Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Kim Henkel, 1995)

by Elena Lazic

I know this entry in the franchise is reviled by most. There is nothing I can do about that. But for my own sake, and in the secret hope that history will eventually prove me right, I want to go into some detail about why I find this film an entertaining and smart play not just on the Texas Chain Saw legacy, but also on our expectations of horror and horror sequels. 

Of the film’s many wild defining features, perhaps the most unexpected is its prom night-adjacent setting. The Next Generation begins as the four lead characters leave their senior prom, and although they spend the rest of the film either in the woods or in the cannibals’ home, each one is a classic figure from the teen slasher. Renée Zellweger is Jenny, an intelligent and bespectacled final girl without a boyfriend, who attends prom with her platonic male friend Sean (John Harrison), a nice guy who does not make it very far into the film. With them are their polar opposites, the glamourous “airhead” Heather (Lisa Marie Newmyer) and her boyfriend, the rude meathead Barry (Tyler Shea Cone). A year before Scream was to revive the genre by injecting it with a strong dose of ironic self-awareness, in 1995 the teen slasher seemed to be on its last legs, with franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween churning out one unpopular title after the other. The decision to bring together in The Next Generation the original film’s sun-scorched Texas setting — at the time still rather original and unique to the Texas Chainsaw franchise — with characters of the suburban high school slasher must have therefore come across as a desperate attempt to come closer to the mainstream. 

Moreover, the idea that kids at a high school prom could ever get lost to such a degree that they’d run into a mad family of cannibals is a wild stretch of credibility. But the utterly ridiculous and unrealistic quality of that story feels completely intentional to me. In fact, it strikes me as the first of many ways in which the film self-consciously plays with the tropes of the slasher, adopting a kind of self-awareness that will take a much more legible and obvious form in Scream, but which here leads the film into complete chaos and hysteria… as it very well should. 

The sensation of being completely out of control, of things happening too fast for anyone to have the time to rationalise them, is I believe what makes Tobe Hooper’s original film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre the masterpiece that it is. But that visceral quality is also a challenge for all its sequels. Bigger budgets mean more people to please and a commercial imperative, characteristics which do not lend themselves well to the creation of the unbridled, raw terror that is at the core of the Texas DNA. But if the spine-tingling, kinetic realism of Hooper’s original cannot be recreated, it has to come from someplace else — something the creators of the first and second sequels understood very well. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 tried to find it in over-the-top horror comedy which, in my opinion, was still too tightly bound by logic and rules to be truly exhilarating. Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III sought it in the contrasts of a banal TV movie aesthetic transcended by moments of extreme gore. But The Next Generation is the most radical of the three, its self-awareness soon devolving into chaos and unpredictable nonsense. 

A year before Randy lecturing his pals on the tropes of the slasher film in Scream, The Next Generation features Heather (Lisa Marie Newmyer), a classic “dumb blonde” slasher character who turns out to be the most careful and paranoid of all, and therefore the most clairvoyant about the fate that awaits her and her friends. When she talks about her dream of some murderer following her (“I’m sorry but we’re all going to die”), Heather is not referring to slasher tropes directly, but the exaggerated quality of the film together with its mix of horror and comedy encourage us to make that leap alone. Like Scream, The Next Generation is self-aware, but unlike Scream, it is so via caricature and does not go for realism, maintaining a distance from its audience instead. That gap is what gives the film its unpredictable quality and what allows it to eventually escalate into pure, crazed mania.

This madness to come is of course already hinted at by Matthew McConaughey’s first appearance as tow trucker Vilmer. When the four teens in their car inexplicably collide into another car in otherwise empty woods — another wild stretch of the imagination — the young driver is left unconscious, and so Jenny, Barry, and Heather go look for help. They stumble upon the office of a real estate agent called Darla (Tonie Perensky), again rather surprising in the middle of nowhere, who calls Vilmer to the scene. When he arrives soon after and meets Sean, the film does not bother to create suspense about his intentions, which is a relief: this being a sequel, we can guess he won’t be one of the good guys (the number of horror sequels which still seem to consider protracted scenes of forced, unconvincing suspense to be compulsory is baffling). But this absence of tension also returns us to the original film’s sledgehammer approach to horror: the hitchhiker slicing his own hand unprompted, Leatherface bursting out of the door and simply grabbing his victim, etc. Like them, Vilmer immediately appears to be a bad guy; that he doesn’t immediately snap the unconscious boy’s neck is just a way for the film to sardonically delay what we all know is coming, and to snidely comment on horror sequels’ terrible habit of trying to create tension where there is none. 

