Sam Raimi: Send Help and Drag Me To Hell

When the System Collapses: What Sam Raimi Is Really Revealing About Power Structures

Sam Raimi’s films are famous for its excesses—vomit, blood, demonic spectacles. But the real horror in Drag Me to Hell and Send Help isn’t mostly supernatural. It’s mostly structural. Both films begin inside institutional-coded spaces—a bank, a corporate succession pipeline. And both stage the same experiment: What happens when the insulation around power disappears? The answer isn’t always empowerment. It’s often exposure. Power isn’t always Strength. Sometimes paradoxically it’s Insulation.

In Drag Me to Hell, Christine competes for promotion against a less competent male colleague who thrives through proximity and schmoozing other colleagues. In Send Help, Linda is passed over in favor of a fraternity-connected executive heir. These institutions don’t simply reward merit. They simply stabilize incumbents. They absorb flaws. They normalize entitlement. They cushion mediocrity. The insiders do not need to prove themselves. The structure protects them from exposure. 

The Closed System: Raimi’s worlds operate as closed systems—procedural, indifferent, fixed. In Drag Me to Hell, Christine enters a supernatural bureaucracy that mirrors corporate logic: someone must pay the debt. She becomes ruthless enough to exhume a corpse and attempt to transfer the curse given previously to her. She follows the rules. And she still dies. Not because she lacked cruelty—but because she never controlled the inner mechanisms. And a simple technical error seals her fate. Compliance offers no authorship. The system does not always reward effort. It just deletes errors.

In Send Help, the plane crash strips away corporate hierarchy entirely. No inheritance. No networking advantage. No institutional buffer. But the pivot happens even earlier. On the plane, after overhearing the men casually confirm her marginalization, Linda deletes the plan draft she is completing. Her gesture is quiet but decisive. She withdraws her labor and ambitions from a system that will never convert them into leverage. The plane crash that follows does not create her break from legitimacy—it reveals she was already prepared to operate without it. 

From Compliance to Authorship: Once stranded on the island, Linda discovers the private beach resort—a hidden infrastructure with plenty of stocked resources, discovering an insulation she can control. From that moment, her survival shifts into authorship. She knows rescue is possible. But she chooses not to signal help. When Zuri and the guide suddenly arrive, she could restore legitimacy and return to the corporate order. Instead, she decides to eliminate them. Not in panic—but in consolidation of her new power. She refuses to reenter the system as a subordinate again, so she remains insulated. 

Baptism and Revelation: Christine seeks restoration and is destroyed by structural indifference. Linda rejects restoration, seizes authority, and converts it into insulation. Closed systems reward either inherited protection or self-authored control. They do not reward compliance by outsiders. Raimi renders this divergence grotesquely literal. Christine is baptized in corpse vomit—engulfed, swallowed by forces she cannot master. Her immersion marks her erosion. She remains subject to rules she did not design. Whereas, Linda is baptized in blood during the boar hunt—drenched, exhilarated, dominant. Her immersion marks her initiation. She stops seeking permission. She generates an inevitability. The difference in these two films is not morality. It is control. And sardonic inevitability.

Blondie’s “One Way or Another” frames Send Help at both beginning and end. At first, signifies how "outside" and not accepted Linda is. By the end, it lands as sardonic thesis. “I’m gonna get ya” is no longer playful. It’s structural. Linda does not only earn legitimacy. She embraces inevitability. One way or another. The humor works because the film knows exactly what it’s showing. Success here is not moral triumph. It is rational adaptation within an uncaring structure. 

The Structural Threat: If insulated hierarchies protect incumbents from exposure, then their authority depends on that insulation. When insulation collapses, what’s revealed is uncomfortable: power did not reflect ability. It reflected insulation. Christine believes compliance will protect her. It doesn’t. Linda recognizes compliance will not protect her. She exits legitimacy, gains authorship, and reenters the system insulated. Strip away the insulation, and power doesn’t disappear. What disappears is the illusion. Raimi’s horror isn’t moral—it’s structural. The system was never neutral, only uncaring. 

