Leatherface: Hell's Chimney

[Abishai100]

Leatherface is the maniacal anti-hero in Tobe Hooper's seminal horror masterpiece "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974).

Leatherface wields a terrifying chainsaw which he uses to rip apart his hapless victims. Leatherface is a cannibal who wears a mask made of the human skin of his dead victims. Leatherface is the horror-fantasy genre equivalent of Satan.

When we think of terrible comic book super-villains such as Video-Man (Marvel Comics), a mutant who can travel through electric wires and disrupts the computing networks in Spider-Man's beloved city, or Scarecrow (DC Comics), a masked maniac who terrorizes Batman and Gotham City with devastating fear toxins, we think of Leatherface.

We don't want to cross paths with Leatherface, simply because he will change our perception of safety and security forever. We don't want to reference his horrifying chainsaw in a bland pseudo-liberal discussion about how chainsaws are used to tear down precious trees.

Unlike other horror film icons such as Michael Myers (from the Halloween film franchise begun by the great John Carpenter), Tobe Hooper's eerie Leatherface is the art world's equivalent to a layman's philosophical treatise on the maniacal boundaries of malice itself.

There are comic book stylized stories about Leatherface floating around out there, and they seem to invoke images of real terrorism omens:

"Leatherface chases three vagrant American teenagers through a forest in Texas, and as he chases them down, God sneers."







Leatherface


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[Abishai100]

Leatherface is the ultimate maniac. He embodies our fears about self-destruction and moralism anarchy.

So, let's pit him against a hypothetical antecedent character, a ghoulish warrior.

The real-life psychopath Ed Gein was arrested for murder and police discovered dismembered bodies in his home, and his horrifying deeds effectively made him a real world template for horror-psychology films such as "Psycho" (1960) and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974). Gein was apparently making outfits out of the skin of dead people to wear. A movie adaptation of his life even depicted him in one such 'costume.' I'm going to borrow a special photo of that apparent 'costume' from that movie to construct a warrior challenger for Leatherface.

Meet Helter-Skelter: a 'purgatory knight' with a taste for hammers and broadswords as his weapons of choice.

Helter-Skelter challenges the lethal and ghoulish Leatherface and as their sword and chainsaw clash, we see an image of an undeniable 'Cannibalism Stand.'





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Ed Gein


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[Abishai100]

"Leatherface is above all, a hobbler.

When we imagine villains and spooks, we imagine that they impair our abilities to find security and happiness.

Leatherface does not terrorize our dreams or our communities. He simply hobbles his victims. His purpose is to make people feel clumsy but in a spiritual way --- as if they are literally dying in his hands.

He seeks to disintegrate the human spirit through terror. He is the ultimate demon in corporeal form.

If you've been harassed by the IRS, you know how debilitating emotionally the experience can be. Imagine now being hobbled and that too by a masked maniac.

The only way to defeat Leatherface is to take on the identity and skills of a super-archer and shoot him down with arrows cast from afar. Get too close, and he just might throw his dreadful motorized chainsaw at you.

That is why I was hired to track down Leatherface before his spread of hobbling reached as far as Boston, Massachusetts.

My name is Green Arrow, and I am the perfect archer."

-Notes from Green Arrow's diary before his militant encounter with Leatherface which unfortunately resulted in both of their deaths.