The Dark Untold Truth Of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the most important horror films of all time. Not only did it inspire a half dozen sequels and reboot films, it was also a completely new addition to the horror genre that opened the floodgates of gore (and the cinematic realizations of a traveler's worst nightmare). Leatherface is still one of the most unsettling villains in movie history, and there's a rich history behind the crazy series that even the most diehard of Sawyer/Hewitt family fans might be surprised to learn.

Any Texas Chain Saw fan worth his or her salt knows that Leatherface was in large part inspired by real-life killer Ed Gein (who was also kept in mind by Alfred Hitchcock during the development of Psycho), but he wasn't the only skin-loving psychopath to lend some creepy realism to the story. Hooper told Texas Monthly that the idea for Leatherface was actually derived from a story his doctor once told him about his med school pranks. "When he was a pre-med student, the class was studying cadavers, and he went into the morgue and skinned a cadaver and made a mask for Halloween," Hooper said. Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.

Hooper also looked to a Texan teen serial murderer named Elmer Wayne Henley. He watched Henley own up to his crimes, and found his post-apprehension behaviors fascinating. "He kind of puffed out his chest and said, 'I did these crimes, and I'm gonna stand up and take it like a man.' Well, that struck me as interesting, that he had this conventional morality at that point. He wanted it known that, now that he was caught, he would do the right thing. So, this kind of moral schizophrenia is something I tried to build into the characters," Hooper explained.

As for the movie's mood, Hooper and Henkel had to look no further than the news to get a read on the cultural unrest that existed at the end of the Vietnam War, and the idea to implement a chainsaw as the weapon of choice came from a particularly terrible holiday shopping trip to a local Montgomery Ward's. Since it was so close to Christmas, Hooper remembered that the store was completely packed, and that's when the a daydream about mowing people down with a chainsaw began to trickle into his brain. Just kidding ... well, mostly.

"I looked down and there was a rack of chainsaws in front of me for sale. I said, 'if I start the saw, people would just part. They would get out of my way,'" he explained to Interview Magazine. "I'd been working on this idea of young people, college students, in isolation. We were going through a gasoline shortage in the country at the time. People had to queue up in their automobiles at gas stations, sometimes for miles. There was gas rationing. And I was hearing a lot of lies on television. Politically, the times were interesting; they were kind of amplified. So the idea came to me in the car of how to pull all of these elements together. It came really quickly—the whole configuration of the characters—and the loop, the way the story loops inside itself."

According to Hansen's autobiographical account of the making of the movie, Chain Saw Confidential: How We Made the World's Most Notorious Horror Movie, the guy whose home served as the set for the film (and later became a restaurant) was growing a few acres of marijuana out in the back field at the time, and of course the cast and crew helped themselves to it. In fact, one of the editors made the them all some weed brownies, which they ate before commencing with filming their last few scenes, including rather dangerous stuntwork, under the hazy influence of the drug.

Actor John Larroquette also did the ominous opening narration of the movie, and he was basically paid for his work with a joint. As he explained to the A.V. Club, he met Hooper through a mutual friend during a trip to a small town in Colorado, and they got along really well at the time. A couple of years later, Hooper called him up and asked him to read a few lines for the film for free, and since he'd had some DJing experience at the time, he was agreeable to it. "I went into a studio, saw the piece of paper, read it for him, recorded it, said adios, he gave me a joint, I think as payment, and that was that." Larroquette never bothered actually watching the movie, or any of its successors, but things did ultimately pay off for him when he was asked back to narrate the rebooted series almost 30 years later. "When they re-imagined it again without Tobe, I was called in to do the narration again, and actually got paid really well for it. So, the favor I did in the '70s for a friend for no money came full circle, and I actually made a great deal of money from it later on."

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a massive success at the box office (it earned $30.8 million, which is about $142.9 million when adjusted for inflation). However, the cast and filmmakers involved got little more than squat out of it (still more than Larroquette, of course, but not by much). As Hansen recalled in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, his first check was "47 dollars and seven cents ... We made virtually no money." He estimated that his shooting salary was about two dollars an hour, which was the federal minimum wage that year.

Due to a cruddy distribution deal with the now-defunct Bryanston Distributors (a company with alleged mafia ties), little money trickled downhill to them, and the cast grew furious at Hooper—not knowing that he was no better off than they were. New Line Cinema eventually came in to purchase the home video distribution rights after Bryanston defaulted on the millions owed to the TCSM team, and the company did deepen the director's pockets a little bit, with almost a million dollars given to the filmmakers. However, some of the cast—particularly Ed Neal—have had a long-standing beef with Hooper over his perceived underpayment ever since. Talk about bad blood.

After Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 failed to live up to the hype of the original (just $8 million made on a reported $4.7 million budget), the studio handed the reins over to new writer-director duo Jeff Burr and David J. Schow, and they even wedged Leatherface's name into the title for good luck. None of that helped, though, because the studio ended up so ensnared in a battle with the MPAA that the movie couldn't even make it into theaters on time for its original release date until it got that R rating (they had to resubmit it a whopping 11 times, slashing chunks of gore here and there until it was tame enough to pass cinematic muster).

Even crazier is what happened next. Reportedly, test audiences who screened the movie were so upset by the death of Ken Foree's character Benny that the studio decided to film a new ending where he survives without telling the director about it. As Burr told Icons of Fright, he'd been let go while the studio hashed it out with the ratings board, so he had no idea the extra scene had been added until he literally watched it in the theater. He was so upset that he called the studio and asked them to take his name off of the movie altogether (but the reel prints had already been made and distributed). Yikes.

When Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger filmed Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation in 1994, they had yet to reach the household name status they'd achieve over the next few years. Their eventual notoriety (courtesy of their respective 1996 breakthroughs A Time to Kill and Jerry Maguire) was a boon for the studio which was still working on achieving the requisite R rating for release, but it wasn't such a happy coincidence for the actors. In fact, their agents tried to stuff the film altogether, to no avail. McConaughey still openly disses and dismisses the movie.

The 2003 remake of the original, featuring Jessica Biel and her tight jeans in a new murderous row with the horrible Hewitt family, has a few stories worth mentioning as well. For starters, Eric Balfour, who's known for his nudist leanings, was said to spend a lot of time in his birthday suit during production, and Erica Leershen, who played one of the eventual victims, screamed so loudly during her audition that other people in the building called the police, thinking she was being attacked. Now that's a true story.

The last (so far) installment to the Texas Chainsaw franchise was 2013's Texas Chainsaw 3D, which was meant to serve as a direct sequel to the 1974 original with no respect to the five films in between. The new round was originally intended to be a non-chronological trilogy, set in a hospital, but the new studio which bought the rights to the series (Lionsgate) instead chose to follow up the original events to be on the financially safe side. As a bit of an homage to the then-decades old movie, they brought back four of the original castmates for cameo roles, including Marilyn Burns, Gunnar Hansen, Paul A. Partain, and John Dugan.