The Chain Saw Massacre might have been a perfectly fine title. It’s blunt and to the point, economical yet evocative. But it’s the “Texas” that really makes it sing. Setting the 1974 film here, in the state that has long stood in for the fading American frontier on-screen, provided an added mythic dimension to the movie’s tale of homicidal cannibals. Austin director Tobe Hooper, after all, wasn’t out to tell a story about Texas, specifically, but about a nation that was spiraling in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, its institutions on the verge of collapse. Leatherface and the rest of his demented clan were Texans, but, more broadly, they were members of America’s endangered rural class—former slaughterhouse workers whose jobs had been replaced by…
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