The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror Ginger nuts of horror review website

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin

The Problem of Franklin: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and disability in horror

Warning for brief mention of self-harm as well as the more predictable horrors of ableism and chainsaws, plus sexual violence. Also some gruesome pictures. 

Everything means something, I guess.

Sally, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

If you’re one of those sexy, charming intellectual titans who read this column regularly you’ll know I sometimes get on a hobbyhorse about disability. I’m not alone, though: disability in horror is a big enough topic to have its own Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability_in_horror_films), and the basic ground is fairly well trodden. Or wheeled; some of us use wheels.

Here’s a quick summary: movies, as we all know, are a visual medium that uses shorthand to get its points across. A lovely face often indicates a lovely soul; conversely, an ugly character is probably up to no good, and if a movie wants to indicate something outright grotesque about a character then using disability, whether mental or physical, is a quick way to do it. Here’s a short article from Fangoria on the subject to get you started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability_in_horror_films; I won’t rehash the whole subject here, because honestly I go on enough. 

But as a nasty little hors d’oeuvre, I’ll just take another example from the giants of the slasher genre –

which is what we’re covering today. This is a disabled character in the slasher tradition that has had a long afterlife. This is the kind of thing we often have to work with. 

Consider Jason Vorhees of Friday the 13th fame. In the first movie (1980), here’s what we know about him: he was a little boy born with hydrocephalus, cognitive disability and an atypical face; he drowned because he was left unsupervised. That sounds like an extremely vulnerable child, no? If that was your boy, wouldn’t you be pretty angry with the people who left him to die? But Mrs Vorhees is the villain of the story, and her rage is a force of evil.

Of course diegetically she’s killing teenagers who had nothing to do with the death of her son – but the very fact that she’s angry about it at all, and that she was unreasonable enough to expect the teenagers she left in charge of him to keep him alive, is presented as grotesque in itself. And whatever the sequels say, in the original there’s nothing to indicate she was a bad mother; her rage is born of quite natural grief. But she’s not presented as natural. Jason emerges at the end as a kind of unkillable monster, cementing the film’s general implication there was something wrong with her for loving him at all. 

This is not how we want people to think in the real world.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere by way of explaining why I get worked up about this stuff, I have a kid with developmental disabilities. He didn’t look like little Jason at that age, he looked like a Shirley Hughes illustration, because in the real world ‘atypical face’ and ‘atypical brain’ don’t automatically go together – but he definitely needs more protection than most kids his age, and I don’t think I’m a monster because I’d be mad if someone let him drown. I certainly don’t think it’s monstrous that I love him. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror
Not my literal son, but pretty close. 

I used to be a good girl. In the real world a Mrs Vorhees isn’t the demon that fights the Final Girl; she is what, given a roll of the genetic dice, the Final Girl can grow up to be. But that’s horror movies for you, and certainly a lot of slashers: we’re in the realms of the visceral rather than the reflective. Slashers go for shameless scares, and playing on people’s fear of the different is shameless – but it works. The animal brain reacts when you poke certain parts of it, and for most people ‘disabled’ equals ‘unfamiliar’. Sad but true.  

I have a Mrs Vorhees inside me, dear reader, but for this review I’m going to try to keep her quiet and give as good-faith a reading as I can. 

So ‘disabled’ as a shorthand for ‘monstrous’ has a long and trashy history in film, and the old slashers used it plenty. However, there’s an odd little silence in the centre of slasher movie conversations. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is one of the most famous – and yes, it’s on Shudder right now – and it’s also one of the best. You don’t need me to talk about the amazing cinematography, atmosphere, sound design, sets, props or anything else; that’s all been said many times. It’s an arthouse film with real subtlety, which is quite a thing to explain to anyone who just knows the title is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and if I was just reviewing it I’d only have good things to say. But when it comes to disability it’s – well, it’s interesting. 

Here’s the thing I hear pointed out a lot: the portrayal of the murderous cannibal family plays hard and fast into fears of the cognitively impaired. Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), in particular, is played to have what we would now, if we knew the terms, call intellectual disability:

[Hansen] visited the campus of a state school for the mentally retarded*

, where his mother was on staff, to observe the students’ physical movements. After two days, he had mastered a shambling gait. He also tried to duplicate pig squeals to come up with Leatherface’s howling yelp that gets drowned in the sound track.

https://www.today.com/popculture/gunnar-hansen-life-leatherface-wbna5121624

*Note: that word has degraded into a slur now. Please don’t use it; there are many other ways to call a person either literally disabled or a dull-witted twerp. 

I’m not sure I’d be delighted if a staffer at my lad’s specialist school sent their actor son to gawk at the kids there so he could turn in a movie-villain performance that parodied them and mixed in animal noises.

I might tick ‘no’ on that consent form, you know? And that’s assuming the kids and their families were consulted at all rather than just letting the staffer’s son in the back door. But to extend as much charity to Hansen as possible, it was the 1970s and he was at least trying to research from life rather than rely on stereotypes, and the stimmy movements he makes are well observed. He shows awareness that those he portrayed were real people.

And Hansen portrays Leatherface with a small degree of compassion. 

There’s a famous moment, for instance, after the third killing, where we see Leatherface in actual distress. (You know, I thought ‘Leatherface’ was a fan nickname like ‘Pinhead’ for the lead Cenobite in Hellraiser, but actually it’s what his brother (Edwin Neal) calls him, and in affection rather than malice. I’ll call his brother ‘the hitchhiker’, since we don’t hear his name and that’s how the credits identify him.) 

