Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - “Leatherface” from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

When The Texas Chain Saw Massacre debuted in 1974, audiences had a visceral experience so frightening, many believed what they witnessed was real. Its main villain, Leatherface, slaughtered innocent youths and wore their skin for pleasure. This depiction of violence seemed surreal, but echoed the real-life crimes of a man who inspired some of Hollywood’s most infamous characters: Ed Gein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Due to the graphic nature of this episode, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder, mutilation, and torture. We advise extreme caution for children under 13. It was the holiday season of 1972, but Toby Hooper was feeling anything but festive. He stood in a daze at Austin's Capitol Plaza, as hordes of frantic shoppers bustled past him. The place was packed to the gills. Toby wanted nothing more than to turn right back around. and drive home, but he had to get his Christmas shopping done sometime.

Bracing himself, he headed into Montgomery Ward, a department store that had everything. If he was smart about it, he could be out of there in no time. But inside the store, his heart sank. The crowd was awful, jamming up every walkway, making it hard to even see where he should be going. There were throngs of people blocking every display. He was starting to get a headache from the fluorescent lighting, and he could feel feel every muscle in his body tensing from frustration. Finally, he sought refuge in a quieter corner of the store, the hardware department.

Unsurprisingly, not a lot of people were buying power tools for their loved ones this Christmas. As he caught his breath, Toby found himself staring at a display rack of chainsaws, and a disturbing thought entered his mind. I know a way I could get through this crowd really quickly. Hi, I'm Greg Poulson. Welcome back to our special serial killers Halloween series, where we're delving into the stories behind classic horror movies. I'm here with my co-host, Vanessa Richardson.

Hi, everyone. You can find episodes of serial killers and all other Spotify originals from Parcast for free on Spotify. So far, we've discussed Scream's Ghostface and Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. Iconic villains whose most terrifying attributes are based on all two real killers. These monsters and the movies they started in reshaped and redefined what audiences expected from a horror movie in the 90s and beyond. Today we're focusing on a movie that broke new ground for the genre two decades earlier. Released in 1974, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre stunned audiences with its savage portrayal of senseless violence, tapping into a feeling of dread and fear that had gripped America during that era.

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Find yours at Target today. Shot on a shoestring budget under a blazing sign. the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is widely considered to be the first true slasher movie. These days, its storyline feels familiar. A group of unsuspecting young people are slaughtered one by one by a masked murderer. But just as the plot was a revolutionary introduction to the genre, the execution of the film is jarringly unique. Even by the standards of horror, the movie is an extraordinarily tough watch.

There's no tongue-in-cheek meta-commentary on the genre like in Scream, and no heroic investigative storyline like in The Silence of the Lambs, there's no pressure release valve for the audience whatsoever. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is, by design, a relentless nightmare. In order to understand that tonal choice, we have to look at the cultural context in which it was made, and that's complicated. Because the late 1960s have often been referred to as an era in which America unraveled.

1968 saw the assassinations of two beloved leaders within months of each other, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. America's controversial involvement in the Vietnam War had also led to widespread protests across the nation, as well as clashes between demonstrators and police that often turned deadly. And then there was Watergate. In June of 1972, five burglars were arrested after breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, in D.C. Authorities traced the break-in back to the re-election campaign for then-president Richard Nixon, sparking a political scandal. So as 1972 neared its end, a growing sense of suspicion and paranoia was swirling. Between the assassinations, the protests, and the bloodshed in Vietnam, violence felt uncomfortably close at all times. And now, people felt that institutions could no

longer be trusted, that the America they'd once known was crumbling. All this was simmering in the back of writer-director Toby Hooper's mind that December, as he tried to get his Christmas shopping finished, but the packed mall felt unbearably chaotic, reflecting his feelings about the country at large. Hemmed in by a crowd, Hooper's eye fell on a display rack of chainsaws inside a department store, and a bizarre, vicious thought sprung into his mind. For a split second, he imagined grabbing one of the tools and slicing his way,

through the crowd. Hooper was not a violent person. He was nowhere close to actually acting on this impulse. And yet it came to him so vividly, so easily that he was alarmed. Before we continue with the psychology for this episode, please keep in mind that neither Vanessa nor myself are licensed psychologists or psychiatrist, but we've done a lot of research for this show. Thanks, Greg.

