![]() The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, like all movies, is influenced by the time period in which it was made. Pastoureau describes yellow as a “false, duplicitous color that cannot be trusted it cheats, deceives, and betrays.” Looking to history, yellow is the color of the Stars of David that the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear, and it is also the color white people assigned to Asians as a way of separating and caricaturing us. Popular paint colors used well before the nineteenth century, like gamboge and orpiment, were brutally toxic given too much exposure. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” revolves around one woman’s experience with postpartum depression as she describes her imprisonment in a room decorated with the sickly-colored paper. In art, the color is often used to connote unease or ill health. We see it in our minds when we picture festering sores and fetid skin. Yellow is also a color that conjures death and other disturbing images. It is a sweet spot that must be quickly harnessed lest the person slip beyond help and into the realm of death. In the medical world, however, this term is often used to describe the crucial period of time following a traumatic injury when a patient is most likely to be saved. In his book Yellow, Michel Pastoureau describes ancient societies viewing the sun as “the basis of all life, the ancestor of their gods.” Today, this sun worship continues in more modern ways, like the hashtag “#goldenhour” used on over ten million Instagram posts of that period during sunrise or sunset when the world is at its most beautiful. It has been important to many cultures because of its association to the sun. Often, it invokes positivity and joy, the color of generous sunshine and cheerful sunflowers, something we must peel through to relish the sweetness of a banana. The color has a complicated place in history and imagination. Not five minutes into the film, the color yellow has created an atmosphere that feels oppressive, hot, and totally inescapable. The opening credits continue over veinlike images of solar flares against a black background before giving way to a final shot of the sun centered in the frame like a singular, round lemon. The camera zooms out to reveal a cemetery completely awash in the golden-yellow hues of sunrise. Eventually, the images give way to a shot of an exhumed corpse fastened to the top of a gravestone. This sallow, putrid color seems to fester in front of the viewer, its vibrancy so real you can almost smell the decay. Yellowing skulls, teeth, skin, and fingernails are illuminated by the flash of a camera that bathes the horrors in a warm yellow light. During the opening credits, images of rotting corpses in various stages of decomposition flash across the screen. Instead, the film’s true horror lies in the stifling environment that is reinforced over and over again through its visual landscape, one largely dominated by the color yellow. Many of the kills are left up to the viewer’s imagination, and there is a startling lack of visible blood. Only Sally Hardesty, the bellicose blonde with a knack for the sustained scream, survives. At the hands of Leatherface and his infrangible chainsaw, the group of travelers is picked off one by one and carved up for dinner. Filmed during a sweltering summer in 1973, the story revolves around five young friends driving through Texas who stumble upon the house of a group of men known to fans as the Sawyer family, former slaughterhouse workers who have embraced murder and cannibalism. To this day, the film is often described as “sick,” “vile,” “perverse,” and “unhinged,” and yet in 1981 a copy of the film was placed in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Upon its release, audience members were known to run from the theater in disgust and fear. It is a polarizing film those who successfully make it through either enthusiastically embrace it or vehemently despise it. There are a lot of films about Texas, but none of them are as disturbing or lurid as Tobe Hooper’s 1974 masterpiece, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In my memory, everything there is cast in a yellow hue and curling from heat at the edges, all my recollections sepia toned. The flora of Houston often looks like it’s on the verge of crisping under that hot Texan sun, and I never saw much that was green or refreshing on drives past vast oil fields and strip malls. ![]() To me, the heat of the place seemed unfathomable-each time I visited, the suffocating atmosphere always seemed to have both its hands around my throat, squeezing. I have languished during many a summer there, spending long afternoons with my father in his home in Houston. Texas is a place I hold in a cage inside my heart, a wild thing that I can never quite seem to tame to my liking. This is The Curse, a column by Miyako Pleines about the poetry and persuasion of horror films.
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