Here’s the scene. Three out of the five victims have died in quick succession, all at Leatherface’s hands. Leatherface sits down, slapping his head in dismay, and we sit with him for a few seconds watching him panic. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror
Of course we’re not seeing moral compunction here:

later the hitchhiker outright complains that their uncle (Jim Siedow) dislikes killing, unlike him and Leatherface who ‘do all the work’. But we can see that Leatherface is scared. Strangers keep turning up and he has to deal with them: where are they coming from? Are there more? Has he missed any?

What will his uncle do to him if he has? Where is his brother and why isn’t he here to help? We hear the uncle shout at the hitchhiker later: ‘I told you never to leave your brother alone!’ – not because Leatherface is violent but because he’s messy: the uncle wants to be sure he’s killed all the intruders, but he’s pissed off Leatherface cut up the door while doing it. The two brothers are buddies, but the uncle yells and swats at Leatherface a lot. Leatherface is good at violence, but he lives in a world where getting hit is just a fact of life. 

So for just a moment we see a violent maniac, but also a maltreated young man. Relevant in terms of movie language: Gunnar Hansen himself looked like this:

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror
[Photo from Empire Magazine]

It’s pretty common for non-disabled actors to portray disabled characters,

and disabled actors get justifiably annoyed about it, but in this shot we do see something: under the grotesque mask is not a grotesque face. Hansen was a good-looking guy, and behind the cured skin we see some rather beautiful eyes – and in the visual shorthand of cinema, that means something not fully inhuman. Of course ugly people can be good in reality, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is talking to our hindbrain here, not our hearts.

We see prosthetic teeth as well as Hansen’s pretty eyes, but there is at least a little empathy in that moment. Rather than a monster with no emotions at all, we see someone just doing what he’s told, a victim of his family as well as its chief executioner. He’s bad genetic stock, an old and depressing horror staple, but he’s not without an inner life. It could be worse – and in other horror films, it is. 

But that’s Leatherface. There’s a lot of talk about Leatherface.

I hear so little conversation about Franklin.

I think that the best way to get us through this is to do something a little old-fashioned in Internet terms: we’re going to go through the film re-telling the story and talking about it as we go, with a particular focus on the character of Franklin Hardesty (Paul A. Partain) – victim of Leatherface, brother of the Final Girl, and wheelchair user. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror
Here’s how Franklin’s day starts out.

Franklin is complicated. Franklin can be confusing. I had the idea for this review and thought it’d be simple to come up with a clear theory, but actually the film kept me uncertain and that’s interesting in itself, so let’s get into the weeds.

One thing before we start, though: Franklin wouldn’t like that metaphor. Getting into the weeds is exactly what he can’t do.

Right from the first few seconds the film tells us to watch out for Franklin. He’s flagged up in the title crawl: 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror

And it’s notable that they refer to Franklin as an ‘invalid’. Franklin’ isn’t sick; he just can’t walk. He looks like he has paraplegia – in other words, his legs are paralysed. But he’s in perfectly good health, and the word ‘invalid’ to modern ears has a rather Victorian sound, as if Franklin was a delicate gentlewoman who had to spend a lot of time on the fainting couch. It comes across as formal, funereal – and also with a slight implication that’s going to follow Franklin for the brief remainder of his life: even if they hadn’t known about the chainsaw, maybe they should have left him behind? 

A bit of disclosure here. Franklin is a wheelchair user; many wheelchair users can stand for short periods, but he can’t. Now when I go about, I take this:
A walker in the dirtDescription automatically generated
My rolly next to a stump. Cannibals aren’t the only people who like to mix blunt realities with crafting skills. 

It’s what you generically call a mobility aid – more specifically, a rollator. You push, you lean on it if you have to, and when you must, you sit. They’re commoner with elderly people, but a few years ago I decided I was going to get so fit, and was stupid enough to ignore the cramp in my back, and next thing I knew I could only walk so far before chronic pain forced me to sit and rest. Don’t do that, kids. When the doctors say you could injure yourself, they’re right.  

You see the ground it’s parked on in that picture? It’s from the owl arena at the Hawk Conservancy Trust in Hampshire, a lovely day out. It was, as the title crawl of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre puts it, ‘an idyllic summer afternoon.’ And the ground was pretty smooth for an outdoor space. 

It was also really hard work to get the wheels over it. 

You may also notice I decorated the thing. (This is relevant, bear with me.) I did it partly because I’m a crafts geek and partly for social reasons: a lot of people, even if they mean well, can’t be quite natural when they see it.

You get the odd person who’s just a jerk, but the majority of times it’s someone who’s actually worried about being offensive, so part of their brain is shouting, ‘Disabled person! Disabled person!’ and panicking about how to behave. They’re probably nice, but it’s not comfortable. I’ve learned that if they can say something about the decorations it breaks the ice: they can see I’m okay talking about the fact that yes, the mobility aid exists and I’m still a normal person, and from there things are okay.

You have to think about that kind of thing.

A big part of disability is how people treat you. And the well-meaning awkward people aren’t the worst of it. Some people resent the extra effort you involve. 

For another example, this is the lanyard and badge I wear on public transport. I have to park the rollator in the wheelchair/pushchair bay and sit away from it – and because of the whole chronic pain business, yes I do have to sit, and no I can’t fold the thing away. Yes, it takes up more space. I make the bus wait longer at the stop. Yes I may ask you to move. I get in the way. So the sunflower motif is code for ‘invisible disability’. I call it my Don’t-Yell-At-Me badge. This is not because nobody has ever yelled at me. 

A key and a green lanyard with a flower design on itDescription automatically generated
The key is for accessible toilets on the Radar scheme. Public places keep accessible toilets locked and staff don’t always have the key to hand, so you need one of your own. None of this stuff is publicly issued; you have to buy them yourself. You’re starting to see how much work it involves just getting about, no? 