What Hooper felt just then sounds like an example of a phenomenon known as the call of the void. You've probably experienced it yourself. Walking along a cliff or perhaps a bridge, it suddenly occurs to you how easy it would be to just step off the edge. Or sitting at an intersection, you wonder what it would be like to steer head first into oncoming traffic. These thoughts are usually brief, completely out of character, and involve physical danger. In most cases, there are nothing to be concerned about. A 2012 study showed that there was a clear difference between imagining jumping off a bridge or doing something similarly dangerous and actually acting on that impulse.

The researchers hypothesized that the call of the void was actually a misinterpreted safety signal and part of our natural survival instinct. In other words, it's the brain's way of encouraging a person to move away from danger, which gets warped by an anxious or overactive mind. So perhaps Hooper's violent urge was a muddled panic response to the crowds at the mall. In any case, he did not go on a chainsaw rampage through Montgomery Ward that day. Instead, he drove himself home, turning the moment over and over in his head. An idea had suddenly come to him the opening of his next screenplay.

A story that would tap into the sense of overwhelming rage he'd felt in that department store, and more broadly into the chaos and lawlessness that he saw beneath the surface of polite society. Something about his experience at the department store had sparked an idea that would become the most influential movie of his career. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre begins with a simple sequence that establishes a world in chaos. Over the opening credits, we hear a radio news broadcast, describing a series of disturbing and inexplicable incidents from across the country. An outbreak of violence sparked by a suicide. A high-rise building collapsed, a slew of graves being death. We're not the only ones listening. The radio is playing inside a van where a group of free-spirited teenagers are setting out on a road trip. And that last headline turns out to be a key inciting event.

17-year-old Sally Hardesty and her brother Franklin decide to investigate if their grandfather's grave may have been vandalized. They're accompanied by three friends, none of who seemed phased by the morbid task at hand. Along their way, the group picks up a hitchhiker because they're, kids of the 1960s and don't consider the risk. The stranger is clearly unstable and soon gets violent, so the group kicks him out of the van. Though they're rattled, they shrug it off. But things keep getting creepier and creepier as they venture further out into the Texas wilderness.

They stop at a gas station, only to discover that the pumps are all dry. By the time they reach their destination, an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, the sense of doom is overwhelming. At least it is for the audience. The kids themselves are blissfully unaware of what's coming. What follows became a blueprint for hundreds of teen slasher movies to come.

When the group decides to visit the Hardesty's old rural homestead in the Texas backwoods, they inadvertently stumble right into the clutches of a family of cannibalistic butchers who see them as nothing more than cattle for the slaughter. Over the course of a grueling hour of screen time, The group are brutally murdered one by one by the Farrell Sawyer clan, led by chainsaw-wielding maniac, known as Leather Phase. And though these villains are mercifully fictional, but filmmakers don't present them that way, which only adds to the terror. When the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released in 1974, a lot of horrified audience members came away with the impression that it was based on real events. An opening narration sets the movie up as a docu-drama, re-enacting,

quote, one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history. This was, to use a modern political phrase, fake news. By kicking off with a deliberately misleading but official-sounding prologue, Hooper was evoking the public's growing suspicion of institutions, and specifically the way the government had lied to the public about both Vietnam and Watergate. That opening wasn't entirely untrue, however. While the story of the movie is fictional, the character of leatherface was loosely inspired by real events.

Though he's now one of the most indelible parts of the movie, Leatherface didn't come to Hooper right away. In fact, he and his co-writer Kim Hinkle initially imagined that the villain would be something more supernatural, trolls living under a bridge, luring unsuspecting motorists to their doom in a twisted reimagining of the Hansel and Gretel story. But that idea felt too otherworldly for a movie that was essentially about human evil. So instead, Hooper and Henkel started talking about. talking about what a more grounded villain could look like.

