If a film could contract tetanus, it would be Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive. The people who consider this a lesser retread of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or, worse, an unsympathetic revelation of the limits of that earlier film’s imagination, are losing their minds. They are not, as they say, down with Hooper’s peculiar way of rendering the American sickness. This is a nasty piece of work, a cinema of morbid fixations, of the fragile emaciation of the American body as it thought it had been fashioned, and as it was apparently unfashioning itself in the mid-‘70s.

If anything, Eaten Alive is more uncomfortably disconcerting than Texas Chainsaw, more unwilling to privilege accepted divisions between center and outsider, urban and rural, digital and analog. While Chainsaw takes us to the margins of America, Eaten Alive seems to fold center and margin in on one another. While the intrepid heroes of Texas Chainsaw venture into the margins of modern America, out of their comfort zone, Eaten Alive collapses distinctions almost entirely. We move from an apparently urban brothel to the film’s forsaken bayou cottage without any sense of the passage of space or time. The film retroactively seems to be infused with the need to demarcate spaces, as well as the failure to do so, uncannily underlining the limits of American dominance.

And just who are our trespassers? Waylaid souls arriving one by one to this theater of the damned, failing to recognize that they haven’t gone from anywhere to anywhere but only gone deeper into themselves. There are several. Clara, (Roberta Collins), a prostitute who escapes from one monster (played by a pre-Nightmare Robert Englund, here a more pointedly mundane nightmare) to another, an omnipresent neon glow signaling that she has both transmuted into another, more warped dimension and not moved at all. Soon enough, we get an apparent couple with an accompanying child. At one point, the man seems to suddenly go catatonic, staring at his wife and reaching for something that isn’t there, a need to connect that he can no longer rekindle. They feel like a set of protagonists from another film that all-too-easily become ghoulish interlopers on the misplaced longings and carnal connections found in this one.

What separates any of these folk from the seemingly jangled nerve Judd (Neville Brand), our killer, who owns the miasmic inn where most of this film takes place? And what separates any of them from Judd’s “pet” crocodile that is equal parts guest and fixture in the film, that seems no more a stranger in these parts than anyone else here, but also no less? They all seem at ease and lost, settled and adrift, in and outside of something that might be called home, trapped in a nation that was all too comfortable labelling certain practices or environs to be abnormal and some normal when, in fact, they were often very much the same.

Eaten Alive is both a meat-cleaving murderer and a coroner, desecrating the American body and examining its remnants. One kill is viciously distended, not because Hooper wants to display his mastery of suspense but because he wants us to grapple with the curiosity of flesh and metal enmeshed and unable to be extricated and reseparated. Hooper exhibits a morbid fixation with an odd image of a man trying to separate a man’s neck from a scythe, no easy task, while a crocodile goes to work on the other end of the man’s body. What a strange pas de deux, corporeal and confused, intriguing and atrocious, animal and mechanical, body and steel. This is a prolapsed, post-industrial nation, a vision of an older America collapsing into, becoming indistinguishable from, something destroying it. Or, more accurately, a proposition that this past America never really existed, that it was always a fabrication of souls in search of a coherent and harmonious national past, a set-bound history conjectured, as the name of the motel fittingly ascribes it, out of pure starlight.

Indeed, the first time the crocodile itself is seen, its scales are so microscopically close that it seems to be glitching in and out, an oddly virtual metamorphosis between reality and image for such an ostensibly analog cinematic statement. The absolutely eccentric score by Hooper and Wayne Bell (Hooper, anticipating John Carpenter, sonically accompanying his own film), meanwhile, is a strangely digital cackle that seems to be breaking out of the film text, looking to some new America doomed to come into being. Rather than a forgotten America brutally assaulting a more modern, apparently civilized thing, Eaten Alive uncannily exposes the violent entanglement of the two, the way in which our image of an authentic past coming home to roost is itself a fabrication of the nation, of our desire to separate past and present and accept that binary in the very act of exploring it.

Modernity, then, is no refuge in Eaten Alive, not in a nation devouring itself, unable to cope with the strangeness of its own violence. The film’s signature, recurrent image is a person  – any person, every person who appears on screen – looking off-screen, around, simply unable to make sense of their dubious environs, awaiting some clarification of their space, finding themselves suddenly, unexpectedly, in a fallen theater for a thoroughly unredeemed world. “I can’t go back to Houston,” a character remarks. And where are we? In a toxic nothingness, flooded with monstrous liminality, our safest companion a monkey in a cage who dies for an entirely unacknowledged reason, not because of any assaultive presence, but perhaps because it simply wanted out of the film. The set, a neon-suffused Tennessee Williams cloister of gothic Americana, is amazing, projecting a strange kind of irradiated American charm that, in its self-evidently set-bound nature, becomes a weird, grotesque exaggeration of American insularity, a cinema of congealed swamp gas all too ready to fade back into the muck of the nation’s id.

Score: 8.5/10