So while I’m more mobile than Franklin, I can tell you about what it’s like trying to get around inaccessible places when you have a set of wheels. And if you know that, then you’ll see inside The Texas Chainsaw Massacre there’s a little mini-horror film going on as long as Franklin’s alive. 

Here’s the story. 

News reports tell us that the world in general is in chaos. There are oil fires, collapsing buildings, cholera outbreaks, awful thing after awful thing. 

Among them is the fact that in this part of rural Texas, there has been an outbreak of grave-robbing.

The five ‘youths’ in the car are two couples and an odd man out. Pam (Teri McMinn) and Kirk (William Vail) are together; so are Jerry (Allen Danziger) and Sally (Marilyn Burns). All four are young, sleek, beautiful. 

Then there’s Sally’s brother Franklin. Pam is reading the horoscopes and predicting a cosmically bad day all round, and Franklin’s is particularly ‘disturbing and unpredictable’. ‘Upsetting persons around you,’ reads Pam. 

A group of zombies in a cemeteryDescription automatically generated
There’s been some local guerrilla art.

And of course there will be cannibals. But here’s another part of the story: the persons around him in the van already have Franklin upset. 

Franklin is Sally’s brother, and it’s their grandfather’s grave they’ve driven out to see: it’s in one of the cemeteries that’s been violated and they want to check it’s okay. While they’re there Sally can show her friends the old family home, now owned by their father but presumably owned by their maternal grandfather before that, because locals call it ‘the old Franklin place’ and their surname is Hardesty.

None of this is spelled out – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a film where everyone’s in media res and you can pick up as many clues as you feel inclined – but adds up to the suggestion that a local girl called Miss Franklin married a Mr Hardesty, and they called their son Franklin Hardesty after his mother and grandparents. He’s named for around here. 

He isn’t comfortable around here, though. It’s a place of dirt roads and rough terrain, and Franklin can’t get around without his wheelchair. Rough ground is exhausting when you have to push over it, even when you’re not pushing your own weight as well as the mobility aid, and the seated Franklin is a big guy. Everything is unwieldy for him.

The very first thing we see happen to the kids is a humiliation for him: they pull over, Kirk sets up a couple of planks and wheels Franklin down out of the van, then hands him a tin to pee in. Franklin sets to, clearly embarrassed. Then a huge truck roars by and the blast of air sets Franklin’s chair rolling: he careens down a slope, falls out and has to lie there, flies unzipped, until Kirk can follow down and help him. 

Cut to the interior of the van. ‘This heat is driving me crazy,’ Franklin complains. ‘I don’t know if I can take much more.’ 

A great deal of what we hear Franklin say is going to be complaining. But here’s the thing: he only complains about things that don’t shame him. It’s not his fault that the day is so hot; if he whinges about it, nobody can say it’s his fault. It’s a lot less personal than complaining that you can’t even take a piss without losing your dignity.

And in a way he reads as selfish. Everyone is hot, right? But Franklin probably is more uncomfortable than the others. He can’t move about so freely; his chair arrangement doesn’t lend itself to wearing shorts; where the two couples have racehorse physiques, Franklin is plump in the way you can get when you can’t walk off your calories.

And he’s socially uncomfortable too, because he’s stuck in ways they aren’t. When they get to the graveyard he can’t go in to look at the grave – ostensibly the whole point of the trip. The place doesn’t have paved paths, so Sally has to go in and look for both of them; they don’t even take Franklin out of the van. He has to sit there and listen to a drunk weirdo (Joe Bill Hogan) deliver warnings too rambling to be any help. 

A person in a wheelchairDescription automatically generated
Indeed they do.

Franklin is in a bad mood. He gripes a lot, but his gripes don’t get very much attention. Nobody says it explicitly, but there’s a certain vibe in the van: these are Sally’s friends, but Franklin? The others might prefer it if they hadn’t had to drag him along.

And here’s where things start to get interesting.

The van passes the old slaughterhouse – and Franklin sparks to life. Their grandfather ‘used to sell his cattle’ there, and their uncle was a slaughterman, and Franklin remembers being taken to see the animals killed. He gets quite dramatic about how the cows used to ‘start squealing and freaking out and everything,’ and of course that’s what’s going to happen to all of them by the end of the day, but it’s curious just how enthusiastic Franklin grows.

He’s just a little bit inappropriate. The girls protest: Pam thinks it’s ‘horrible’ people do this to animals, Sally pleads, ‘I like meat, please change the subject!’, and Franklin, cut short, retreats to grousing again about the heat and trimming his nails with a switchblade.

And this is the point where they pick up the first of the cannibal family: a skinny, twitchy hitchhiker with a birthmark on his face. Franklin, no saint, is quite prepared to pull rank as to which of them is the most normal – ‘I think we just picked up Dracula,’ he snipes – but once they start talking they hit it off. For a minute, there’s someone in the van just as excited about slaughter methods as Franklin. 

A person with blood on his faceDescription automatically generated
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror

The two of them get into a lively chat about whether the gruesome old hammer method was better than the new air gun; they talk of ‘head cheese’, a kind of terrine made from reclaimed offal. The others are revolted, but Franklin is actually striking up more of a rapport with the hitchhiker than he was with any of them.

Why is Franklin so chatty about slaughter methods?

Well, here’s where we have to speculate. The simplest explanation is the ableist one: being disabled he’s less civilised than the others. Disabled people are just kind of gross, amiright?  

You could read it that way, but you don’t have to. There are other explanations the film supports equally well.