During one of their late-night brainstorms, Hooper recalled a story he'd heard from a doctor. As a pre-med student, the doctor had snuck into the morgue and skinned one of the cadavers that the students were studying. He'd used the skin to make himself a mask, which he'd created for Halloween. This sinister anecdote became the basis for the character of Leather Face, who's named after the collection of human skin masks he wears throughout the movie. He has a different mask for every mood and swaps between them as easily as pairs of shoes. Gunner Hansen, the actor who played Leatherface, prepared for his role by visiting a psychiatric ward in Austin on several occasions. He studied the behavior of patients there, trying to pin down the right mannerisms to give his character depth.

Leatherface never speaks a single word throughout the movie. He's limited to screeches and grunts, behaving more like a rabid animal than a man. The movie has no interest in trying to diagnose him. He's a symbol of pure anarchy and madness, as are his family members. For this reason, psychology fans may find the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of frustrating watch. There's a deliberate lack of depth in its villains. They aren't there to be understood or analyzed. But that won't stop us from trying.

And while Leatherface may not have a backstory for us to delve into in this film, the man who inspired him most certainly. In a moment, we'll meet the closest thing to a real-life leather face. The floorboards creak. The walls, they moan. The house seems vacant, but you're not alone. This October, Parcast invites you to celebrate the spookiness of the Halloween season with all new episodes of haunted places.

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Now back to the story. The Texas chainsaw massacre aims to disorient from its very first shot. Against dissonant, unsettling music, we catch glimpses of something horrifying. interspersed with black, these disjointed shots are so brief that it takes a while for us to piece together what we're seeing. It's a rotting corpse being exhumed from the ground. As this unsettling scene plays out, a radio broadcast begins. The newscaster describes a grave-robbing spree that's baffling Texas authorities, in which bodies are dug up and posed as crude monuments.

The camera pulls back further to reveal one of these grisly sculptures, made out of multiple corpses. This grave-robbing mention is directly inspired by the grisly crimes of Ed Gein, a sheltered farm boy with a penchant for dead things. It's not clear exactly where that fascination came from, but we can find some clues in Gein's early life. He was born in 1906 in the city of La Crosse, Wisconsin, but grew up in an isolated farmhouse a hundred miles east. There, he and his older brother Henry had no escape from their parents.

Their father, George, was an alcoholic who, to hold down regular work. Their mother, Augusta, was a domineering religious zealot, who raised her sons to believe that the outside world was a hotbed of sin and immorality. She punished her sons if they attempted to make any friends, and refused to let them leave the house except to attend school. More than anything else, she warned them away from women, who she believed were all instruments of the devil.

There is notably no maternal figure in the all-ma-man-lawful. male Sawyer family. So Augusta doesn't seem to have directly inspired any part of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But she does represent a scary movie archetype, a puritanical fanatic whose terrifying abuse of her child ultimately drives them to violence. For horror fans, this description instantly calls to mind Margaret White, the mother of the protagonist in Stephen King's novel Carrie, which, coincidentally enough came out the same year as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As we discussed Back in our Scream episode, bad mothering is often blamed for violent crime, both in pop culture and in the stories of real serial killers.

But Gein's case was a little different from most, in that he was devoted to his mother despite her abuse. In fact, he couldn't imagine being apart from her. Though it seems counterintuitive, it's not uncommon for an abused child to cling to their abusive parent. Animal studies have shown that the attachment process between a mother and her child is so strong that it can override the child's self-preservation instinct. The most famous and upsetting example of this

is probably Harry Harlow's studies on attachment using baby monkeys during the 1950s and 60s. Harlow discovered that the monkeys formed a strong attachment to a surrogate mother made out of soft hairy cloth. Given a choice between this comforting mother which provided no food and a wire mother which did, they consistently chose comfort over food. Harlow later decided to test how that bond

was impacted by abuse. In one study, he found that the monkeys would continue holding on to their comforting cloth mother, even when she unleashed an unpleasant blast of air in their direction. Later studies produced similar results, indicating that a bonded child will cling to their caregiver in spite of abuse. Gein loved his mother so much that he didn't question her orders, and he certainly didn't think of leaving home. Ed Gein left school after the eighth grade.

