Guest Author - Barbara Rice DeShong, PhD.
Talk about a bad start in life. What kind of person do you think you would turn out to be if you started out life the victim of a botched abortion done in a slaughterhouse? Add that your mother dies and, you, her hideously deformed offspring, is presumed dead and tossed in a garbage container?
What are the chances that you will turn out to be a balanced and loving individual? The abandoned “Thomas” found by a beggar and raised in a meat packing plant, doesn’t fair well at all. Maybe there would have been some hope had the boy been discovered and raised by the VonTrapp family from the “Sound of Muscic”, but such was not to be. While the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is considered more of a horror-thriller than a mystery, it’s also a mystery as the unlucky protagonists try to figure out just what kind of family they’ve stumbled into. Also, there’s the eerie set and the unexpected ending.
We psychologists are fond of pointing to childhood issues to explain adult behavior, but one wonders if, given his childhood, Thomas didn’t turn out the best he could. The meat plant closes after a few years and Thomas first expresses his psychopathic rage by killing the foreman. Thomas’s “father” gets into the act by murdering the sheriff and assuming his identity, wearing his clothes and driving around in the county sheriff’s car. The “father’s” pretense as sheriff enables the several stories that have been told involving innocent “hippies, college-students, young men preparing to go off to the service” to be especially horrifying. Not only do each of these groups innocents run into trouble only the lonely, deserted road, but the person who offers to help them and on whom they rely is really part of the set up to bring new “recruits” to the cannibalistic family. Thomas’s “family” includes a bizarre cast of people who are related through being unattractive and dim-witted outcasts.
The psychology of the family’s murderous thirst lies in their absolute repulsiveness. Not able to be part of the world, Thomas, particularly seeks to destroy the happiness and lives of others. He doesn’t want to just kill; he wants his victims to be sorry they were ever born. Many viewers ask if the movie character “Thomas” is similar to the serial killer on which he was supposedly based. Thomas may be “similar” but Ed Gein, also an outcast, was even scarier. His mask was taken from the face of a human female. He finished out his outfit by wearing the frontal skin of female including breasts and genitalia.
Oh, what can happen when your parents aren’t “there” for you? This story should remind each of us of how lucky we are and how brave are people who have to go out into the world and function even though they are physically repulsive to others and even though they’ve had no human nurturing.
