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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