It's unclear if he worked much after that. What we do know is that in 1940, when Gein was 33, his father died of heart failure. At this point, the two brothers took over running the farm, but their relationship was tense. Unlike his younger brother, Henry did have a life outside of the family home and had started dating a local woman. Henry was concerned about Gein's intense closeness with her mother and never missed an opportunity to make fun of him for it. This infuriated Gein, who was incredibly defensive of Augusta. After a few years, the Gein family was dealt another blow. In 1944, Henry and Gein were out burning brush on the farm.

The fire seemingly raged out of control and consumed Henry. However, evidence later showed that Henry had already been dead before the fire started and seemed to have bruises on his head. Although this was never proven, some speculated that Gein was actually responsible for his brother's death. After all, once Henry was dead, Gien had his beloved mother all to himself. But not for long, just a year later, Augusta also died from a stroke. Having lost his entire family within five years, Gine was totally adrift.

Life at the farmhouse was all he'd ever known. And so, with no idea what else to do, he stayed on the farm by himself. Gein's insular life on the farm was a major influence on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and cultural critics seized on that theme. In its 2019 book, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Film That Terrified a Rattled Nation, Pop Culture writer Joseph Lanzah, writes that, The film casts an eerie reflection on what Jimmy Carter would later call

America's Crisis of Confidence. Specifically, this refers to a kind of economic anxiety which remains prevalent to this day. Early in the movie, it's established that the slaughterhouse in town has laid off workers, forcing most of the locals to move elsewhere. Lanzin noted that the Sawyers represent, quote, the working and middle classes who started to feel the sting of falling from their post-World War II ascension and seeing their American dream disemboweled.

But at least the Sawyer family have each other. In contrast, Gain was now completely alone, with no sense of how to navigate life. And in any case, his mom had raised him to see the outside world as hostile and full of evil temptation. Unsurprisingly, his mental health started to deteriorate. He kept Augusta's room spotlessly clean and perfectly preserved from the day she died, but he let the rest of the house fall into disarray and stopped taking care of the farm.

This is central to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the image of a crumbling, abandoned homestead where madness and mayhem hides. Our unsuspecting young heroes seal. their own fates by venturing inside the seemingly empty farmhouse with no idea it's about to become their mass grave. But unlike Leatherface, Gein wasn't entirely cut off from the outside world. He was able to find work as a handyman and even as a babysitter. If parents were willing to trust him with their children, Gein must have developed a pretty

convincing mask of normalcy. He was certainly shy and did have a reputation for being odd, but most locals could have a considered him harmless. But Gien was developing some strange interests. He spent his spare time reading about Nazi medical experiments and books about human anatomy. He fixated on the idea of seeing a dead body. Over the next decade, Gine dug up multiple corpses. According to his own account, he visited three different cemeteries and dug up a total

of nine separate graves. Sometimes he took an entire body, other times just parts. It's not clear if any of these incidents were investigated or even noticed. Unlike the grave-robbing spree that makes the headlines and the Texas chainsaw massacre, Gein's crimes were spread over a large period of time and several different cemeteries. As a result, it seems nobody suspected that a single person might be responsible. That left Gein free to do whatever he wanted with the spoils of his robberies. Sometimes it was just enough to have them nearby.

Dead bodies thrilled him. And so, despite their awful smell, he kept them inside the farmhouse with him. Gein has often been referred to as a textbook necrophile, but it's not clear that this is accurate. Necrophilia is a parapheria where a person is sexually attracted to corpses or gets sexual gratification from having intercourse with them. Gein claimed that he never had sex with the bodies he'd stolen, and whether or not he was attracted to them is unclear. But in lieu of sex, Gein still found ways to make use of them. He made bowls out of bones and lambshades out of skin. He shrank down human heads and turned them into decorative pieces which he placed on his bedposts.

