Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 Can’t Repeat Halloween 2018’s Formula

Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s 2022 reboot seems to be borrowing from 2018’s Halloween sequel. Here’s why that’s a misguided approach for the franchise.

The 2022 reboot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre looks like an attempt by the franchise’s producers to ape the success of Halloween’s 2018 sequel, but there are numerous reasons that this approach won’t work for the new movie. Released in 1974, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a low-budget horror movie that transcended its humble origins and became one of the genre’s most legendary titles. Future Salem’s Lot director Tobe Hooper turned the simple setup of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre into a terrifying, intense endurance test that is still regarded as a masterpiece even decades after its original release.

However, none of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s many sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots were able to recapture this success. Some sequels took a more comedic approach to the material while others were bogged down by backstory, but all of them failed to nail the grim tone and authentically gritty look of the original movie. As such, many fans of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series were understandably reticent when a new addition to the franchise was announced in 2021.

Related: Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Best Reboot Would Follow The 2003 Remake

Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 is set to be released in February and will ignore the complicated continuity of the franchise, picking up after the events of the original 1974 movie. If that sounds like the approach of Halloween’s 2018 reboot, that’s because the franchise’s producers are attempting to revisit the series in much the same manner as that earlier hit. However, while Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot looks like it is trying to be another legacy sequel in the vein of Halloween 2018, this approach ignores a lot of major differences between the two franchises. It may be tempting to think that Halloween 2018’s approach is foolproof, but the formula only works for certain franchises, and the  Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not one of them.

Why Halloween 2018 Succeeded

Halloween’s 2018 sequel was an unexpected critical and commercial success upon release. After the critical drubbing of director Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween remake and its sequel, hopes were not high for another direct sequel to the original 1978 slasher movie. However, the David Gordon Green-directed 2018 hit succeeded despite the odds because of Halloween 2018’s clever approach to canon. Halloween 2018 dropped the convoluted backstory of earlier Halloween sequels, brought back the beloved heroine of the series, and focused on telling a simple, scary story akin to the bare-bones setup of the original slasher classic. These all seem like steps that a prospective Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel would be able to repeat, but further inspection proves this is not the case.

Why Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 Can’t Pull This Off

Halloween’s heroine Laurie Strode was a sub-genre defining Final Girl and a fleshed-out character who audiences spent plenty of time getting to know before Michael Myers ever took a knife to her. Like Scream franchise heroine Sidney Prescott, Laurie is a beloved character in her own right, and Halloween is mainly her story. By the time Michael is killing off her school friends, viewers have spent almost an hour seeing the movie primarily from Laurie’s perspective. In contrast,  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s heroine Sally Hardesty is just the luckiest of a very unfortunate group and has almost no defining characteristics beyond surviving the movie’s killing spree. She’s resilient and tough, but not a particularly memorable character in her own right.

This is not an issue for the movie’s writing, but rather a conscious decision made by design. Without much money for gore effects (and with Hooper somehow believing that the finished movie would get a PG rating if the onscreen violence was limited),  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre made its kills feel more chaotic and random than Michael Myers’ methodical murders by never having a clear protagonist. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is relentlessly dark precisely because viewers often think that the character they are following must be the movie’s hero, only for them to be horribly killed in a sudden sneak attack. It’s an incredibly effective way of building suspense and subverting audience expectations, but this approach also means that the true protagonist of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn’t revealed until all of Sally’s friends are dead and, by then, Sally receives little memorable characterization beyond being “the one who made it out alive.”

Related: Every Upcoming Movie Sequel In 2022

Leatherface & Michael Myers Are Too Different

If the respective Final Girls of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween are very different, the killer villains of the two movies are even more divergent. Halloween’s Michael Myers is an embodiment of evil whose cruelty is never given a concrete origin, precisely because that makes him scarier. He is an inexplicable boogeyman who kills for no real reason, making him impossible to reason with. However, much like A Nightmare On Elm Street can’t copy Chucky’s TV show, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot can’t turn the franchise’s villain Leatherface into a similarly stoic monster.

Leatherface is a surprisingly humanized member of a starving clan driven to cannibalism by desperate circumstances. In comparison to Michael Myers, Leatherface is more sympathetic and relies on his family more than Michael when it comes to murder, acting as the muscle for a larger group but never operating alone. Leatherface is a tragic figure where Michael is completely irredeemable, and is murdering to feed his depraved family, where Michael is killing for no apparent reason beyond pure sadism. The two characters diverge in terms of motive and method, making Sally’s desire to wreak vengeance on Leatherface less compelling than Laurie’s anger at Michael given how pathetic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s villain has always been.

Sally Doesn’t Have A Vendetta Against Leatherface (Specifically)

It is more than understandable for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot’s recast Sally Hardesty to be pretty annoyed when she sees that Leatherface is wielding the titular weapon again. However, her beef is with the entire Sawyer family and the community harboring them, since the entire clan was responsible for her trauma and only the well-timed intervention of a trucker saved her life in the original movie. As such, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot’s attempts to treat Leatherface and Sally’s relationship as a mirror of Laurie and Michael’s doesn’t add up. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot trailer sees Sally claim she has waited decades to face off against Leatherface again but, unlike Halloween’s Michael and Laurie conflict, the heroine’s original fight was never against one villain.

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