One reason might be good old-fashioned spite. This trip is humiliating for him, and the more of the film we see the more unkindness we hear from his supposed friends. Kirk, in particular, has a bullying streak: he’s the one who helps with the chair while Jerry drives, but he complains behind Franklin’s back that they should ‘Just shoot him and put him out of our misery,’ and to Franklin’s face he jokes at one point, ‘Franklin, if we run out of gas before we get back to that service station, you’re towing us back in your chair.’ 

That’s not a nice joke – or not from that person, and not that day. Disabled people can be mischievous and transgressive and a lot of us like to poke fun at ourselves; here’s a good article on the subject of ‘Crip Humor’: https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/6163/4902. But there are things we can say that you’d better be very sure we don’t mind hearing from you. It depends on the relationship, and on whether we’re actually upset in the moment. It’s the wrong moment and the wrong relationship here, and Franklin clearly does mind it from Kirk. 

So when he talks slaughterhouse, it might be deploying a kind of little-boy nastiness:

being dependent on you is infantilising if you don’t treat me respectfully, and you don’t, so I guess I’ll act immature until you’re all as uncomfortable as I am. The hitchhiker talks to him like an adult – as we’ll see later, disabled people are nothing new to this guy – and so Franklin answers like an adult. With Sally’s friends, though, there’s obvious tension.

And people in distress aren’t at their best; I would be lying if I said I’d never been snappish or made a deliberately bad-taste joke when I was in pain and struggling with access. Franklin can’t afford to have a big enough fight with the others that they refuse him help, but he might be using passive aggression – or taking comfort in the thought that that at least someone had it worse than him, even if it was only slaughterhouse cattle. He might, in short, be doing it because he’s angry. 

But it might also be the simple fact that slaughterhouses don’t bother him because, unlike the others, ugly physical realities are something he can’t ignore. He has to piss in a can: he doesn’t get to pretend the world is a nice place.

Physical suffering might be an unpleasant new idea to his companions, but past a certain point – and Franklin is past it – being squeamish is a luxury you can’t afford. Sally, after all, eats meat but doesn’t want to hear about slaughterhouses; Franklin is less proper than her, but another way to look at it is that he’s more honest. You want to pee? You need something to pee in. And do you like meat? This is how you get it. 

It’s one way in which Franklin seems more of this location than the other kids.

It’s not just his name, Franklin going to the old Franklin place. He’s also more like his male forebears than Sally: his memories of the slaughterhouse are partly just memories of family trips, and if she’s queasy about it, their grandfather and uncle weren’t. And there’s something about his accent: I’m no expert on American dialects, but if my ear isn’t completely out he speaks with more of a Texas twang than Sally does. Has he had as much of a chance to expand his horizons as her?

The Hardestys talk about childhood holidays as if the other three didn’t know them back then, so the likeliest relationship here is that they’re college friends. But if there was no problem with the able-bodied Sally skipping off to college, was that equally true for Franklin? Or if he did go, was he able to make friends the way she did? Because he doesn’t sound so much like someone who’s had the chance to citify his speech. In interests, at least, he’s just more of a Texan country kid than anyone else – and that puts him closer to the hitchhiker. 

And it’s not just in interests. The other four ‘youths’ are clean-limbed, but Franklin isn’t. Like the hitchhiker, he’s scabby. 
A group of people in a carDescription automatically generated
Look at Franklin’s arms. That’s got to be painful.

The hitchhiker has unhealthy-looking skin and his face is scuffed up. Franklin never mentions it – for all his grousing, he’s reticent on anything to do with his disability – but you can see that both his forearms are blistered where they rub the arms of his chair. 

One of the ways you can tell someone’s social class is how good they look. Can they afford proper food and time to exercise? Do they get knocked about by life? The other four youths are scions – but Franklin, like the hitchhiker, is marked. Like many disabled people, within his small social circle he’s a one-man underclass. 

And here’s another quite distinctive thing:

they act out in similar ways. Feeling rejected, the hitchhiker slashes himself with a knife before lashing out at Franklin. Franklin is upset, of course, but he also dwells on the self-harm aspect almost admiringly: it ‘takes something’, he mulls, to be able to cut yourself, and while he’s thinking this he’s absent-mindedly slicing at the doors of the van. ‘Franklin,’ says Kirk, ‘you’re crazier than he is.’ 

Does this make them alike? You could interpret it otherwise. Franklin doesn’t have many ways to show physical valour: the only person he could really fight is himself. So perhaps it’s just the rumination of a young man feeling inadequate in his manhood, surrounded by other young men who aren’t overly tactful about it. 

But Franklin and the hitchhiker also do the same thing when they’re angry, and it’s an odd thing for adults to do: they blow raspberries.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror
First the knife, then the tongue. 

The hitchhiker does it when they put him out of the van and he chases along behind them; later we see him do it to his uncle as well. Franklin, understandably upset at being left to struggle over awkward ground in his wheelchair while the other four wander off to explore the upper floors of the old family house, blows raspberries at the ceiling, mimicking what Sally must have told him: ‘Come on Franklin, it’s gonna be a fun trip. [Another raspberry.] If I have any more fun today I don’t think I’m gonna be able to take it.’

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror
Franklin’s not having fun. 

Is Franklin inspired by the hitchhiker?

Actually childish? An angry Christian boy raised not to swear? As with so many other things, the film leaves us to make our own guesses.

What are we supposed to make of this?

How do we read the marking of Franklin, the ways in which he’s more like the cannibal family with his disability and his damaged skin and his gracelessness and his slaughterhouse practicality? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a documentary style: it presents these things deadpan. It doesn’t give us much direction one way or another.