That way, they could watch him sleep. He also began working on a body suit made from human skin. This was a direct inspiration for leather face and his array of masks made from the skin of his victims. Just like Buffalo Bill and The Silence of the Lambs, Leatherface doesn't see his victims as human beings at all, merely as physical matter that he can use. This dehumanization is central to what makes both movies so horrifying. It's possible that Leatherface and his family started out as grave robbers before advancing to killing. Perhaps, just like Gein, they realized that digging up bodies didn't produce the best results. Because of the natural process of decomposition,

Gein discovered that the skin of the bodies he stole was hard and brittle. That wasn't going to work for his suit sewing purposes. And so in 1954, he honed in on his first living victim. Mary Hogan ran a tavern in the center of town. One night, after all the other patrons had left, he shot her. After making sure that Mary was dead, Gien put her body on a sled and dragged it back to the farm. There he dismembered her and began the process of removing her skin.

He carefully cut off her face and stored it in a bag. Some sources note that Mary Hogan resembled Augusta, so it's possible Gine planned to use her face as a finishing touch on his woman suit. He missed his mother and probably wanted to feel close to her again. Even so, it was three years before he could. claimed another living victim. But finally, in November of 1957, he was ready. He visited a hardware store owned by Bernice Warden in the town of Plainfield and bought

a gallon of antifreeze. Gein raised his gun and shot Bernice dead. Just as he'd done with Mary, Gein brought Bernice's body back to the farmhouse and began the process of dismembering her. But this time, he hadn't gotten away quite so clean. Bernice's son, Frank, happened to be a deputy sheriff. When he found the hardware store abandoned and bloodstains on the floor, he sprang into action. Frank knew that Gein had been in the store the previous evening, asking about a gallon of antifreeze.

And sure enough, when he looked at the cash register receipts, it showed that the last sale was antifreeze. He alerted the Plainfield police who immediately went to search Gein's farmhouse, and nothing could have prepared them for what they found there. To call the Gein residents a house of horrors is an understatement. It started with the smell, a putrid, overpowering stench of decay, which seemed to permeate every room. Fighting back nausea, the investigators wandered through the house. Inside, they found Gein's macabre collection. Human skulls and organs, bowls and utensils made from bones.

The partially finished skin suit stitched together from multiple. victims. Finally, in the barn, they discovered Bernice's headless body. Gein had hung her from the ceiling by her feet and gutted her from top to toe like the carcass of a deer. There's a horrific moment in the Texas chainsaw massacre which can be taken as an homage to this scene. Leatherface impales his second victim, Pam, on a meat hook. But what makes this scene so horrifying is that Pam is still alive. Gein, for all his monstrosity, seemed to have no interest in torturing any of his victims and killed them as quickly as he could. And that's exactly what he told the police.

After his arrest, Gein confessed to everything. He told them that he'd been using the skin of various victims to create a skin suit, which he wanted to climb inside in order to become his dead mother. The authorities ultimately found the remains of ten separate women inside Gein's property. Most of these remains were from grave robberies. This is where Leatherface's story diverges completely from Geines. There's a striking lack of law enforcement presence in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the Sawyers are never brought to any kind of justice.

Unlike in the Silence of the Lambs, there is no cathartic final act where a plucky investigator shows up to save the day. That lack of traditional authority figures is a crucial part of a bleak nihilism that defines the movie. Out here in the wilderness, the institutions that are supposed to protect us are nowhere to be found. And although 17-year-old Sally Hardesty does manage to escape from the Sawyer House alive, that sense of pure chaos and despair follows her out into the sunlight. She may be alive, but she'll never be free.

Coming up, we'll discuss how Sally set the benchmark for a generation of final girls on screen. Transport your senses with Sol de Janeiro's limited edition perfume mist collection. At Sephora, spritz on lush notes of rainforest orchid and crisp sea breeze with Hefresco Paraiso. Embrace a floral and fruity scent inspired by Rio's nude beach with chiqui bikini. Or caps for sun-kissed bliss with limonada gelada, where zesty Brazilian lemonade accord meets coconut milk and golden brown sugar. Don't miss Sol de Janeiro's limited edition perfume mist collection only at Sephora. This episode is brought to you by Prime. Obsession is in session.

And this summer, Prime originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book-to-screen favorites you've already read twice. Off-campus, every year after, the love hypothesis, Sterling Point, and more. Slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. Now back to the story. After his arrest in 1957, Ed Gein was charged with one count of murder and ultimately confessed to two.