Rachel McAdams is wonderful as always—our eternal romantic lead. Here she uses every ounce of that built-in goodwill as a weapon. Her Linda is never a victim in Send Help. Even covered in sand, blood and sweat, she possesses a terrifying, luminous capability. It is a subversive performance that lands perfectly. Opposite her, Dylan O’Brien nails the specific, grating energy of a boss we have all had. He is not a cartoon villain, but an indifferent, casually manipulative dude who mistakes privilege for charm. His descent from predator to pathetic prey is horrifying, hilarious and—crucially—feels earned. Raimi’s genius is in the balance. The torture walks a razor’s edge between cruelty and catharsis, but it never tips into nihilism. You are always cheering for Linda’s ingenuity and cruelty. Source: cultmtl.com

Donnie Darko as Suicidal Ideation Allegory, Twilight Override (Jeff Tweedy from Wilco)

Narratively, cinema tends to oversimplify the onset of a character's mental illness by rooting it tidily in a single trauma. This is called the "presumption of traumatic etiology", a term used by Steven E. Hyler, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, in his Comprehensive Psychiatry article, "DSM-III at the Cinema." In the mythos of the film, Donnie Darko must sacrifice himself to save the universe. In another read, though, he instead comes to the unfortunately common conclusion that his suicide will improve everyone else's lives. He allows the jet engine to crush his bedroom with him inside: he kills himself. Just think of the image at the end of the jet engine falling through the wormhole tunnel. What does that resemble? A bullet traveling through a gun barrel. The jet engine's rounded, cylindrical, shiny-metal shape is completely analogous to that of a bullet. The jet engine missing him the first time might be symbolic of giving up on an early suicide attempt. 

The suicidal young man's idea of himself as a hero who must sacrifice himself to save people is the psychology that is represented in many works (including Catcher in the Rye), and in certain mythology of rock and roll. Jeff Tweedy from Wilco differs from that mythology. Jeff Tweedy (talking over his most recent triple album Twilight Override): “I’m not espousing the dark underbelly of New York's nightlife or decadence or anything like that because I was so disappointed—even as an addict, I was so disappointed with the cliche of it, the hypocrisy of it. The disgusting nature of advocating for things that are really bad for people.  You know, honestly, the way rock and roll was marketed as a culture was just awful. And the part that I knew was there and was disappointed to find wasn’t really the guiding principle was the part that I thought was really beautiful.”

 

“It was just like, ‘Oh, you get together with your friends and then the world is a little less painful. You get together with your friends, make some music and you’re all transported. And then all of a sudden, you have a community around it. And then other bands start because they see that there’s this opportunity, there’s this place. There’s a strategy for living. It isn’t what you’ve been sold. And so, you know, I reject it. I fucking reject it in rock and roll. The radical, individuated self-expression of rock and roll and the self-liberation of it — that’s all that matters.” He makes it sound so simple. What if it is?" Source: insidehook.com

At first Donnie/the antihero has an impulse to harm others, and then he turns it inward and imagines an elaborate scenario by which he "saves" people. His destructive, lashing-out impulse has found a personal mythology that makes him feel justified and good. Catcher in the Rye's Holden character has a fantasy of saving children running through a field toward a cliff. Holden Caulfield is the guy who catches them before they fall to their deaths. By the end of that novel, we realize Holden is in therapy and undeniably suicidal. His rejection of "phonies" is very similar to Donnie Darko's hostility toward the moral preachings of those at the high school. By burning down the house of the Patrick Swayze's pedophile character, Donnie Darko basically "catches" the Sparkle Motion girls (and his little sister) by preventing the local creep from getting to them.

The fear/love dichotomy is similar. He fears dying, especially the loneliness of dying by his own hand, fears many other things, especially losing his girlfriend Gretchen and his family. He wants to love and be loved. His parents are shown to be very loving people, but not reaching him, not even his doting mother. He really doesn't want to hurt them. He finds a way to think that if he dies, he is somehow doing them a favor. Part of him realizes that the fear/love dichotomy is a cop-out, so by the end he has accepted that if it has to be one concept winning above the other, it should be love. 

The arrow of time, and the blob that goes in front of people before they take action, is like what he sees himself moving toward. But he's schizoprenic and starts to see his decision as inevitable. He goes onto a kind of autopilot toward his oblivion. That is similar to the resignation and elation that many suicidal people have just before they commit the deed. Often it is a sense of peace after the decision has been fully finalized and accepted. In suicidal research literature, this is often the time when people are giving away their personal items, as they don't care any more about possessions. Donnie's parents give him a lot of "new stuff" as a reaction to him getting in trouble at school, and unfortunately it doesn't mean much to him.