If you were ableist, or wanted to read an ableist intention, here’s what you could say: Franklin, by virtue of his faulty body, is a degraded man. Like the poor stock of lunatics they run into, he is lesser – nastier, uglier, more brutish. Some people just suck.

A person in a wheelchairDescription automatically generated
Welcome to being a burden. 

If you wanted to go in another direction, here’s what you could say:

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a potent class critique. The cannibal family are broken by poverty as much as anything else: the hitchhiker tells us they’ve ‘always been in meat’, but the local slaughterhouse put people out of work when new technology came in, and now they’re living as much on roadkill as produce. Make people do inhumane work and their humanity wears down – and then take away that work, and they still have to scratch a living somehow. Franklin is tiresome because he’s got good reason to be pissed off; the cannibals are the way they are because they never got a chance to be anything else. 

Really the film gives equal support for either interpretation. It’s not so much didactic as curious. 

Let’s go a little further down the road and see what we find.

One pretty pleasing thing about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre if you’re disabled is when Franklin dies. Bear with me on this one. 

Here’s how they get picked off. Pam and Kirk go looking for an old swimming hole, abandoning Franklin to his own devices – which is to say, stuck in his chair with nothing to do. The old pool isn’t there any more, but they spot another house out back of the old Franklin place and Kirk, seeing a generator, thinks they might be able to buy some gas from the inhabitants. (It’s the 70s, gas shortages are one of many reasons to believe the universe is out of joint.) 

We know this is foolish. Franklin, actually, could have told them it was foolish: he’s the only one who’s been fretting about whether the hitchhiker might still be around – and given that there are grave-robbers in the area, that’s not paranoia, it’s common sense. Or rather, it’s the sense of someone who knows that neither fight nor flight will work for him and can’t afford to be complacent. He’s also slow enough about the place that he’s the only one who’s spotted odd bits of feather and bone lying about, and he’s worried. Franklin is the only one vigilant to danger, but of course nobody listens to Franklin.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror
Kirk and Pam want to go swimming, and they want Franklin to tell them how they can find the place while he stays right here.

So Kirk goes into the house. And suddenly there’s Leatherface: a single swing and Kirk’s on the floor twitching his death-spasm. 

Kirk went into that place with the confidence of the young and strong. He didn’t anticipate there could be any situation where his body wouldn’t be able to meet the challenge.

Then Pam goes in to find Kirk, and Leatherface grabs her and drags her inside and drops her onto a meat-hook, and it’s all very nasty and horror-movie – and something a little striking happens. Leatherface leaves her hanging. 

He doesn’t bother to put her out of her misery. He has Kirk’s body to butcher first, so he turns to it and ignores her whimpers. Pam dangles. 

It’s slaughterhouse callousness, of course. But I wonder if anyone else sees this: for the first time in the film, an able-bodied character is left to suffer because the person hauling them around decided there were more important things to deal with right now. It’s the first time we see it happen to an able-bodied character – but it’s not the first time we see it happen. 

I have no idea if this was deliberate, but Leatherface, from behind, has a certain look of Franklin.

Both are big and burly; both are dark-haired. For a moment, if you want to read it that way, you could see a kind of avenging angel, or at least an avenging monster, risen to his feet to give the carelessly healthy a taste of their own medicine. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror
If I told you it was Partain in that costume instead of Hansen, would you be sure I was lying? 

Maybe. As I say, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre plays it all without comment. 

But it is, if nothing else, a film very interested in the brutally physical.

When Pam meets her fate, she meets it by losing her footing. She opens a curtain and falls straight into a room of merciless, visceral reality.

A skeleton on a benchDescription automatically generated
Animal or human, a bone is a bone. You can use bones.

The cannibal family deploy roadkill and grave-robbing and murder with equal seriousness: waste not, want not. The room is a terrifying craft stash of human remains – including, appallingly, what looks like the ribcage of a baby – but what’s most frightening of all is that they’re mixed willy-nilly with animal parts. The floor is covered with feathers and skulls twirl from the ceiling along with horns and turtle shells: these people do not distinguish between one kind of meat and another. That’s the horror Pam uncovers. Tell Franklin to shut up all you like: at the end of the day, we are made of meat. 

And that’s what determines the order of deaths.

Kirk dies first: he’s the boldest, the least thoughtful, the one reckless enough to walk straight into danger. Pam dies immediately after because she was with him. Then the others get worried, and there’s some dispute over what to do: Jerry dies next because he goes looking for Kirk and Pam.

A person standing in front of a windowDescription automatically generated
Kirk looks like he should be able to handle himself, right? 

And that leaves Franklin, who can’t go anywhere fast, and Sally, who would have preferred to go with Jerry but felt she had to stay with her brother. She’s pissed off about it, no question. The two of them quarrel. But when she finally insists on going to look for Jerry, Franklin won’t stay at the van, even if she offers him the flashlight: more than anything else, despite everything that’s happened today, he doesn’t want to be left alone. 

And that’s why Sally survives, really.

Each of the other kids is, at least for the crucial moment, alone when they get caught. The second Leatherface appears Franklin is a dead man: he doesn’t die first because he couldn’t go exploring, and he doesn’t survive because he can’t run. But in that moment, Leatherface can’t kill two people at once, so Sally flees. It’s not the end of her struggles, but if it had just been Leatherface and her in that moment, that would have been the end of Sally. 

Franklin doesn’t die heroically saving her; he’s not a voluntary human shield, and he certainly doesn’t feel, like some lamentable movie stereotypes, that his disabled ass should be sacrificed to protect her more valuable and mobile one. He wants to live just as much as Sally. 