However, while Gein was awaiting trial, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. It's not clear how doctors reached this conclusion. Per the DSM-5, schizophrenia involves symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and catatonia. We don't have evidence that Gein experienced any of these symptoms, but since he spent so much time alone, it's possible that his condition went unnoticed. Either way, Gien was committed to a psychiatric hospital where he was a model patient. According to psychiatry professor Dr. Gail Salts, who was interviewed about Gine by A&E true crime, this is no surprise.

After being raised in such a repressive household, Gine might have found comfort in rules and restrictions. Salts noted that children who grow up in strict authoritarian homes often feel drawn to similar environments as adults. She explained, living under very stringent rules without freedoms and being told what to think and do is very difficult for children. She suggested that when Gein was committed, he may have been able to re-experience and process the trauma of his childhood for the first time, which might explain why his mental health seemed to drastically improve during his time in the hospital. In fact, by 1968, after about 10 years as a psychiatric patient, Gein was declared sane and fit to stand trial.

But the outcome was the same. He was found not guilty of his crimes by reason of insanity and given a life sentence to be served in psychiatric institutions. Sane or otherwise, Gein was off the streets and could no longer hurt anyone. Leatherface, by contrast, is still very much at large at the end of the Texas chainsaw massacre. After a night of torture and terror, a blood-caped and traumatized Sally, throws herself through a glass window and staggers across acres of farmland, pursued by Leatherface and his relatives.

She narrowly gets away on the back of a passing pickup truck, but it's far from the triumphant escape we've come to expect for horror movie heroines. Sally laughs hysterically as she's driven away from the house, watching Leatherface furiously swing his chainsaw in the air in defeat. And that's where we leave her. In another example of the movie's blunt brutality, there's no aftermath sequence where Sally receives medical care or tearfully reunites with her parents. We don't even know for sure if she lives.

It's not until the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 that her fate becomes clear. In the sequel's opening, we learned that Sally did make it back to civilization and said that she had, quote, broken out of a window in hell. Then, after explaining exactly what had happened to her and her friends, Sally sank into catatonia. Catatonia is a blanket term for a group of symptoms that usually involves a lack of movement and speech and can also include unusual postures and agitation. It's historically been associated with schizophrenia and can also occur in other medical conditions.

But although it's often depicted as a reaction to trauma, this link hasn't been clearly proven in real life. Sally is one of the earliest examples of the final girl archetype. But she gets a raw deal in comparison to her successors. She's driven insane by her experience, and the third movie in the franchise reveals that she died in a private health care facility by the time she was 21. This revelation feels like a betrayal of what the final girl is supposed to represent. The trope is beloved because it gives viewers a safe way to process their fears about crime and violence.

No matter what horrific mayhem ensues, you know she'll be okay in the end. According to Carol J. Clover, a film professor at Berkeley, who's written extensively about women in horror, the final girl is a feminist construct designed, quote, to align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the female victim who finally defeats her oppressor. Clover also argues that the final girl is a modern-day equivalent of a fairy tale princess who must use her courage and resourcefulness to defeat evil. But Sally doesn't defeat evil. If anything, it defeats her.

Keep in mind that both sequels were critically panned, and many fans of the original don't consider them part of the canon. If you consider the first movie on its own, then Sally's fate is up to you. You can choose to believe that she was able to overcome her trauma and live a rich and full life, or you can go with the sequel's narrative, where she was mentally destroyed by what she experienced. Both are realistic possibilities. If Sally were a real person, it's like, likely that she'd be left with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, not to mention survivors' guilt.

This isn't an official diagnosis, but a response that usually arises in people who've witnessed the deaths of others in an event that they survived. It can cause intense emotional distress and low self-esteem. A 2020 study at Algonquin College found that 61% of survivors of violent crime experienced a lasting mental health condition afterwards, including PTSD, depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. But most real survivors do not end up catatonic or institutionalized for life. In fact, there's substantial research to suggest that trauma can increase psychological resilience, that is, the ability to bounce back after a crisis and to cope with adversity and uncertainty.