One major element of the story is the idea of destruction being a part of creation. "The Destructors" by Graham Greene is about young people destroying a man's wealth and home, and the story is said to mean something about destruction being a positive thing. It is the young reclaiming something from the old, an expression of vitality and renewal. I think the fixation on this story is completely a part of the psychological process Donnie Darko is working out. Interestingly, the term "cellar door" represents a portal to a downward location -- a portal one passes through to death. It's also a term from "a famous linguist," whom the screenplay avoids mentioning was J.R.R. Tolkien, whose claim to fame was the creation of a vast fantasy realm and mythology. Donnie Darko is creating his own personal mythology as he moves toward the "cellar door" of his demise. The two words are cast as "the most beautiful in the English language": death recast as a high form of beauty. Suicidal ideation.

Basically, Donnie considers himself a liability to his community. He falls in love with the new girl at school, but he imagines he might end up losing her, and fantasizes finally with saving her life. His therapist isn't making any real progress with him and recurs to use placebo medicine. The echo-voiced bunnyman he imagines doesn't seem to be alive -- it is a half-dead bunny face, like a skull. A bunny is a symbol of innocence but in the form Donnie hallucinates, it becomes a symbol of innocence turning to death, of something that has become rotten in its springtime. That's how he feels on the inside: Like he's not youthful or vital or hopeful like he thinks he ought to be, but already dead inside.

On October 2, 1988, Donnie Darko — a euphemistic “troubled teen” — receives a dreamlike message from a satanic bunny named Frank, that the world will be ending on October 30. Donnie accepts this news fairly stoically, but it’s just the beginning of a month of nightmares about destruction that Donnie then re-creates in real life. Or does he? Is anything that happens between the warning to Donnie of impending apocalypse and the date of its predicted arrival real? Is it all a drug-induced hallucination? Or a psychosis-induced fantasy, a detachment from reality? Donnie Darko is what Ferris Bueller’s Day Off might have been if David Lynch had ever gotten his hands on it, a daring, disturbing, visionary debut from writer/director Richard Kelly. 

It's at times a bleak and pessimistic vision, but it reflects some of the feelings of Xers that they’ve been ignored and unappreciated. Donnie knows where his parents hide their gun. The inevitable chest-blob-arrow leads him right to it, as though it's not even his own decision anymore. He imagines a scenario where he'll end up using the gun on somebody else, out of revenge or some angry impulse. He doesn't want to do that. Up close, the gun's barrel is a wormhole of time. The bullet's aim is the arrow of time. The bullet is the jet engine. The Philosophy of Time Travel becomes the ability to make time stop, for him and him only. Source: popmatters.com

The Dick Powell Story by Tony Thomas

No movie star ever made a more radical change of image in mid-career than Dick Powell. The former crooner turned tough guy in Murder, My Sweet, Cornered (his darkest film), Johnny O’Clock, To the Ends of the Earth, Pitfall, Station West, and Cry Danger, all among the best examples of American film noir. It was, as he admitted, “one hell of a transition.” Dick Powell’s position in Hollywood history is unique in that he is identified as a leading exponent of two vastly different film genres—the musicals of the Thirties and the films noir of the late Forties. The actor of the one is barely recognizable as the actor of the other. Film students might be forgiven for wondering if they are the same man. Despite the complex image, Dick Powell was a relatively simple man. He was the product of an average working-class family, growing up with traditional values, politically conservative with religious views that did not much go beyond a faith in the Golden Rule and The Ten Commandmants. Powell was a classic example of the Great Depression self-made man with a passion for work and seemingly gifted with the Midas touch. Powell believed that anyone can achieve anything if he tries hard enough. For him it certainly worked.

Almost all the songs sung by Dick Powell in his first two years in Hollywood were written by Harry Warren and his lyricist Al Dubin. Dubin quit Hollywood in 1938, but Warren stayed for the rest of his long and productive life. He and Powell remained friends. “Of all the singers I’ve ever dealt with, he was just about the easiest to get along with. I don’t think he ever made an objection to any song we ever handed him. Music was easy for him. He’d been a musician and he’d been singing since he was a choirboy. His only problem at Warners was getting more money. Even when he was doing 42nd Street he was only getting $175 a week, and it was a constant fight to raise it.”