But the fact that she brought him with her, however grudgingly, means that it’s the only time the cannibals don’t find them helplessly isolated. He doesn’t fall on his sword – but by sheer happenstance, he splits the killer’s attention. 

A person with a flashlight in the darkDescription automatically generated
Only a few seconds left to live. 

I like the timing of when Franklin dies.

In a worse movie he’d either have died first because he was obviously disposable, or he’d have been some kind of Supercrip angel and survived to the end, which wouldn’t have been plausible and might have been pretty patronising. 

(If you’re unfamiliar, ‘Supercrip’ is a sarcastic term disabled people use to denote the hyper-gifted archetype of the person that ‘rises above’ their disability; it’s a subset of what we sourly call ‘inspiration porn’. You know how in Game of Thrones they end with crowning the guy who ‘knew he’d never walk again so he learned to fly’? That’s Supercrip in a nutshell. People aren’t comfortable with the story of the guy who knew he’d never walk again so just got on with an imperfect life like everybody else; you’re supposed to become amazing. If things are harder for you, achieve more! It’s annoying, so let us take a moment to stan Franklin for being annoying the old-fashioned way.) 

Because the moment Franklin dies, like everything else, is dictated by the basic realities of what he can and can’t do. He spends his last day alive in a bad mood and taking it out on everyone else, and in the end it doesn’t matter. He dies the same way everyone dies in this place: there came a moment when he couldn’t get away. And he was in his chair, the others were on their feet, but that’s just dying as they lived. They all died the same. 

Now here’s a final oddity: the cannibal family are better carers than the victims.

They aren’t nice people. They aren’t even always nice to each other: the uncle whacks his nephews with a stick when he’s annoyed, and while the hitchhiker shrugs this off he’s also getting old enough to challenge him for leadership, and one of the mini-stories we see in the film is a power struggle going on between the two of them.

Leatherface is really a joiner – he yells when anyone else does, but he pets and kisses on his Grandpa (John Dugan) when left to himself – but the hitchhiker and uncle snap and squabble pretty continually. We can see that in a few years the current patriarch is going to be toppled by a nephew he’s frequently antagonised, and even now, it’s not pretty. It’s a family full of noisy friction, and Sally gets away partly because they haven’t got their hierarchy fully sorted out. 

But when it comes to their disabled members? 

Well, put it this way: when it’s time to carry Grandpa’s chair down the stairs, they do it with better grace than Kirk or Jerry have for Franklin’s. 

Grandpa is pretty much a living corpse, and the family are, you might argue, so excessively accommodating that they can’t quite accept the fact that he’s old and weak and no longer able to swing a hammer. Grandpa’s immobile and they’re kind of in denial about that when it comes to the killing part; you might put that in the same category as their refusal to lock Leatherface up somewhere. This is a family that includes its disabled members. 

So they know Grandpa can’t walk, and they don’t resent it the way the other kids resent Franklin.

The hitchhiker boy goes to fetch the rocking chair he’s confined to, and calls cheerfully down the stairs, ‘Hey! Hey Leatherface, give me a hand with Grandpa!’ Leatherface trots upstairs with perfect willingness, and, taking a quiet break from all the yelling they usually do, the two of them navigate Grandpa down with the calm cooperation of a couple of removals men. Or, you might say, of two close brothers who take it for granted that helping a disabled relation is just one of those things you do. 

A dark hallway with stairs and a couple of peopleDescription automatically generated
The Leatherface brothers: model caregivers.

Is this a sign of their degradation?

Maybe. Is it a rebuke to the murdered kids? Kirk, Pam and Jerry might be alive right now if they’d put kindness to Franklin ahead of exploring, and we’ve watched them be mean to him in ways that make us uncomfortable. So is it a sign that these maniacs are in some ways better than the ‘civilised’ kids, or lesser? 

Or is it both? One of the things that’s horrifying about the cannibals is their complete lack of taboos – and some taboos are wrong. They aren’t revolted by human meat; they aren’t revolted by a sick grandfather. They just get on with doing whatever they feel needs doing. If you’re outside their clan that means mercilessness; if you’re inside it means solidarity. Does the solidarity give context to the brutality, or does the brutality contaminate the solidarity? Or does each have its own weight regardless of the other? 

After all, the hitchhiker boy talked to Franklin perfectly amiably at first; he was fine with the wheelchair. He invited him to dinner, in fact, and everyone including Franklin snubbed the invitation because they didn’t want to be around this obviously special-needs guy.

If they’d gone in as guests . . . well, they’d probably still have been killed anyway; it might be fun to pretend this is a fairy-tale narrative in which rejecting the kindness of a low-status stranger might be the thing that doomed you, but I don’t think we can stretch that far. Somewhere in the world is a film in which the able reject the hospitality of the disabled and get punished with worse injuries than the bodies they scorned, but that film is Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932), not The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Ableism is not what kills these youths. 

But they’d for sure have been killed just the same if they left Franklin at home. 

And the first to die, Kirk, does commit a sin shortly beforehand. We know that sin traditionally heralds your end in slashers – but Kirk’s sin isn’t having sex. It’s being a jerk about Franklin’s disability. He jokes they should kill Franklin; someone kills him. 

Disability haunts the film the way sex haunts the standard slasher. 

We see two couples, and they’re pretty people in summer clothes that show you their fine figures. And presumably they’re in sexual relationships with each other: the whole trip is a kind of double date with Franklin as the gooseberry. A short sex scene would be easy to tuck into the narrative somewhere, or at least a quick flash of flesh. But for the duration of the film nobody gets laid; nobody even smooches. 

Yet flesh is important. Boy is it important.  

