Fifty years after the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: How the most terrifying film ever made was inspired by the crimes of real serial killers

There aren’t many horror films that are as utterly horrifying to make as they are to watch. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which opened fifty years ago this month, is a notable exception.

It is one of the most controversial yet enduringly influential horror films in cinema history, which despite its starkly unsubtle title, was described in the New York Times as “a formally superb art film, packed with beautiful nightmarish images that are as poetic as they are deranged.” .

Yet the film was shot at the height of an oppressively hot Texas summer in such “unbearably putrid” conditions that Icelandic-born actor Gunnar Hansen, who played the story’s depraved villain “Leatherface,” later claimed he wasn’t sure if the cast would. get out alive.

A psychopathic masked cannibal who liked to torture his victims before killing and eating them, Leatherface was truly the stuff of nightmares. But so did the set: a farm in Round Rock, Texas, where temperatures consistently rose above 43 degrees Celsius.

And to make conditions even more uncomfortable, director Tobe Hooper insisted on littering the building with dead dogs, cattle remains and smelly cheese. It wouldn’t, it couldn’t happen now. It is clear that this should not have happened then.

But Hooper reasoned that a terrible stench would help create a gruesome atmosphere, making the gruesomeness of the plot seem all the more real. The result was that the actors had to keep running outside for ‘vomit breaks’.

All of this was concocted in an Austin department store shortly before Christmas 1972. Not yet 30, Hooper stopped by to do some shopping and found himself in the crowded hardware department, desperate to escape. “That big crowd always captivated me,” he told the Austin Chronicle decades later. Then he saw a series of shiny chainsaws.

He fantasized about taking one, detonating it and carving a deadly path through the Christmas shoppers. In less than a minute, he claimed, his idle fantasy turned into a coherent idea: the Texas Chain Saw Massacre was born.

There were other sources of inspiration. America was an unhappy country in late 1972. The Watergate crisis was brewing, the Vietnam War raged on, and the political assassinations of the 1960s loomed large in the collective memory, as did the murderous rampage of 1969 by disciples of Charles Manson.

Furthermore, just nine months before Manson’s acolytes slaughtered actress Sharon Tate and six others, a former handyman named Ed Gein – known as the Plainfield Butcher – was tried for numerous crimes, including murder and body snatching.

Gein was fascinated by the war story of Ilse Koch, whose husband was the commander of the Buchenwald concentration camp, and who reportedly made lampshades from the tattooed skin of murdered prisoners. Inspired, he dug up bodies from the cemetery in Plainfield, Wisconsin, and made souvenirs from their skin and bones. Leatherface, whose mask was made of human skin, was modeled after Gein, who was being held in a secure psychiatric hospital by the time Hooper conceived The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

But some of the worst serial killers in the country’s history were still at large. Among them was 6-foot-2 Edmund Kemper, imprisoned for murdering his grandparents in 1964.

“I just wanted to see what it felt like to kill grandma,” he told police.

While working on the script with his co-writer Kim Henkel, Hooper had also been keeping a close eye on a case closer to home, the so-called Candy Man Murders, in and around Houston, Texas.

An outwardly respectable man named Dean Corll kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered at least 28 boys and young men before being shot by his own twisted accomplice in August 1973.

There was another remarkably macabre influence on Hooper. Just before Christmas 1972, he heard, along with the rest of the world, that 16 survivors had been found from a plane crash 72 days earlier in the Andes. To stay alive, they were forced to eat the flesh of those who had died.

That eerie detail helped hone Hooper’s vision for a modern version of Hansel and Gretel, the 19th-century German fairy tale by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

Hansel and Gretel are brother and sister, abandoned in the woods by their mother, who are captured by a cannibalistic witch. Hooper imagined the young protagonists in his film similarly straying off the beaten path into the same kind of terrible danger, but perhaps without such a happy ending.

Long before that, Hooper himself had almost become a victim of mass murder. On August 1, 1966, he was wandering the campus of the University of Texas at Austin when a police officer yelled at him to take cover in a nearby building. Someone shot people from the 28th floor of the university administration building. Seconds later, the same officer was hit by a bullet.

The shooter was former Marine Charles Whitman, the “Texas Tower Sniper,” who had already fatally stabbed his mother and wife that day and then shot fourteen more in a 96-minute killing spree. The long-haired Hooper, then just 23 years old, saw how much of this unfolded. He claimed to be a laid-back hippie, but was deeply affected by the Whitman massacre. For him it was the most alarmingly personal event of the 1960s, completely at odds with the countercultural clichés of peace and love.

So all things considered, it’s not surprising that he came up with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre how and when he did it, and why the Hansel and Gretel theme appealed to him so much.

By then, he and Henkel had already made one film, Eggshells, a largely improvised 1969 drama about a community of hippies haunted by a malevolent spirit. That summed up what both filmmakers had come to think about the 1960s. But their second project together was very different.

Filming of the film began on July 15, 1973, but there were already disturbing signs of headaches. Instead of showing up on set, Gunnar Hansen went on a drunken binge and locked himself in his hotel room with a debilitating case of pre-shoot jitters. If he had known what awaited him, he might never have emerged.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre tells the story of five teenage friends who make the fatal mistake of stopping at a remote house during a road trip in hopes of getting gas for their van.

It turns out to be the home of Leatherface and his maniacal relatives. In the film’s most infamous scene, one of the teens, Sally Hardesty (played by Marilyn Burns), is tortured at the family dinner table. She is tied to the arms of a corpse, and Leatherface cuts off her finger so that the 100-year-old patriarch (actually played by teen actor John Dugan in heavy prosthetics) can drink her blood.

Most self-respecting horror movie fans revere this scene. But what they all don’t know is that the horror was real. Hansen used a prop knife with a tube of fake blood attached, but it didn’t work properly.

After countless recordings, he decided to take matters into his own hands, all too literally. He secretly cut off Burns’ finger for real, which none of the other actors realized during the heat of filming. Burns was said to be furious when she found out. But not Dugan, who only found out years later that I was actually sucking her blood, which is actually kind of erotic.

In 2013, two years before he died, Hansen wrote a memoir called Chain Saw Confidential, for which he interviewed Burns. She told him there was nothing fake about her fear. “You scared the hell out of me,” she said. The way he leered at her, she remembered, felt “too real.”

An actor named Jim Siedow, who played another bloodthirsty clan of Leatherface, found it difficult to get himself to the point where he could simulate extreme violence against Burns. So Hooper and the rest of the crew egged him on, yelling “hit her, hit her harder, hit her again!” Even Burns joined in. “Just hit me, don’t worry,” she said.

Such tricks are unthinkable today, while any director who litters a set with dead dogs just to create a noxious atmosphere would be fired and canceled. But in his 2019 book The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Film That Terrified A Rattled Nation, author Joseph Lanza mentions another possible reason for what was even unhinged behavior at the time: cannabis. Outside the house where the filming took place was a two-hectare plot of cannabis. Hooper, his cast and crew were told that as long as they were discreet about the “extracurricular gardening” they could help themselves.

No matter how much he consumed, Hooper is no longer there to answer for his actions; he died in 2017, at the age of 74. But he took great satisfaction in the lasting influence of his most famous film, which directly inspired a string of subsequent pictures, from John Carpenter’s 1978 hit Halloween to Ridley Scott’s Alien a year later.

It also introduced power tools as weapons for murder and torture, which won’t sound like a throwback to everyone… but horror fans know differently.