Naughty But Nice brought the long Warner Bros. phase of Dick Powell’s career to a rather abrupt end. The original title of this minor musical was The Professor Steps Out, which indicates the nature of the plot. In something of a change of pace for Powell, he is not a genial dunderhead but a serious minded music professor named Hardwick, who goes to New York to arrange for his symphony to be published. In The Big Apple the poor man is used, abused and confused, and learns that the music business is not run by decent minded academics. 

Professor Hardwick is not equipped to deal with the kind of sharks who run Tin Pan Alley. Part of his problem is that he has been coddled and protected by three maiden aunts who believe him to be a genius. Although far from that he does have some ability with melody, which leads to one of his serious pieces being bowdlerized into a snappy jive song, “Hooray for Spinach,” performed by the slinky Zelda Manion (Ann Sheridan), who is in league with a sleazy publisher. She pursues the professor in order to filch more of his melodies but Linda McKay (Gale Page) falls in love with the sweet natured but thoroughly naive professor. Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer wrote four songs for Naughty But Nice. Ann Sheridan, whose career Warners was building, got two of them and Powell got “I’m Happy About the Whole Thing” and “In a Moment of Weakness,” which he recorded for Decca. Sadly it would be the last of the movie songs that he would record. 

Dick Powell and Joan Blondell had been married four years by the time they made I Want a Divorce and still happy enough to hazard a film with such a title. While the critics had praised Powell for his performance in Christmas in July they didn't make many comments about any real change of image. That came with I Want a Divorce. Variety noted that there was no singing and commented that “he handles the straight role in capable fashion, displaying ability to carry both dramatic and comedy situations required by the characterization.” The Hollywood Reporter was even kinder: “Dick Powell is genuinely amazing as the boy, his work opening up a fresh screen career to him. Here Powell proves beyond question that glorified chorus boy roles are definitely behind him. He realizes expert understanding of the character changes in his role and plays each to the hilt.” He had been waiting a very long time to get a comment like that.

Murder, My Sweet continues to be a much studied and admired film. Its qualities are many but pivotal is the performance of Dick Powell. Always a confident man, he was here able to focus his intelligence as an actor. Never before had he been able to take such command of a characterization. His Philip Marlowe is not an especially likeable man but he is basically decent, “I’m just a small businessman in a very messy business, but I like to follow through on a sale.” 

Much of the effectiveness of Powell’s performance was due to his skill in delivering lines, one of which became a classic, “I caught the blackjack right behind my ear. A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom.” Powell could muster the right tone for cynical dialogue, as when seeing the palatial home of the Grayles, “It was a nice little front yard. Cozy. Okay for the average family. Only you'd need a compass to go to the mailbox.” After this film Dick Powell no longer had to dog anybody to be considered for a good role. He had made the breakthrough. Now they would come to him. Philip Marlowe would be played by other actors, including Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, but there are those who feel that Powell’s Marlowe was the closest to the part as written by Raymond Chandler. 

One of them was Chandler himself, who felt that Murder, My Sweet was the best film adaptation of any of his novels. In his book The Detective in Film (1972), film historian William K. Everson noted: “Purely as a thriller, with a complicated yet logically worked out plot, Marder, My Sweet was near perfect. Powell—because the realistic conception of the private eye was relatively new, and because Powell was totally new to it—became Marlowe far more easily than Bogart, who had several other competing images against him: the gangster image, Sam Spade, Rick from Casablanca. Powell tossed off the tired, contemptuous, yet biting Raymond Chandler wisecracks and insults with superbly underplayed style.”

Powell’s emergence as a director and producer was closely tied to the legendary eccentric Howard Hughes when he took over RKO as owner and manager in 1948. The studio’s financial affairs were then in disarray and the assumption was he had acquired RKO as a tax write-off. This proved not to be the case. Production picked up and for a while it seemed as if Hughes would become a movie tycoon, albeit one with highly unusual business practices. Hughes’ office was not at RKO but at the Goldwyn Studios and it is said that he set foot on the RKO lot only once and getting an appointment with him was virtually impossible. RKO functioned as if it had a ghost boss. 

