Shades of Yellow Heighten the Horror of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’

In Tobe Hooper’s famous horror film, the color yellow is a visual catalyst for the evil that is to come.

This is The Curse, a column by Miyako Pleines about the poetry and persuasion of horror films. 

Texas is a place I hold in a cage inside my heart, a wild thing that I can never quite seem to tame to my liking. I have languished during many a summer there, spending long afternoons with my father in his home in Houston. To me, the heat of the place seemed unfathomable—each time I visited, the suffocating atmosphere always seemed to have both its hands around my throat, squeezing. The flora of Houston often looks like it’s on the verge of crisping under that hot Texan sun, and I never saw much that was green or refreshing on drives past vast oil fields and strip malls. In my memory, everything there is cast in a yellow hue and curling from heat at the edges, all my recollections sepia toned.

There are a lot of films about Texas, but none of them are as disturbing or lurid as Tobe Hooper’s 1974 masterpiece, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It is a polarizing film; those who successfully make it through either enthusiastically embrace it or vehemently despise it. Upon its release, audience members were known to run from the theater in disgust and fear. To this day, the film is often described as “sick,” “vile,” “perverse,” and “unhinged,” and yet in 1981 a copy of the film was placed in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Filmed during a sweltering summer in 1973, the story revolves around five young friends driving through Texas who stumble upon the house of a group of men known to fans as the Sawyer family, former slaughterhouse workers who have embraced murder and cannibalism. At the hands of Leatherface and his infrangible chainsaw, the group of travelers is picked off one by one and carved up for dinner. Only Sally Hardesty, the bellicose blonde with a knack for the sustained scream, survives.

Many of the kills are left up to the viewer’s imagination, and there is a startling lack of visible blood. Instead, the film’s true horror lies in the stifling environment that is reinforced over and over again through its visual landscape, one largely dominated by the color yellow. During the opening credits, images of rotting corpses in various stages of decomposition flash across the screen. Yellowing skulls, teeth, skin, and fingernails are illuminated by the flash of a camera that bathes the horrors in a warm yellow light. This sallow, putrid color seems to fester in front of the viewer, its vibrancy so real you can almost smell the decay. Eventually, the images give way to a shot of an exhumed corpse fastened to the top of a gravestone. The camera zooms out to reveal a cemetery completely awash in the golden-yellow hues of sunrise. The opening credits continue over veinlike images of solar flares against a black background before giving way to a final shot of the sun centered in the frame like a singular, round lemon. Not five minutes into the film, the color yellow has created an atmosphere that feels oppressive, hot, and totally inescapable.

The color has a complicated place in history and imagination. Often, it invokes positivity and joy, the color of generous sunshine and cheerful sunflowers, something we must peel through to relish the sweetness of a banana. It has been important to many cultures because of its association to the sun. In his book Yellow, Michel Pastoureau describes ancient societies viewing the sun as “the basis of all life, the ancestor of their gods.” Today, this sun worship continues in more modern ways, like the hashtag “#goldenhour” used on over ten million Instagram posts of that period during sunrise or sunset when the world is at its most beautiful. In the medical world, however, this term is often used to describe the crucial period of time following a traumatic injury when a patient is most likely to be saved. It is a sweet spot that must be quickly harnessed lest the person slip beyond help and into the realm of death.

Yellow is also a color that conjures death and other disturbing images. We see it in our minds when we picture festering sores and fetid skin. In art, the color is often used to connote unease or ill health. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” revolves around one woman’s experience with postpartum depression as she describes her imprisonment in a room decorated with the sickly-colored paper. Popular paint colors used well before the nineteenth century, like gamboge and orpiment, were brutally toxic given too much exposure. Looking to history, yellow is the color of the Stars of David that the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear, and it is also the color white people assigned to Asians as a way of separating and caricaturing us. Pastoureau describes yellow as a “false, duplicitous color that cannot be trusted; it cheats, deceives, and betrays.”

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, like all movies, is influenced by the time period in which it was made. At the time of filming, the United States was on the verge of an energy crisis fueled in part by the transition from domestic oil production to foreign suppliers, a shift that left many local producers without work. Early on in the film, we learn that the Sawyer family used to make their living in the slaughter business, but the invention of modern slaughter technology has caused them to lose their jobs. Alongside cannibalism, the Sawyers have transitioned into running a roadside gas station. When the travelers stop for gas, they are informed by the attendant (the man who will later turn out to be the head of the Sawyer family, known as “the Cook”) that he is out. “The cost of electricity is enough to drive a man out of business,” he later states. In his book The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Film that Terrified a Rattled Nation, author Joseph Lanza describes how in this particular instant, “the energy crisis and its many social ills are inescapable.” Oil, or the lack of it, becomes more than just a plot device—it is the lifeblood of the film, silently flowing beneath the visual terror. Their former jobs in the slaughterhouse taught the Sawyers how to kill, but their newfound financial dependence on oil, that often yellowy, viscous substance, finally gives them a reason to. And so The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is more than just a film about murderous lunatics; it is also a brutal critique about the struggles of the working class.

