For our Family Feud feature for Unconventional Families Week, every day The A.V. Club will select two families from a similar category. One of our writers will make the case for each side, and our fearless Editorial Director Josh Modell will make the call on the final victor. Whether you agree with Josh’s decision or not, be sure to add your vote to our online poll.
Yesterday, The Munsters took on The Addams Family in a battle of monster-based relations. Today, we continue our pre-Halloween creepy theme with everyone’s favorite cannibalistic clans. In a fight between the Leatherface and the Hills Have Eyes families, who is the more sadistic? Not a fight we’d really like to be a part of, but let’s find out anyway!
Horror families
Leatherface’s family, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
“Sadistic” fails to capture what a family in rural Texas does to the poor souls who cross their path. When it comes to murderous cannibals, sadism is their starting point, a one on the scale of evil. The family that terrorizes a group of young adults in the horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has transcended sadism and moved into something far more disturbing. Horror films can have a slickness that makes them foreign, the violence far removed from reality. Chain Saw’s low budget stripped it down to its bare, simple brutality—the thunk of Leatherface hitting a guy’s head with a hammer, for instance. As the original trailer warned, “This is the movie that is just as real, just as close, just as terrifying as being there.”
And being there was rough. As much murdering went down in Leatherface and family’s house, it seemed more designed to psychologically torture the people who had the misfortune of visiting it—the room full of bone furniture, the bodies in the chairs, the foyer of animal hides. The dining room that hosts the consumption of human bodies is understated by comparison, but that’s where the family straps down one victim to sit and take in the horrors of dinnertime at Leatherface’s house. They eat and mock the woman’s horrified shrieking, gleefully basking in her terror, as if the more scared she is before dying, the better she’ll taste once she’s dead. The lucky ones just get a hammer to the head—as the trailer pointed out, “Even if one of them survives, what will be left?” A shell of a person, that’s what. [Kyle Ryan]