By Erin Free
“The whole thing came to me in a flash,” Tobe Hooper told The AV Club in 2000. “I was standing in a hardware store, and it came to me instantly as a reaction to another project that I’d been working on, which was about a house and isolation. This thing gelled really rapidly: I had the idea, I called my writing partner [Kim Henkel], and we started working on it that night. We had the script finished in three weeks, and it went very rapidly, almost as if it were meant to be in the jet stream.” That flash became a full-blown fire when Tobe Hooper eventually unleashed his shattering horror classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, upon an unsuspecting public in 1974. Shot on fumes by Hooper – a college professor and documentary cameraman – and a crew of neophytes, the grim, no-budget film gained instant notoriety, largely born out of its violently sensationalist title.
Those four perfectly positioned words, however, were hardly an accurate description of the small scale horrors that unfold during the film’s economic 83-minute running time. Loosely inspired by the flesh-eating antics of serial killer, Ed Gein (known as “The Plainfield Ghoul”, and also an influential figure in the creation of both Psycho and The Silence Of The Lambs), the film follows a group of kids who get menaced and ultimately butchered by a family of Lone Star State cannibals, the most fearsome and instantly iconic of which is the towering, masked, chainsaw-wielding killer, Leatherface (played with looming, wordless physicality by Gunnar Hansen, who passed away late last year at the age of 68). Grungy, guerilla-in-tone, and gruesomely nihilistic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was nevertheless far from soaked in blood and gore, particularly when slammed up against the charnel house horrors of today. It was, however, shockingly immediate and realistic, which led to the film baiting ratings boards across the world. Several countries banned it outright (the film didn’t receive a classification in Australia until 1984 after many cuts had been made), and in America, many theatres refused to screen it.
But riding on a paltry budget of just $300,000, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre went on to make $30 million at the US box office, making it one of the most successful independent films of all time. “It took off immediately,” Tobe Hooper told The Austin Chronicle in 1998. “It was released, and it jumped up on the charts, although the releasing pattern in those days was different than it is today. It got great reviews. Immediately, The Museum Of Modern Art purchased a print for its permanent collection. It was then selected for The Director’s Fortnight at The Cannes Film Festival. Then the awards started coming in, so it really took off in a critical way straight away. I knew that there was nothing like it, but there was no way of anticipating that it would become a title as important as Gone With The Wind.”
With its cultural relevance undeniable despite its disreputable roots, it took a long time for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to cop the sequel treatment. But with 1986’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Tobe Hooper offered up a film that – though wildly different from its predecessor – was certainly worth the wait. Eschewing the original’s verite intensity in favour of ghoulish black comedy, and boasting chainsaw battles, arcane set design, and Dennis Hopper as a badass lawman, the film was banned in Australia for twenty years, and rates as a rare sequel that successfully veers from its source material. A 1990 Tobe Hooper-less second sequel/reboot, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 (featuring Viggo Mortensen in an early role), was far less successful, but that didn’t stop the follow ups from rolling in.
1994’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation was a shoddy loose remake of and quasi-sequel to the 1974 film, written and directed by Kim Henkel (Hooper’s co-writer on the first film), and starring Texans, Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey, before they hit the big time. 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, meanwhile, was a straight-up remake of Hooper’s original, with the director this time on board as a producer. “It’s still my baby,” he said at the film’s premiere. “It’s Leatherface, and in the history books, you can’t separate Tobe Hooper and Leatherface! I’m happy to see my little boy back at it.” Starring Jessica Biel, Marcus Nispel’s bloody reimagining was a hit, and promptly inspired a follow up in the form of 2006’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, a prequel tracking the origins of the monstrous Leatherface. Released in 2013 was Texas Chainsaw 3D, which took a major detour away from the recent films, and set itself up as a direct sequel to Tobe Hooper’s 1974 original. “I brushed all of the other films aside, and took from the original,” director, John Luessenhop, told Screen Rant. “I wanted it to be a little bit familiar, but so you’d never be balanced enough to know exactly what was going to come at you. That was the challenge: to be true to the original film and not offend its audience.”
And the buzzing sound of chainsaws isn’t set to stop anytime soon. Coming out later this year is Leatherface, a prequel tracking a teenage Leatherface, who escapes from a mental hospital with three other inmates, and kidnaps a young nurse, eventually taking her on a road trip from hell. In a clear nod to1986’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the crazed road trippers are pursued by Stephen Dorff’s Texas Ranger Hal Hartman, an equally deranged lawman out for revenge. Start your chainsaws now…
