1973 and the American horror film: Political futurity in The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Abstract

This article argues that two classic films made in 1973, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, both anticipate and give nightmarish form to an underlying political shift that historians often originate at exactly the same moment: the advent of the neo-liberal/neo-conservative order that would come to define American life for at least the next 40 years. Rather than seeing these films as centred on ancient demons or obsolete workers, this essay reverses the standard ‘Gothic temporality’ of the past’s persistence and positions the horror film as, instead, a form of speculative fiction; not a registration of history’s traumatic aftermath but a barometer of the emerging political future.