Texas Chain Saw displays its yellow in layers, but on the surface, it’s the visual yellows of the film that do most of the work in creating an almost unbearable feeling of tension and dread. As Sally and her friends travel deeper into the Texas countryside, the landscape is filled with blue sky and green trees. Still, always at the bottom of the frame is the bilious color of the browning, drought-ridden grass along the roadside. It is a yellow that exists at first on the fringes, before slowly creeping its way into and dominating the entire frame. When the group of friends pick up the hitchhiker that will go on to torment Sally later in the film, he sports an outfit that mimics this landscape: His top blends into the rich greens of the forest, but his khaki pants reflect the straw-colored grass, anchoring him to the yellowing countryside from which he comes. The use of yellow in the clothing of the villains is reflected again when we meet Leatherface, the hitchhiker’s mute brother—for the majority of the film, Leatherface wears a long yellow butcher’s apron that falls past his knees over his clothes. He embodies the look of decay, and as the main slaughterer throughout the movie, he embraces the sallowness of the color yellow, harnessing its power and using it to terrorize his victims: His chainsaw, that iconic weapon of choice for which the movie is named, has a dastardly, putrescent yellow hue.

The house where the murders take place is white. From the outside, it appears to be a beautiful country home. A bench swing sits under a tree in the yard, and an expansive porch wraps its way around the home’s exterior. Two of the young travelers, Kirk and Pam, make their way inside, and we learn the macabre truth. Kirk is the first to die, repeatedly bludgeoned over the head by Leatherface before being dragged off and carved up for meat. Pam is allowed to anguish a bit more—before she is impaled, she discovers a room illuminated by sunlight spilling in through the open blinds. As she looks around, she wretches onto the floor, horrified by the sight of various skulls and rib cages and a sofa made entirely out of human parts. The room is a demented space, subtly inundated with the yellow shade of death. This pale yellow gives way to the golden hues of sunset that succeed the duo’s killings. As the rest of the group advances one by one to look for their missing friends, we are treated to shots of the white house now bathed in a sinister yellow light—a visual catalyst that ushers the remaining friends into the evil that is to come.

Only a handful of months prior to the start of filming Texas Chain Saw, the Paris Peace Accords had been signed, effectively ending the United States’ long involvement in the Vietnam War, and Nixon was under increased scrutiny for the Watergate scandal that was threatening to ruin his already-unpopular presidency. Lanza notes in his book how the “dynamics of the [Sawyer] family” can often be seen as a “caricature of Nixon’s ethical mire.” By the time the war ended, over three million people had died, more than half of which were Vietnamese noncombatants—many of them killed as a direct result of orders Nixon gave, such as the infamous Christmas bombings. Lanza describes how Jim Siedow, the actor who portrays the morally ambiguous Cook within the film, bears a remarkable resemblance to Nixon. This purposeful parallel between a political scoundrel and the film’s most slippery antagonist creates a direct correlation between the crimes committed within the film and the crimes committed by Nixon during his presidency.

As an Asian American woman, it is not lost on me that throughout history, Asian skin has been depicted as yellow in various offensive caricatures. I can’t help but associate this, as well as the historical undercurrent of the Vietnam War, with the rich, unfiltered yellow hue of this film. The presence of a Nixon-like character forces me to reckon with his crimes against his own country as well as the people of Vietnam. The film becomes a magic lantern, able to conjure up multiple instances of the pain and corruption of the time. Its strength lies in how it allows viewers to grapple with the uncertainty surrounding what it means to kill or be killed in America.

Despite all of this, I love the color yellow. I find it buttery and pure, a color that can inspire a warmth within me. Throughout the film, even though yellow appears to reinforce the sweltering Texas landscape and the grisly crimes unfolding on the screen, there are a handful of moments when its presence feels light and sanguine. When Pam and Kirk first stumble upon the Sawyers’ house, a field of tall, aureate black-eyed Susans greets them. These flowers are vibrant and alive, in stark contrast to the landscape around them. They evoke within me a brief feeling of cheer and delight, and it is impossible for me to read their presence in the film as anything but a symbol of joy, however unlikely.

The most striking use of the color yellow is found in the final moments of the film, when Sally seemingly manages to get away. As she screams from the back of the truck that has rescued her from her macabre fate, we are treated to a chilling but beautiful shot of Leatherface spinning and waving his chainsaw in the air. His movements appear dance-like, and each time I see this scene, I’m mesmerized by his silhouetted body pirouetting against the backdrop of a startlingly yellow rising sun. It is a wild scene, but its frenzy and its beauty lie in the warmth created by the sunrise, a hue that seeks to terrify just as it brings hope.