some things you have to do. don't mean you gotta like it
Like Psycho , The Texas Chain Saw Massacre begins with a very specific setting—a date on which this “idyllic summer drive turn[s] into a nightmare.” It’s also got an awesome scroll (with narration) to let us know things are going to go very badly—as if the title did not already imply as much. As Sherman Alexie (1992) says in his poem of the same* name, “even its name brings fear.” * with chainsaw as one word, though, as I tend to think of it as well. Before I get back to Alexie, I gotta mention the old guy sitting in the tire at the cemetery at the beginning of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre . He seems like the predecessor to all the crazy old guys who warn people away in the various Friday the 13th films and other slasher films. There was a point in my twenties, when I was writing fiction almost daily, that I wanted to write a story implying those guys—and I think they have a name genre studiers use, but I can’t think of what it is—were actually all the same person (or supernatura...