Five friends visiting their grandpa’s old house are hunted down and terrorized by a chainsaw wielding killer and his family of grave-robbing cannibals.
First of all let me apologise for this starting a day late. Now here is a film that truly shows you don’t need a big-budget to produce a truly terrifying movie, this film is used as a blueprint for many independent film-makers even to this day so that shows you what an impact it had and still does.
Tobe Hooper’s film was heavily inspired by killer Ed Gein, if you know the story of Gein then you can see that inspiration. One thing that truly terrified me with this film was it’s creepy opening, the sound of the camera with the flashing and the narrator telling the grizzly story. I remember being sat in a dark room with some friends, we’d sneaked this film out of my friends parents collection for a sleepover and were so excited, I can tell you now that nobody slept that night!
One thing that works well for these genre of films is the cast of unknowns. We have no expectations of them, or if we do have any they’re usually low. With this cast we are given quite a treat really, no they’re not the best actors in the world but neither are they the worst with all putting in a solid performance. My favourite is the performance of Ed Neal as Leatherface’s brother, he gave me more nightmares than any other character in the film.
A great thing about this film is it’s status of how gory it is, yet when you watch it there really isn’t any, especially not enough to be considered as a gore-tastic film. What Tobe Hooper does with the camera work is amazing, he gives us a terrifying scene then lets our imagination fill in the blanks so when we’ve finished viewing the film we think we’ve seen a blood filled film. I never saw anything like that before and having seen anything like it after either.
I know many people who couldn’t even sit through one viewing of this film and still can’t. It has certainly left a scar on many peoples minds and undoubtedly made a huge impact on the genre. For a low budget film made in 1974 by unknowns and starring unknowns I’d say that’s a legacy to be proud of.
Leatherface is undoubtedly the star of the film, he’s the one people are mostly scared of and he’s the character most people talk about. Even today he is still a huge favourite and Gunnar Hansen’s performance was outstanding, putting the character in the big leagues alongside Pinhead, Kreuger etc.
Miscellaneous facts about the film:
The actress whose character, Pam, was hung up on a meat hook was actually held up by a nylon cord that went between her legs, causing a great deal of pain.
During the dinner scene towards the end of the film, when Leatherface cuts Sally’s finger, he actually does cut her finger because they couldn’t get the fake blood to come out of the tube behind the blade.
The movie wasn’t released in Australia until the early 1980s.
Director Tobe Hooper claims to have got the idea for the film while standing in the hardware section of a crowded store. While thinking of a way to get out through the crowd, he spotted the chainsaws.
When it was first released, the film was so horrifying that people actually walked out on sneak previews for it.
After getting into the old-age makeup, John Dugan decided that he did not ever want to go through the process again, meaning that all the scenes with him had to be filmed in the same session before he could take the makeup off. This entire process took about 36 hours (five of which which took to put the makeup on), during a brutal summer heat wave where the average temperature was over 100 degrees, with a large portion of it spent filming the dinner scene, which him sitting in a room filled with dead animals and rotting food with no air condoning or electric fans. Edwin Neal who played the hitch-hiker claimed: “Filming that scene was the worst time of my life… and I had been in Vietnam, with people trying to kill me, so I guess that shows how bad it was.”
The film was shot in chronological order.
The chainsaw used in this film was a Poulan 245A, with a piece of black tape covering the Poulan logo in order to avoid a possible lawsuit.
The film was rejected by the British film censors in 1975, but it did get a limited cinema release in the London area thanks to the GLC (Greater London Council). It was banned again in 1977, when the censors’ attempts to cut it were unsuccessful, (for the purposes of a wider release), then it was banned again in 1984, due to the growing controversy involving ‘video nasties’. In 1999, after the censors finally changed their policy, they took the plunge, and passed it uncut, for the cinema and video, after 25 years, since they first banned it.
The script was entitled “Leatherface.” At various points before the film’s release, the title was switched to “Head Cheese” and finally “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”.
A family was actually living in the house that served as the Sawyer family house in the later half of the movie. They rented out their house to the film crew and continued to stay there during the entire shoot. During filming, the crew discovered that one of the residents had been cultivating a marijuana field; fearful that production would be shut down if they were found near the plants, the filmmakers called the Sheriff, who never arrived to investigate.
The human skeleton in the house at the end of the movie was a real human skeleton. They used a real one because a human skeleton from India is far cheaper then a fake plastic skeleton.
Tobe Hooper allowed Gunnar Hansen to develop Leatherface as he saw fit, under his supervision. Hansen decided that Leatherface was mentally retarded and never learned to talk properly, so he went to a school for the mentally challenged and watched how they moved and listened to them talk to get a feel for the character.
Leatherface had “lines” in the script that were gibberish with little side notes indicating what he was trying to say.
The close-up of Leatherface cutting his leg on the chainsaw was the last shot to be filmed; the actor was wearing a metal plate over his leg, which was then covered with a piece of meat and a blood bag.
Edwin Neal, who played the Hitchhiker, said that making the film was more miserable than his service in Vietnam and said that he might kill director Tobe Hooper if he ever saw him again.