However, Hughes appeared to like Powell and gave his approval when producer Edmund Grainger suggested that he be hired to direct Split Second. Hughes’ respect for Powell increased when he found that Powell was not cashing any of the checks paid to him in the period of pre-production. Hughes called and wanted to know what was wrong. Said Powell, “I told him that the script was being altered without my having any say in the matter. Hughes asked for my ideas and immediately phoned the writer to work directly with me. Then I cashed my checks. The movie was a hit and Hughes started cultivating me.” 

Dick Powell considered many other projects for Twentieth Century-Fox but none materialized. In 1960 he asked that his contract with them be terminated. It was obvious to Fox and to everybody else that Four Star Television had burgeoned into a major production company and Powell was the man who ran it. It was a matter of too much to do and too little time. He had directed five films, while also producing four of them. Split Second and The Enemy Below deserve special mention as very fine pieces of work. He was never pretentious about anything he did and about his work as a director he made no lofty claims. “I do the best I can with the type of material I am able to get. I have no illusions about joining the company of William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Henry Koster, Elia Kazan, Carol Reed or John Ford. I admire all these filmmakers for the honesty with which they attempt to do their pictures.” Still, it is interesting to wonder how good a track record Dick Powell might have had as a director had he been not so busy. 

Ronald Reagan became friendly with Dick Powell soon after he arrived at Warners in 1937. He played an announcer in the film Hollywood Hotel and afterwards played supporting roles in three other Powell pictures. Recalls Reagan, “On Hollywood Hotel, Dick was the star and I had only two lines, but he couldn’t have been nicer. Easily and smoothly he put me at ease. I was one of thousands who were drawn to this very kind man, and who would think of him as a best friend. He always seemed to feel such genuine pleasure at seeing you. Sometimes our paths took us in different directions and months would pass without our seeing each other. Still in these later years, when we did meet again, it would be as if no interruption had occurred. I cannot recall Dick ever saying an unkind word about anyone.” 

Four Star Productions blossomed in the late Fifties, taking over the Republic Pictures lot in Studio City. It quickly became known as a place that gave fresh talent a break. Powell said at the time: “I know what a tough time I had realizing my ambitions, so I’m giving everybody a chance to make money and do what other shows won’t let them do. I’ve been able to sign the best writers and actors in the business because I’m not following the greed principle of the other producers. The actors are coming into my fold because I’m offering them all rights outside of the United States in the shows in which they appear for me. And I’m giving the writers every financial break.” One of the young producers in whom he put his trust was Stanley Kallis: “I was hired as an associate producer for The Law and Mr. Jones and at the end of the first season, we didn’t know if we would be picked up. Dick came to me and told me: ‘I’d like you to stay here. I don’t have anything for you at the moment but I’ll find something.’ I was amazed. This is not the usual way of doing things in Hollywood. I’d been striving to find a niche in this business and he gave it to me. Dick was a very generous man. 

There was a decency about him that is unfortunately rare in this business. He was a ‘no nonsense’ character. He had a genius for business but he did it with charm. Dick was a gentleman. I’d have done anything for this man.” According to Kallis, Powell was also a man of vision. “One evening in his office he showed me some plans he  had drawn up for a future concept of the studio. He always had a keen regard for real estate and he thought the old idea of sound stages covering acres of ground was a waste. His concept was to build new sound stages one on top of the other, to stack them and thereby leave the cleared ground for location use or other buildings. There’s no telling how far he would have gone had he lived.”

Someone who had a good idea of where Powell wanted to go was June Allyson, who always referred to her husband as Richard. Allyson said: “Richard’s wheeling and dealing in TV boggled my mind. At one point Four Star was buying the stock ownership of Marterto Productions, which owned, among other things, ninety episodes of Make Room For Daddy. It would cost us $1,800,000. Time magazine called Richard ‘one of the major, and sharpest, businessmen in U.S. television.’ Richard's favorite phrase was, ‘Nobody loses, everybody wins.’” About Dick's investments, June sometimes complained: "No sooner would I get used to one house than Richard would move us to another—this time to Bel Air. But I loved English Tudor. And I told him "I love this house. I’ll never move. Never." He grabbed me and mashed the hysterics out of me in a big rough bear hug that ultimately turned into a long evening of lovemaking. The next day I sputtered all the way to Bel Air, grumbling about being thrown out of my house and deaf to his lecture on real estate values and the art of doubling your investment. He turned it into a most impressive estate on Copa de Oro."