For the majority of its runtime, the film brings such unhinged, brutal elements together with hints of intelligent, sardonic self-awareness, in what amounts to an admittedly strange but fascinating mix. The character of Darla is a weird, over-the-top play on third wave feminism and the role of women in the slasher. Although she has an office job and wears the corresponding power suits of an independent business woman, her actual office is small and isolated in the middle of the woods, and it’s hard to imagine she could have any clients at all. While she appears strong and unafraid of men, she in fact gets her way with them through casual, noncommittal flirting, a grimly old-fashioned vision of female liberation. When she first welcomes Jenny into her office, Darla appears to be both a lifesaver and a role model, the kind of strong woman Jenny would like to be. But Jenny finds refuge in Darla’s office in much the same way Sally did in the petrol station in the original film, and like her, she is betrayed: Darla, it turns out, isn’t a feminist at all, but rather the girlfriend of the psychotic Vilmer, the very man who is hunting Jenny down.

Though they evolve in different registers and on different levels, McConaughey’s crazy-eyed, very physical performance as Vilmer and Perensky’s more intellectual, dialogue-heavy interpretation as Darla together create sparks and complete one another. Darla herself is a monstrous contradiction, created by the oppressive and paradoxical demands put on women at the time. Her boyfriend Vilmer is nothing if not a heightened image of the patriarchy brought to its logical end, an unpredictable and violent machine of destruction who simply loves to kill — just like the alpha killers from the original film. And as in the original film, Leatherface here is both a cruel and violent man reduced to a feral state, a fearful and childish creature, and a person with an apparently confused gender identity. Though Darla is the public-facing, more acceptable member of the family, she is just as monstrous as Vilmer and Leatherface.

Once Darla’s role is revealed and the kids all either dead or tied up, the film turns into an extended, insane screaming match between Darla, Vilmer and the other members of the family, all shouting and beating each other up while the poor Jenny is tied up to a chair, handling it all surprisingly well (in an earlier version of the film, she was a survivor of abuse, which could explain her reaction and would tie up nicely with the film’s social commentary on gender violence). McConaughey is madly spinning his arms around as he often does, chaos reigns and the story has come to a standstill. But just as it seems the film has fully broken down into hysteria, it finds a way to escalate things further by looking beyond the societal ills of sexism and destitution that have always been at the core of the franchise. In what I find to be an utterly exhilarating, stunning leap into sheer lunacy, The Next Generation descends into conspiracy theory territory, adding bone chilling anguish to the film’s already heady mix of terrors. Out of nowhere, a man in a black suit belonging to a secret society which Darla says are “the same people that killed J.F.K.”, arrives at the mansion in a limousine. Moving at a glacial pace, the strange little man proceeds to make very vague but menacing remarks to Vilmer, who apparently works for him. “I want these people to know the meaning of horror…” is about how clear as he gets before he leaves, Vilmer consequently ashamed at having somehow failed him, and turning even more violent than before, forcing Jenny to gather her strength and flee for good. 

This statement from the man in black is of course a knowing wink at the sorry state of horror cinema at the time, but also at the legacy of Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece, a purely visceral experience which offers no ways out, no intellectual hooks to hold on to, no safe rationalisations to help us weather its onslaught of terror. In crafting an amalgam of sheer visceral thrills and social themes that soon disintegrates into chaos, then leaps into the worst excesses of logic and rationalisation, writer-director Kim Henkel (who also co-wrote the original film) has created a kind of mirror image of Hooper’s original. Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Next Generation ultimately denies viewers’ desire to rationalise the horror on screen; but, and unlike Hooper’s film, not without first gleefully and intelligently playing with that desire, mocking this hope for explanations as utterly futile — or, at least, as being antithetical to "the meaning of horror”.