One thought I had yesterday is that I think we all need to regularly express ALL the emotions. We understand sadness and anger, love, joy, sexual desire. But what about revulsion?
I read that there are, on one typology, 6 basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, surprise, and sadness. Horror certainly caters to the fear element, but also both surprise and disgust. I would submit that in our sanitized world, where all convenience store clerks are taught to say “have a nice day”, that some primal part of our selves craves the dissolute, the insane, the repulsive. Cannibalism certainly fits the bill.
On a perhaps deeper level, do we not all sense that crimes are happening, even now, that particularly in wide open places may never be punished? I have in mind particularly pedophilia, but wife beating, and cruelty to animals certainly also go on.
Think about the Texas of 1973. This was an era when the reality of pervasive pedophilia/sexual abuse of children and minors was still widely rejected. Children would tell their stories, and be abused for it. Catholic priests were still routinely molesting children. Actual racism was still present, and blacks had to watch their steps, lest they have violence visited on them.
There is a line from Conan Doyle’s story “The Copper Beeches” which has always stuck with me: They are traveling to the countryside on a very beautiful day, watching farmsteads go on by from the train window. Watson says “Are they not fresh and beautiful?”
Holmes replies: “Do you know, Watson, that is is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with crime may be committed there.”
You hear country music throughout, even in very grim places, like when the gas station owner is tying her up. They seem both to be hinting at undiscovered crimes–and here I have Tobe Hooper and the other author in mind (what do they know?)–and to be explicitly pointing to the violent nature of life, as in the description of the process of slaughtering cattle, which of course was a large industry in Texas.
All living beings, in some ways, depend on the death or use of other living beings. The smallest fish eat plants, and the larger fish eat them. Humans are theoretically at the top of the food chain, but countless bacteria within us are always trying to survive and thrive at our expense.
And to the point of this movie, there is a bloodlust that is superior in some ways to the external trappings of our civilization. Humans can be food for humans. We can move sideways, and have in many cases. There were many examples of cannibalism in Napolean’s march on Moscow.
Few thoughts. It will keep percolating for a while.