MGM intended to star Dick and June as the married couple honeymooning in The Long, Long Trailer (1954) based on a best-selling book. Then when I Love Lucy became a sensation, the studio offered Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz the property. June wasn't happy about it, and Dick Powell never made another film, choosing to concentrate on TV productions. Powell justified all the long hours and the many periods away from home by affirming it as his plan for the future—to turn Four Star into a major film studio, one that would rival MGM. The plans were admirable, but the strain on his marriage was severe. He arose at six, conducted business by phone during breakfast and often put in sixteen-hour days, in addition to the constant trips out of town. 

June Allyson complained: “Where was Richard? He was late. He was sorry but he wouldn’t be home early enough, so we'd just go ahead and have dinner without him.” Aside from the fact that they were genuinely in love and attached to each other, the Powell-Allyson marriage was regarded by some friends as a strange one. And in fact they were different kinds of people. He was confident and reserved, she was volatile and emotional. An industry insider once described them as "an oak tree paired with a butterfly." Despite of various rumors echoed by the press, the reality was simple: Dick Powell never really changed despite of his stardom. His views towards his marriage were based on mutual respect, love and family. Despite some obstacles thrown upon Powell and Allyson typical of their Hollywood milieu, it's been difficult to prove infidelity on either side. Powell belongs in that rare category of the consummate Hollywood artist who was also a basically decent man (in the same league of Fred MacMurray or James Stewart). —The Dick Powell Story (Riverwood Press, 1993) by Tony Thomas

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Monster: Ed Gein

Horror is derived, ultimately, from the unknown. Ultimately, the core of fear is that something will somehow harm you. Harm may lead to death, which leads to the unknown--fear is possible because in the depths of our minds, we're all agnostics. God takes away the uncertainty behind death, and thus, the terror it inspires. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre succeeds at being the finest expression of horror on film because it takes the concept of uncertainty as the source of fear and suggests that if there were no uncertainty, we would still be horrified. It removes the comfort of an afterlife not by delving into the supernatural, but by peeling the veneer of normalcy off reality. 

The film is drenched in a post-Vietnam sense of irony and disillusionment, declaring itself a true story or revelation, which instantly crafts a sense of mythology around it. From the old man at the cemetery rasping that there's things they don't tell you about, things he's seen, to the radio broadcasts describing (an obvious series of lies) that the local sheriff has pinned the grave robberies on international jewel thieves, the film underlines the fact that the truth about the world is not only hidden but it's horrible. It also suggests, especially with its characterization of the unseen sheriff, that these lies are intentional and constructed to control the populace. The five youngsters' world is still holding on to Leave It to Beaver; their neighbors are still friendly and helpful. It has been suggested the film anticipated the death of the American Dream and the dissolution of the nuclear family.

These youngsters cannot conceive a world where Leatherface exists, no matter how grim the news reports. So Kirk, Pam, and Jerry, in the space of about 15 minutes, walk to their bloody dooms. Sally's terror is the terror of anyone faced with the dismantling of their illusions. The hypocrisy is shown casually when the cook says he can't take watching the cruelty, but when Grandpa tries it [sorta], he cheers it. Sally, as her horrorscope suggests, is awakened, and is thus able to react to the events before her, whereas her friends all died before they could process it. The only time the score and the sounds come together is to emphasize disorientation and terror, in the single greatest scene in horror movie history: the dinner table scene. Even if she survives, she will be scarred emotionally, mentally, and metaphysically. This is as much a metaphor for America as it is PTSD in its significant change. As dawn comes, it shifts from a misty white (like emerging from the clouds of the afterlife) to the summer gold flare as Leatherface does his infamous dance of frustration. 

