At first glance the Sawyer family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are not typical monsters. This clan does not transform, The Sawyers do not have super-human abilities or come from a distant universe. In fact, I think it is debatable if they are monsters at all. I had a hard time defining what a monster was in our last assignment. When I started to list all the different "monsters" in my mind, I realized there was not a lot in common from character to character. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's article "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" helped me to sort out and make some connections between TCM and monster theory. Cohen defines monstrum as "that which warns" or "reveals" a "projection". Letherface, Grandpa, Hitchhiker, etc are classics projections of fear, they are the one handed man scraping your car, the Boogeyman, the man in the van offering you candy. lurking in an old farm house in the middle of nowhere, hidden from a modern world. They are literally a mysterious death behind a door. Be scared of the unknown children. As said in thesis 5 "...curiosity is more often punished than rewarded.."
Cohen has the view that the monster "always escapes": The Ogre, Alien, Vampires. TCM has had numerous sequels and reboots. In the original movie Leatherface does not die, the last shot is a man dancing with his chainsaw. It is explained that that there is a lineage of deviant behavior in the Sawyer line. When Grandpa is brought down we sense these monsters have always been and will always be.
As Cohen writes on the monster being at, "the gates of difference", it is an obvious point that the victims in TCM represent normal teenagers (at least for their time). Good looking young people going on a trip, trying to have fun. It is the monstrous, redneck yokels (perhaps inbred) robbing graves and cannibalizing these good hear-ted youngsters (pun intended). The word "Darwinian" is used in the article and how some have tried to pull monsters into normal culture. TCM proves it best to let the dragon lie.
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