So here’s an idea: just as Michael Myers is a force of malevolent sexuality and the girl who survives him is the one who doesn’t engage in any sex, the cannibal family are a force of malevolent disability and the girl who survives them is the one who doesn’t engage in ableism. The nicer you are to Franklin, the closer you are to slasher-movie virginity. 

Maybe. Real purity eludes them all, and Franklin refuses to play the angelic invalid too doggedly to function as a mere symbol. Like many unheroic victims of bullying, he’ll grab the target off his own back and put it on someone else’s if he gets the chance, hence his ‘Dracula’ crack about the hitchhiker: he’s not a locus of virtue, just a guy with paralysed legs and bad manners. So while characters’ relationships with Franklin do make a difference, it’s messy rather than schematic.

Sally teases Franklin a bit and she’s not always patient with him; she’s torn between conscience and the plain fact that she’d be having more fun without him, so she’s not quite an innocent in this scenario. But she tries to stick by him, and it keeps her alive. Pam, conversely, doesn’t give him a particularly hard time and she’s the first girl to die; she dates Kirk, who’s the worst, but she’s the only one who doesn’t crack jokes at Franklin’s expense. But then again, if she hadn’t abandoned Franklin to go swimming with Kirk, she wouldn’t have been at the cannibal house. In this part of Texas there are no virgins. But there are degrees. 

As a theory it works loosely, but it matters that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is interestingly sexless for a slasher.

The girls are in summer outfits, but the camera doesn’t gawp. And almost uniquely, there’s no lust in the prolonged tormenting of Sally, a scene in which a beautiful girl is at the mercy of four depraved men, and the chance to be prurient was right there and they didn’t take it. Her clothes get ripped, but they get dirtier and tattier without getting much more revealing.

The only non-violent touch she gets from any of the cannibals is when Leatherface picks up her shiny blonde locks to have a look, and his manner is less lecherous and more, ‘We could make something nice with these once they’re off her head.’ Sally even offers herself, or at least offers to ‘do anything’ in a tone that makes it clear what ‘anything’ means, and they just don’t care; that’s not what they have in mind for her.

Slashers are fascinated with the body – what it’s for, and what can be done to it. 

And the slasher story tends to revolve around that fascination in a kind of escalating reiteration: it takes a vision of the body, does something in line with that vision, and then something more twisted and extreme, and more twisted and extreme still, and so on until the end, where only the body that best resisted this vision survives. 

So Michael Myers is obsessed with the body as sexually active: the camera gazes voyeuristically; we see sexual activity; then we see lust-murder. Mrs Vorhees is obsessed with the body as sexually punishable: the camera and narrative oblige her. Freddy Krueger is obsessed with the body as sexually violable with a twist of psychological sadism: the sexually active kids die both mutilated and terrorised, and even the virgin gets her most menacing scare at the moment when she forgets to keep her legs together.

A person lying in a bathtub with a few nails sticking out of itDescription automatically generated
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror
In the average slasher, sex is a kind of demon summoned by your interest:

you whisper to sex, and sex comes roaring after you. Hellraiser (1987) is kinkier than most horror films of the 70s and 80s, but when the Cenobites tell their victim that they came because they were summoned and bring with them ‘further regions’ of sex than you bargained for, they’re really just making the implicit explicit. Chase the ‘little death’ and Death itself hears you calling.

Now sex not the only thing bodies can do, of course. But the usual slasher films the body as a site of sexual activity, starting at normal horniness and escalating to sexualised violence so extreme it’s no longer recognisable to anyone except the pervert doing it as sexual at all.

And possibly to the audience, if they enjoy seeing all that flesh jump and jiggle. Sexuality can always be a bit objectifying, the camera says, so let’s see how far we can push that. First we see skin, then we see the blood beneath it. First we hear moans of pleasure, then we hear howls of anguish. Leering becomes stalking. A mundane desire to get inside that pretty girl gets in deeper than she can survive. 

And this is true of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in its own way: it, too, escalates. It’s just as obsessive – only it obsesses differently. 

In the conventional slasher the body is a desirable object that can be penetrated, whether by another body or by a blade. But in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the body is a functional object that can be able, or impaired, or dismantled for future use. 

Getting physical means something else here. 

That’s the best theory I’ve got – but it makes the film’s issue of respect or disrespect for disability something of an optical illusion. The artfulness of the construction is that you can see one thing or another. Even leaving aside the cannibal family it certainly isn’t a manifesto for disabled rights. It isn’t in the wheelchair with Franklin: it just looks at him as coolly as it looks at everybody else. But at least it does look at him – and because it looks, it sees some plain facts that a world built for able-bodied people may overlook: that moving an impaired body through space is hard work, and that this affects everything about your day. 

Wherever you place yourself in relation to the disabled body, in this film you don’t get to pretend it doesn’t exist. Like the cannibals, it shows us things happening and doesn’t flinch. It’s uneasy and ambiguous, and all the more memorable for the questions it doesn’t answer. 

And to say it places disability where most slashers place sex is one way to read it, at least. Like sex, disability is a fact of life. It may not affect everyone, and some people may get pissed off it’s happening, but as a species and a society it’s part of who we are. Sit down at the dinner table, Sally, and meet what we all have in common. 

Where do we go from here?

Let’s make like the other characters didn’t and return, finally, to Franklin. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is hugely influential. Literal sequels and remakes have happened, which I personally couldn’t be bothered with, but it was also one of the stand-outs in a genre that proliferated very vigorously for a while – a template so strong, in fact, that it ended up getting parodied in Scream (1996), and then The Cabin In The Woods turned up in 2012 a couple of decades late to the party, joking about traditions that by then had actually changed.

