Massacre on Walton's Mountain

This is a short paper I did for Cult Films. We watched The Waltons religiously in my house as a kid. My dad was born and raised just north of the area where the show takes place, Nelson County Virginia.I got an A on the paper, the professor has a sense of humor.

In the early years of the 1970’s, television and film viewers were being inundated with conflicting imagery that ran a spectrum from simplistic morality to violent depravity. During these years no television show exemplified ideas about morality and family values in the 1970s more than The Waltons. The show, set in depression era rural Virginia, is told through eyes of John Walton, better known as John Boy. The stories are short morality plays about how the togetherness of family is the balm of life and that by giving, one will surely receive. In sharp contrast to The Waltons is the 1974 Tobe Hooper movie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If this film is used as an example of the other end of the spectrum from the morality of The Waltons we can get a clear idea of how diverse the depictions of families were in the 1970’s.
Remarkably, there are some similarities between the Waltons and the family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both are victims of hard times, the Waltons are struggling through the depression while the Leatherfaces are victims of the automation of the meatpacking industry. Both live in rural southern areas and make their living from the use of power saws; John Walton owns a backyard lumber mill; Leatherface owns a chainsaw and half a gallon of unleaded. Both families place a high priority on the nightly ritual of gathering around the dinner table and discussing family matters. And both families have a great reverence toward the patriarchal grand paw figure with Grand Paw Walton being given the head of the table and Grand Paw Leatherface being given the honors of bashing in a dinner guest’s skull.
The similarities meet a divergence however when the families play out their motivations. The Walton’s, always using morality as a roadmap, might make every effort to help a wayward stranger, while the Leatherfaces, erring to the side of depravity, might make every effort to eat a wayward stranger. At the Waltons, a visitor might be treated to an extra slice of Grandma’s famous sponge cake, while at the Leatherface’s a visitor might be treated to her boyfriend’s barbequed spleen. The Walton family might spend an evening tramping through the woods in order to chop down the perfect Christmas tree, while the Leatherfaces might tramp through the woods to chop up a wheel chair bound whiney guy.
However dissimilar the two productions are, both The Waltons and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre represent a fantasy image of the American family. While it is hard to imagine the perfection in which the Waltons adhere to their principles, it is equally difficult to imagine the complete depravity of the family depicted in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Considering the middle ground might give us a better idea of what the reality of family life in the 1970s translated to: that families are weird and imperfect. Whatever the case, there is one more similarity between The Waltons and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Whether it be from the saccharine morals careening off of Walton’s Mountain, or the splattering blood and incessant buzzing coming from the Texas wasteland, a viewer may end the viewing of each production feeling more than a little nauseous.