The new power duo of Gen Z directors, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, both seem to be influenced by an iconic horror film: Tobe Hooper’s 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Director of the record-shattering Obsession (2026), Barker is directing a reboot of the film for A24, which he plans to make “grounded, brutal, raw.” Kane Parsons, director of the similarly record-shattering Backrooms (2026), does not appear to name Texas Chain Saw Massacre as an influence (see this article in GQ for the most extensive list of the influences he’s recognized), yet he incorporated an extended homage to Hooper’s film into his own, in one of the most interesting scenes of the film.
Backrooms continues Kane Parsons’ (known online as Kane Pixels) series of short YouTube videos, Backrooms. The feature film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who dreams of being an architect but, instead, runs a deserted discount furniture store in a desolate strip mall. He also lives in the store, having lost his house in an acrimonious divorce. After some strange occurrences in the store, at night, Clark discovers the ‘Backrooms’ – beyond and through a wall in the lower level of his store. He starts mapping the Backrooms and eventually gets lost in them, drawing a psychiatrist whom he had been seeing, Mary (Renate Reinsve) into following him. The film then tracks their strange experiences in the Backrooms. By film’s end, it’s unclear if either has escaped.
Mirrored dinner scenes
The scene that echoes Texas Chain Saw Massacre comes relatively late in the film, as both Clark and Mary are wandering the Backrooms. Mary wakes up to find herself duct-taped to a chair, sitting at a kitchen table along with Clark and three strange distorted figures: a bearded man, a woman with red hair wearing a red dress, and a man in a suit seated under a lamp. Backrooms lore (drawing from Parsons’ original YouTube film, “Backrooms Found Footage #3”) describes these figures as “Still Lifes” – “neutral, uncanny entities created by the Backrooms that attempt to replicate humans, resulting in abomination,” according to the Backrooms wiki, “Still Life” [i] A ScreenCrush video review calls the Still Lifes “a mishmash of our own memories corroding into one another” (10:40) The Backrooms wiki goes on to speculate that the man seated on the chair maybe unable to get up, may be fused to the chair. The figures, in short, are not-entirely-human human-like copies that embody the theory Clark offers in the film that everything in the Backrooms is a distorted copy of memories from the outside world.
The dinner scene in Texas Chain Saw Massacre
As it plays out in Backrooms, the dinner scene is almost identical to the dinner scene in Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in which Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), having been knocked out by the gas station attendant – the ‘Cook’ – after she tried to seek help, wakes up tied to a dinner table, surrounded by three men (the Cook, Hitchhiker and Leatherface) and soon to be joined by ‘Grandpa.’ Both Sally and Mary look with horror at the strange figures at the table with them and even, at some point in the horrific ‘meal’, offer to ‘do anything’ if they are freed – Mary’s line echoing Sally’s almost exactly. Both women are surrounded, however, by an insanity that is impervious to such offers.
These mirrored scenes are incredibly rich, and I would argue that this scene at the heart of Backrooms is much more than a glib visual homage to Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It generates meanings for both films – and it specifically amplifies the class analysis embedded in Backrooms.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s class critique
Critics have been writing about the class critique in Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre since at least the late 1970s when Robin Wood published his groundbreaking essay, “Return of the Repressed,” in Film Comment (expanded in his 1986 chapter, “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s”). Wood argued that the monstrous family in Texas Chain Saw was a logical result of the capitalist process – a logical result of the men having worked all their lives in the local slaughterhouse, only to be discarded when machines took their jobs (as Hitchhiker so eloquently explains to the five young protagonists after they pick him up from the side of the road). The family is, Wood writes, representative “of an exploited and degraded proletariat” (1986: 91). Deprived of their means of making a living, the family take what they know and continue their job of slaughtering – killing people who wander their way in order to both eat them and sell them as food. As Wood puts it, “the slaughterhouse has invaded the home” (1986: 90). Wood also made it very clear that the family is not only ‘monstrous’ but also sympathetic: “they are victims, too – of the slaughterhouse environment, of capitalism – our victims, in fact” (1986: 92).[ii]
Backrooms’ discarded worker
Clark in Backrooms – the instigator of this film’s climactic dinner – may not be a discarded slaughterhouse worker, but he is a man who has nonetheless been discarded. He manages a store which is only ever empty: we see no customers. And selling cheap ugly furniture at a box store in a desolate strip mall is a twisted incarnation of his desire, his avowed intent, to become an architect. ‘I am an architect,’ he tells Mary in their therapy session. But he is about as much an architect as the family in Texas Chain Saw Massacre are slaughterhouse workers (anymore).
In an essay in The Conversation, James Cronin and Sophie James argue that Backrooms indeed “plays upon a deeper source of modern anxiety: the experience of trying to survive in an economy that fails to deliver on our vision for the future.” Movie audiences may certainly recognize, they continue, “Clark’s experience of living among failed promises, diminishing aspirations, precarity, social isolation and the growing fear of becoming obsolete” (2026).