(It hadn’t been the Final Girl for a while; at that point in film history it tended towards the final boy. Oh my subverted expectations.) But The Cabin In The Woods definitely reproduced the beginning of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre precisely: five youths in an oversized vehicle start their country trip by ignoring an unpleasant experience at a gas station. 

Scream happened in the last gasp of the actual slasher craze, but The Cabin In The Woods was retrospective: rather than observing what was actually around at the time, it’s about what people vaguely remember. Which makes it a way of asking what, in terms of pop cultural legacy, had staying power? Because The Texas Chainsaw Massacre certainly had some staying power: in a movie all about referencing things, it was one of the very largest allusions. But how?

The Cabin In The Woods got up my nose for a few reasons, but one that sticks in my mind writing this review: it insisted that the template must be five youths – two couples and a ‘fool’.

Is Franklin’s cultural archetype ‘the fool’? 

Hm.

I decided to trust Internet people’s ability to spot references and checked out IMDB for all the horror films alluded to in The Cabin In The Woods; I thought it’d be an interesting measure of where pop culture ended up. Here’s the link: 

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls066732149

And here are the slashers with ensemble casts, apart from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, mentioned on that list. Do they have the two-young-couples-and-a-fool set-up? And is anyone in them disabled? I’ll admit I haven’t watched all of them, but I’ll list what I could work out – and if you’d rather tl;dr, the answer is simple.

It’s basically an across-the-board ‘no.’ 

  • The Blob (1958). No. Teen couple and a younger brother.
  • The Hills Have Eyes (1977). No. A family of victims rather than a group of teens. The villains are disabled in the Vorhees/cannibal family sense, but not the protagonists. 
  • Halloween (1978). No. Mostly teen girls; the boy who gets killed is the sexually active one, not the fool archetype. You could consider Michael Myers disabled in the sense that he’s mentally ill, but as his doctor diegetically confirms that he’s more ‘the boogeyman’ than a patient, I’m not sure I would. 
  • Friday the 13th (1980). No. Six teenagers, none particularly foolish. Jason Vorhees features, of course. 
  • Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981). No. No fools, unless you count the fact that, Jason Vorhees-like, the monster is an intellectually disabled guy taking posthumous revenge. 
  • The Evil Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987). No. Two boys, three girls, none particularly foolish.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). No. The cast is all couples. The villain’s face is covered in special effects, but because of burn scars rather than anything inborn. 
  • Chopping Mall (1986). No. The cast is all couples. 
  • Ghoulies II (1987). Can’t find a clear plot summary for that one, sorry. 
  • Night of the Demons (1988). Let’s give this one a tentative ‘yes’. More than five teenagers, but they have a clownish boy called Stooge, who’s a combination of fool and athlete. Mostly a sex pest. 
  • Hobgoblins (1988). Can’t find a summary. 
  • The Faculty (1998). No. Big cast, no particular fool. 
  • Black Christmas (apparently 2006, but the original was in 1974). No. Set in a sorority, so the co-ed mix doesn’t apply; no fools. Psychologically damaged villain, as far as we can tell from his obscure whispers. 

So you know what? I’m not actually finding that template anywhere except in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Disabled villains abound, but ‘fool’ archetypes among the protagonists? I found a fool in Night of the Demons and that pretty much bottomed out the issue. 

And looking for a disabled character who wasn’t the monster got me nowhere. You get the odd horror movie where a character’s disability is relevant to the threat – Audrey Hepburn’s ‘blindness’ in Wait Until Dark (1967) or the daughter’s deafness in A Quiet Place (1981), but characters like Franklin who just happen to be disabled, and where the connection to the story is as complicated as it is in real life? That influence has not taken. 

Franklin, in other words, has left very little legacy. 

It’s a pity. Franklin is a major character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, probably the actor with the most lines, and also, I’d argue, the thematic centre. But his disability is overlooked both in discourse and pop culture. Putting someone like him in the film was original, but did not become the origin of very much. We can remember disabled characters when they’re a family of murder-cannibals, but a disabled person who’s imperfect and difficult to judge and just hanging out with everyone else seems to be a harder sell.  For a film that had such a huge impact, it’s really a shame that Franklin’s ghost doesn’t haunt us. 

Because Franklin Hardesty is an interesting character. He’s flawed and awkward in a way that could be read as either respectful or disrespectful to disabled people depending on how you tilt your head – which is as much an attitude test in its way as meeting an actual disabled person. Yet he falls prey to the same fate as his companions. And honestly, however I go back and forth, of the various options in this imperfect world, I think I like that better. 

Because when I look at disability in horror, I see a lot of prejudice. The average horror movie avoids ableism only by avoiding disabled characters at all; when disability does turn up, it’s more often evil than good. That’s ugly, and it’s predictable. Sometimes I’m angry, sometimes I’m resigned. I’m never surprised. 

But I also see something like one of those equality-equity-inclusion memes: 
A group of people standing on a fenceDescription automatically generated
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Problem of Franklin, and disability in horror

Because that, I feel, is the story of Franklin, and why I end up liking The Texas Chainsaw Massacre despite all my qualms: 

Equality is when you aren’t in the movie. Equity is when your disability is a major plot point. And inclusion is when you get killed with a chainsaw like everyone else. 

Author

  • Kit Whitfield

    Kit Whitfield writes dark folk fantasy, most recently the Gyrford series: In The Heart of Hidden Things and All The Hollow Of The Sky, both of which were longlisted for BSFA Awards. Featuring fairy-smiths who forge the cold iron that repel malign spirits, belligerent bramble bushes, versifying pigs and a fiery dog that eats landlords. She lives in a London in a neurodiverse family and tries to grow pot plants.

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