This is Hooper's true masterpiece. From the moment Sally enters the dining room until she breaks free, everything is composed for the utmost agony. The characterization going on here is chaotic. The hitchhiker snarls and scorns the old man, who insists he doesn't like the cruelty. Leatherface has donned his 50s matronly garb, jarringly discordant with the idyllic domesticity it evokes. Grandpa rests there like a mummy, encased in hard human leather. Marilyn Burns gives one of the most intense performances in horror history, her eyes doing the work of a million lines of dialogue. Hooper zooms into them, lingering on the veins and irises, watching them twitch (and reinforcing his themes of seeing what's truly there), and Burns, drenched in sweat, writhes. It's here that hypocrisies are laid bare, where any vestige of mundanity is scored away by burning light, where the cow stops being meat and becomes a person, where the uncertain becomes certain, and that certainty is a godless, empty void of suffering.  Hooper's sense of irony and understanding of hypocrisy is crystal clear in that moment. —Review by Sally Jane Black. Source: letterboxd.com

Sally (Marilyn Burns) is the Final Girl of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Within this horrific tale ("You'd probably like it if you didn't know what was in it") Sally is regarded as a hero and not simply as a heroine. Classically the heroine was saved by the male and the hero endured the hardships that follow in conventional horror films. Yet Sally is the only survivor of her group and has endured the hardships of a ruined society to literally laugh in the face of her iconic assailant. Carol Jeanne Clover (teacher of American Film at the University of California, Berkeley) states that even if often predominantly male, the audience is able to engage and identify with the Final Girl due to the fact that “the threat function and the victim function coexist in the same unconscious, regardless of anatomical sex.” 

Therefore it is for this reason that the audience, male or not, is able to sympathize with Sally and identify with her anguish and then to her rise to power. Linda Williams (“Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”) similarly states that ‘Not only does this dinner scene provoke a visceral reaction from the audience but the viewer more intensely sympathizes with the femininity of the character. During multiple points within this scene, the audience is given the perspective of Sally who is strapped to a chair. 

The fact that she escapes her assailants and laughs in the wounded face of Leatherface demonstrates her new found empowerment and reaffirms her sexuality. The Final Girl must subvert the patriarchal Texan society which is represented by the all male family that is impotent, perverse and gender confused.' Power is for this reason ushered away from the family and given to Sally. Therefore, the film allows the audience to identify with the Final Girl and celebrate her triumph over the killer. As much as “Psycho” or “The Exorcist,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” created a mythology of horror, one that feels even more resonant today than it did 50 years ago. 

“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” channeled the descent of the American spirit that we can now feel all around us. In the end, what the film revels in with such disturbing atmosphere, and what makes it more indelible and haunting than any other horror film, is its image of madness as the driving energy of the world: Leatherface, swinging his chain saw around in front of the rising sun, his crazed dance of death not just a ritual but a warning—that the center will not hold. That something incredibly wicked will come soon. Source: variety.com

Co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, The Ed Gein Story picks up in 1950s rural Wisconsin, and follows the titular monster — known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul — and tells the tale of his perverse crimes, which would go on to inspire the onscreen horrors seen in Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Charlie Hunnam previously admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he doesn't "really like the horror genre or dark, bleak stories," and so the role was always "kind of a strange choice" for him. Hunnam was "truly gobsmacked" when Murphy asked him to play Gein during a two-hour dinner conversation. Of the episodes, Hunnam said, "I never felt like we were sensationalizing it. I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact. It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could."

And, he hopes that means viewers are left looking inward after watching. “Is it Ed Gein who was abused and left in isolation and suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and that manifested in some pretty horrendous ways? Or was the monster the legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it to make entertainment and darken the American psyche in the process?” he told the outlet. "Is Ed Gein the monster of this show, or is Hitchcock the monster of the show? Or are we the monster of the show because we’re watching it?” Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood by William J. Mann

Red Sheet by James Ellroy (2026): "It’s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The U.S. prevailed. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from domestic Communist Party members embedded in L.A. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job. Freddy Otash is named lead investigator. He encounters commie malfeasance at every turn. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There’s a murder on Halloween night. It links to ex-VP and gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and possibly two homicides eight years back. Now Freddy is working double duty: he’s commanding the probe and is hired to keep Nixon out of trouble. Meanwhile, integrationist fever is sweeping L.A. and the police department comes under its fire. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for city council and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride. And the long-forgotten but still-stunning folk singer Judy Henske is on a collision course with the love of her life, the freewheeling Freddy O." Source: amazon.com