In our last episode, we discussed the... extraordinary story of Josephina Rivera, one of the several women who was kidnapped and held hostage by Gary Hydenick. Thanks to quick-wittedness and courage, Josephina was able to escape, saving not only herself but three other victims. After her ordeal, Josephina gave up both drugs and sex work, which she'd previously relied on for income. She reunited with her estranged sons and sought treatment for her intense PTSD. In 2014, she told the Daily Mirror, For a long time, I was haunted by Heidnick, by the women who died next to me. But not any longer.

I hope I can inspire other victims to feel positive about the future. Josephina's story is an example of what's called post-traumatic growth. Developed during the mid-1990s, this theory suggests that people who struggle psychologically after adversity may ultimately experience positive growth. According to Richard Dideski, one of the psychologists who pioneered this theory, people who survive trauma often develop new understandings of themselves, the world they live in, how to relate to other people, the kind of future they might have,

and a better understanding of how to live life. In most horror films, we don't stay with the final girl long enough to know how her story ends. But most of us want and choose to believe that she's able to overcome the nightmare she lived through. This might be part of why research is increasingly showing that watching scary films can actually improve mental health. Many horror films end with at least one person surviving.

Most horror movies offer a kind of cathartic release that may be especially appealing for fans of true crime, who know a little too much about the real monsters that are out there. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre brutally dramatizes the moral unraveling of a once strong nation. But it also has a clear narrative arc, a somewhat familiar structure, and an ending where the heroine makes a daring escape. In other words, it offers far more closure than real life often does. The movies we've explored in this series present three different theories

of how to cope with the reality of evil in the world. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is designed as a merciless wake-up call to an American public that's been in denial for too long. It takes the viewer by the shoulders and shakes them hard. By translating Ed Geim's crimes into great, gruesome technicolor, it hopes to shock audiences into acknowledging the danger of neglect, of parts of the country being literally left behind. But that kind of shock value became less effective in the years that followed,

as more-and-more-slash-movie villains followed in Leatherface's footsteps. So by the time the silence of the lambs came out in the early 1990s, the message was different. Clarice Starling represents the idea that the best way to combat evil is to try and understand it, to make sense of the evil. incomprehensible. And five years later, Scream expanded on that idea, giving its teenage heroin the knowledge she needs to outsmart her masked torment her.

Sidney Prescott has seen horror, both figuratively and literally. Living through her mother's murder has made her stronger and smarter, and ultimately it gives her the tools she needs to defeat Ghostface. She's the embodiment of post-traumatic growth. Over the years, our expectations have transformed along with the horror genre. Back in the 1970s, Sally survived, but it was questionable if her mind remained intact. Now we want more for our final girls. Sally walked so that Clarice and Sidney could run.

Over the course of this series, we've discussed how the rise of mass murder in the public consciousness is inextricably tied to the evolution of horror movies. But what's interesting is that while actual serial killers have declined significantly, Both scary movies and true crime are more popular than ever. Slasher narratives have been usurped by films that evoke different types of real-life brutality. Systemic racism in Jordan Peel's Get Out, inherited mental illness in Ariasters' hereditary and domestic violence in Lee Wunnell's The Invisible Man, to name a few recent examples. Because no matter what kind of evil we face, horror gives us an irresistible chance to understand.

it better. Thanks again for tuning in to the special Serial Killers Halloween series. We'll be back soon with another episode. You can find all episodes of serial killers and all other Spotify originals from Parcast for free on Spotify. We'll see you next time.

Happy Halloween. Serial Killers is a Spotify original from Parcast, executive produced by Max Cutler. Our head of programming is Julian Bois row. Our supervising sound designer is Russell Nash with Nick Johnson as our header production and Trent Williamson as our senior production specialist. Ben Bishop is our supervising editor

and Derek Jennings is our writing lead. This episode of serial killers was written by Emma Dipton, edited by Joel Callan and Greg Castro, fact-checked by Catherine Barner, research by Brian Petrus and Chelsea Wood, produced by Bruce Gatowicz, and sound design by Michael Motion. Our hosts are Vanessa Richardson

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