Due to the low budget, Gunnar Hansen had only one shirt to wear as Leatherface. The shirt had been dyed, so it could not be washed; Hansen had to wear it for four straight weeks of filming in the Texas summer. By the end of the shoot no one wanted to eat lunch with Hansen because his clothing smelled so bad.
Tobe Hooper intended to make the movie for a “PG” rating, by keeping violence moderate and language mild, but despite cutting and repeated submissions, the Ratings Board insisted on the “R” rating for the effectiveness of what is onscreen and what is implied offscreen. Hooper had a similar ratings problem with the sequel.
The soundtrack contains the sounds an animal would hear inside a slaughterhouse.
The van the kids drive in the movie belonged to Ted Nicolaou, who worked as a sound recordist on the film.
Gunnar Hansen said that, during filming, he didn’t get along very well with Paul A. Partain, who played Franklin. A few years later, Hanson met Partain again and realized that Partain, a method actor, had simply chosen to stay in character even when not filming. The two remained good friends up until Partains’ death.
Leatherface’s teeth were prostheses made especially for Gunnar Hansen by his dentist.
Tobe Hooper used a stunt double for Sally’s leap through the window; all the same, Marilyn Burns actually hurt herself shooting the insert of her falling to the ground.
Gunnar Hansen hit his head on doorways and other objects several times during the shoot because the Leatherface mask severely limited his peripheral vision and the three-inch heels he wore made his 6’4″ frame too high to clear all obstacles.
Even in his lift boots, Gunnar Hansen could run faster than Marilyn Burns, so he had to do random things when chasing her through the woods (you’ll notice in one head-on shot that he starts slicing up tree branches in the background).
Edwin Neal said, in a documentary, that he read for the part acting like an eccentric nephew of his and that, luckily for him, it was exactly what Tobe Hooper was looking for.
Marilyn Burns’ costume was so drenched in fake blood that it was virtually solid by the last day’s shoot.
Marilyn Burns, whose character was chased by Leatherface through the undergrowth, actually cut herself on the branches quite badly, so a lot of the blood on her body and clothes is real.
The financing for this film came from the profits of a previous film the production company had made – Deep Throat.
Since the film’s original release, the location used as the Sawyer family house has changed completely. It’s now an open field, with no indication there had ever been a house there. The house itself has been relocated and fully restored. It is now operated as the Junction House Restaurant on the grounds of the Antlers Hotel complex at 1010 King Street in Kingsland, Texas.
“Entertainment Weekly” magazine voted this the the second scariest film ever made, behind The Exorcist
Gunnar Hansen wore three-inch heels so that he was taller than the rest of the cast, but it meant that he had to duck to get through the doorways in the slaughterhouse.
Originally had a two-week shooting schedule, but filming ultimately took four weeks to complete.
The company worked seven days a week, 16 hours a day, in the summertime in one of Texas’ notoriously brutal heat waves.
One of the crew members, Dorothy J. Pearl, accidentally injected herself in the leg with formaldehyde while preparing one of the props.
The film’s distributors Bryantson Pictures were allegedly discovered to have Mafia connections.
According to John Larroquette, his payment for doing the opening narration was a marijuana joint.
Many of the film’s original locations were later featured in Headcheese, a short film named after one of “Chain Saw’s” early titles during production in 1973.
The film’s original budget was $60,000; during the editing process, the filmmakers amassed an additional $80,000 in costs, requiring that they sell off portions of their ownership in the film’s royalties.
This film has had a long and troubled “relationship” with German law. The original theatrical version in West Germany was denied a rating and therefore cut. In 1982, the film was put on the index for youth-endangering media. Then in 1985, the film was banished by the Munich district court and all existing copies were confiscated. Over the years the film was released on VHS and DVD in various (legal and illegal) versions, mostly cut. Since April 2008, the new German licensee, Turbine Medien, has tried to get the banishment revoked and the film removed from the index. Only in September 2011, the district court of Frankfurt/Main finally lifted the banishment of the film (it is the first time in Germany that such an attempt was successful, making judiciary history). Finally, in December 2011 the film was removed from the BPjM index and subsequently rated “Not under 18” by the FSK.
The film’s original distributor was Bryanston Distribution Company, in fact a Mafia front operated by Louis “Butchie” Peraino, who used the movie to launder profits he made from Deep Throat. In return, the production received only enough money to reimburse the investors and pay the cast and crew $405 a piece. The producers eventually discovered that Peraino had lied to them about the film’s profits; after Peraino was arrested on obscenity charges when his role in Deep Throat was revealed, the cast and crew filed a suit against him and were awarded $25,000 each. New Line Cinema, which obtained the rights to “Chain Saw” from the bankrupt Bryanston, paid the cast and crew as part of the purchase agreement.
A still photo taken during filming of the entire ‘Sawyer’ family posing outside the house as a gag was found and stolen from the set by a visiting German reporter who took it back to West Germany with him, and the image of the family eventually became the advertising poster for the first release of the movie in West Germany.