The Redheaded Still Life from the Backrooms‘ dinner scene
So, when Mary in Backrooms wakes up sitting at the end of a kitchen table and tied to a chair – paralleling Sally Hardesty in Texas Chain Saw Massacre – it’s no surprise that it’s Clark who put her there. His anger at Mary in this scene is an extension of an earlier therapy session in which she role-played his wife and he expressed his anger at his wife through her. Indeed, it’s speculated that one of the Still Lifes at the dinner table – the Redheaded Still Life – is his wife. Clark’s supposedly ‘fundamental’ anger (at his wife) is likely only another displacement, though, of the greater anger at everything that has foreclosed opportunity in his life (and race must be a part of that) – everything that has shut down his dream of being an architect and consigned him to the soul-crushing furniture store.
In his insightful reading of Texas Chain Saw Massacre in relation to corporate capitalism, the extractive industries, and the 1970s oil crisis, Chuck Jackson argues that the central family are not just representative of the slaughterhouse but of a broader “economy of violence steeped in the history of US/Texas oil production and consumption in the early 1970s” (2008: 52). He adds that “for large corporations, humans matter only once their bodies are reconfigured as slick machines” (2008: 51). The slaughterhouse family in Hooper’s film refuses to embody those “slick machines” and so do not “matter” as far as modernity is concerned. Tellingly, in Backrooms, bodies are “reconfigured,” pressured by different capitalistic forces – those more embedded in service and technological industries. (The Still Lifes have been compared to the failed copies of AI, for instance.) The permutations and distortions of capitalism are, nonetheless, at the center of the deformed ‘monsters’ in both films.
Breaking through the pane
Mary Kline’s book
Twice in Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Sally attempts to escape by jumping through the windows of the slaughterhouse family’s house. The second time, she does escape to the highway and is picked up, leading to the film’s iconic ending. Mary, too, is associated with windows, first as a form of entrapment and then as a means of freedom. Like Clark, Mary has experienced past trauma: her mother was a hoarder and shut in, insisting on keeping the windows closed. Once Mary becomes a psychiatrist, she channels that trauma into an apparent understanding of how to transcend it – resulting in the aptly titled book: The Window Within, described by two bullet points – “Overcome the Barriers and Take Action” and “Break through the Pane.” The commercial for Mary’s practice/book includes a woman opening a window – and, in one key scene (a party), Mary rather pointedly walks through a patio window.
Like Sally, then, it is clear that Mary does “escape” (of sorts); she does “break through the pane.” The slaughterhouse family in Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Clark in Backrooms do not. Class and race potentially factor into these endings. It’s no accident, for instance, that we learn that Sally and Franklin’s granddaddy in Texas Chain Saw used to sell his cattle to the factory the slaughterhouse family worked in. And Mary’s whiteness must surely have played some role in her ability to achieve her dream, to achieve a middle-class status, while Clark fails and is clearly losing his grasp on the middle-class American dream. Mary, like Sally, can break through the window; Clark cannot.
Notes
[i] In another parallel I don’t have time to go into here, there are also “still lifes” in Texas Chain Saw Massacre, albeit very different ones. In his discussion of the film, Rick Worland points out that the bushes adorned with artifacts (such as a watch impaled on a nail) that Kirk and Pam pass on their way to the slaughterhouse family’s house are evocative of the works of surreal artists such as Salvador Dali, especially his well-known 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory (218–19).
Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s “still lifes”
[ii] In a 2024 essay in Post-45, Johanna Isaacson extends the class reading of Texas Chain Saw Massacre by considering the gender ambiguity / feminization of the slaughterhouse family (especially Leatherface): “However, because of this film’s particular emphasis on the themes of class and labor, I think special attention should be given not only to the ways that Leatherface wears female masks, but also how he performs the feminized labor of preparing food and serving food to his family. This behavior troubles conventional categories in ways that do not allow us to disentangle gender and class.”
Bibliography
“Backrooms Movie Breakdown and Ending Explained.” ScreenCrush, June 2026.
Cronin, James, and Sophie James. “Backrooms: Why Being Trapped in the Film’s Endless Corridors Feels a Lot Like Modern Life.” The Conversation, 2 June 2026.
Isaacson, Johanna. “My Apron Is a Chainsaw: Leatherface and His Family beyond the Masculine Proletariat.” Post45, Special Issue: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at 50, 30 September 2024. (See the entire special issue here.
Jackson, Chuck. “Blood for Oil: Crude Metonymies and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).” Gothic Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, May 2008, pp. 48–60.
Wood, Robin. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s.” Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 63–84.
Worland, Rick. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