Mystery writer Megan Abbott has already proclaimed Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood (2026) the best book she has read on the Black Dahlia case, evidently not pausing to consider just how low the bar is on this subject, given the dismal quality of the aforementioned books, plus John Gilmore’s Severed (1994), Janice Knowlton’s Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer (1995) and Don Wolfe’s Black Dahlia Files (2006), a work so fraudulent that it earned the author a lifetime ban by the district attorney’s office. Mining the well-traversed district attorney’s files in the Black Dahlia case, augmented with FBI reports, news accounts, public records, and occasional interviews with less-informed descendants of the main figures, Mann has amassed the ponderous resources for what could have been a strong book. Mann sets out with two laudable goals: To strip away the numerous myths surrounding Elizabeth Short, and to eschew any attempt to solve the case, which he views as hubris. Mann’s depiction of Elizabeth Short plunked down in Hollywood as Tom Sawyer in ankle-strap shoes brings us no closer to her. The book speculates wildly on one of the usual suspects in a far-fetched solution, then attempts to recant with a “never mind.” Elizabeth Short, the enigmatic victim of the murder, crossed paths with hundreds of random people during her brief time in Hollywood in the summer and fall of 1946. Instead of being the Black Dahlia, who went on hundreds of dates, Elizabeth Short was the woman who went on one date hundreds of times, a carefully scripted encounter with a parade of presentable men who were a safe escort. All but one, apparently. Source: ladailymirror.com

Jon Hamm (Your Friends & Neighbors-Neo Noir), Dick Powell (Pitfall-Classic Noir)

"Your Friends and Neighbors" is a 2025 Apple TV+ series, categorized as a neo-noir drama, starring Jon Hamm as a disgraced hedge fund manager who resorts to robbing his wealthy neighbors in the affluent Vestment Village. He discovers that the secrets hidden within these seemingly perfect lives are more dangerous than he anticipated. The show features a cool noir aesthetic, with a jaded voiceover that provides commentary on the unfolding events. The series adopts a noir aesthetic, drawing inspiration from classic 1940s noir films, complete with a detached and cynical voiceover, according to the show's creator, Jonathan Tropper. In the prologue, Coop trips and stumbles into a pool (referencing Sunset Boulevard), saying: "I know what you're thinking: the pool is a metaphor. I wasn't the kind of guy who woke up on the floor of someone else's house covering the dead guy's blood before falling into the pool, but here we are. And at that moment, I couldn't help but catch a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eyes of the swirling hot mess of my life, and wonder how the hell everything could go so wrong so fast." Source: movieweb.com

In Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948), John Forbes’s (Dick Powell) angst results from his disillusionment with postwar society and discontentment with the apathy in 1950s’ American suburbia. “You are John Forbes, Average American, backbone of the country,” his wife emphatically states to his exhausted husband. In "Pitfall" Powell reinvents his screen persona playing a distinctly disreputable businessman who puts his career, his family and eventually his own life on the line after getting a midlife sweet tooth for Lizabeth Scott. De Toth said: “Life is often a betrayal. And sometimes you betray yourself too. Let’s have the guts to admit it. There isn’t anybody here who didn’t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life.” Miss Scott burnished her noir chops as a loan out from Hal Wallis who had her under contact. 

It is one of her favorite pictures and arguably the best performance of her film career. Lizabeth Scott had very positive recollections about 'Pitfall': "The whole experience of making Pitfall was delicious! Dick Powell was so gracious and kind. His attitude inspired me. He was a pleasure to work with. People asks me who is the greatest talent in Hollywood. And I say Dick Powell! I love him. He's just like a big, woolly bear. And June Allyson is very nice. I think of them as the perfect family. I met them in a Hedda Hopper's party, and Dick Powell complained to Hedda "it doesn't matter how many times I tell June I love her, it's never enough!" 

When Lizabett Scott was loaned for Pitfall (1948), she was guaranteed a minimum of $75,000. Although Pitfall now ranks as classic noir (Bertrand Tavernier considers it one of the genre's masterpieces), producer Hal B. Wallis could not have known that in 1948; he simply believed that Lizabeth appearing opposite Dick Powell, who showed his macho side in Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945), was right for a story about a woman who ensnares a respectable married man in a web of deception and murder, from which he emerges repentant but not exactly on the best of terms with his sexless wife (Jane Wyatt). Pitfall (1948), directed by Andre de Toth, is a caustic examination of the American dream, chiefly because its subject is the post-war nuclear family, amidst factories such as Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. —"Lizabeth Scott: Noir's Quicksilver Anti-Heroine" by Anastasia Lin (2010)