Explaining the true story behind the Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror classic “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is not based on a true story, despite what the film’s marketing might lead you to believe. There was no Texas serial killer named Leatherface, and there was no real family of backwoods cannibals called the Sawyers. In fact, even within the “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” mythology, it’s difficult to keep the facts straight, as the series has been rebooted multiple times. As of this writing, There have been nine films in the “Texas Chainsaw” franchise.And at least four of them are reboots, reimaginings, or prequels.

To sum it up briefly, “Texas Chain Saw” follows a quintet of teenagers who travel in a truck through a remote area of ​​Texas, searching for the grave of the grandfather of two travelers. They pick up a crazy hitchhiker (Edwin Neill) who threatens them with a razor and cuts himself. The quintet escape to a local house where they disturb a race of slaughterhouse workers who have been isolated for so long that they have taken to eating passing humans to survive, often creating furniture from the bones of their victims. The rest of the film is a struggle for survival as viewers learn more and more about the sick practices in which the cannibals are involved.

As all TCM fans know, the events of Hopper’s original film were actually based on fact. Hopper and co-screenwriter Kim Henkel paid attention to the news, and were fascinated by the details surrounding notorious serial killers such as Ed Gein and Elmer Wayne Henley. In fact, many of the details of Leatherface’s murders come from the actual murders committed by Ed Gein (we’ll get to those below). Hopper was also commenting on the raw violence one would see in the news media in 1974. Below are the true events that inspired the film.

Many TCM lovers in the world can probably tell you that Ed Gein had a huge influence on the film. For the uninitiated, Ed Gein was a real-life murderer and grave robber who committed a long string of heinous crimes from around 1947 until 1957 when he was caught. Aka Plainfield Ghoul (After his base of operations in Plainfield, Wisconsin), Gene was known for raiding the local cemetery, exhuming bodies, and using their bones to design furniture and other souvenirs.

Gene was captured after he kidnapped and murdered a shopkeeper named Bernice Worden, whose body he also extensively mutilated. When the police raided his home looking for Worden, they found his large collection of strange crafts, including some items too bad to list here. Jin has already designed facial masks for several women, as well as a women’s leather corset. It was rumored that Gene claimed that he was recreating a suit of human skin so that he could wear it and “revive” his mother, however His case has been greatly sensationalized over the years. Gein confessed to kidnapping and killing Worden, as well as a woman named Mary Hogan, three years earlier. Gene was committed to a mental hospital and died in 1984 of lung cancer.

The cauldron in which he boiled the flesh of some corpses is on display Zak Pagan’s Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. Details of Gene’s habit of collecting corpses received much attention from obsessive people, and his house became a tourist attraction.

Some of the Sawyer family’s crafts seen in “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” were directly inspired by Jane, including all the human skulls and lampshades made of human skin, not to mention the female skin mask worn by Leatherface. Gene was not a cannibal. His obsession with female bodies, specifically his mother’s, served as inspiration for the films “Psycho” and “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Gein also had his own film in 2000 titled Natch, “Ed Gein.”

Ed Gein was working out of Wisconsin, so where did the Texas “Chain Saw” come from? The real killer and sex trafficker was Elmer Wayne Henley, a native Texan, and someone less well-known to TCM fans. Hopper has also been cited as an inspiration. Henley, along with his partner Dean Corll, would kidnap and/or pursue teenage boys for a trafficker named David Brooks who would sell the boys. The couple assaulted and killed six boys during the purchase.

No such acts of assault occurred in “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” which focused more on Ed Gein’s crimes as inspiration. On the DVD commentary track for the song “Chain Saw”, Co-screenwriter Kim Henkel He admitted he watched Henley’s video confession and was impressed. He was greatly attracted by Henley’s assurances that he would receive his punishment “like a man”, and that he vacillated between humility and moral superiority. Henkel said Henley’s positions were used as the basis for the film’s killers. They know that killing and assault are wrong, but only sometimes. And they don’t always care. Henkel called it “moral schizophrenia.”

Shortly before his arrest in 1973, Henley shot Corll in the head for taking his murder and sex games too far. Henley himself was arrested in 1973 and sentenced to six consecutive 99-year prison sentences. Brooks was sentenced to life in prison, and died in 2020 from Covid-19. Henley remains in captivity to this day.

The sensational media coverage of Henley’s trial also marked, for Tobe Hooper, a change in the way the American public consumed violence. That inspired him too.

While the violence of Hopper’s original “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was striking, the film is often noted for its gritty style. The film is worn and dirty, and the film stock itself appears to have been stored on a slaughterhouse rack for a long time, affecting its greasy, almost yellowing quality. “Texas Chain Saw” is difficult for many audiences to access because it almost looks like a legitimate film. It should be noted that Hopper, while a film student at the University of Texas at Austin, worked as a documentary photographer.

In an interview on one of the many “Texas Chain Saw” DVDs, Hooper noted that news coverage in San Antonio had become incredibly violent, with crimes described or even depicted in graphic detail. Let us remember that the year 1973 was in the middle of the war in Vietnam, and that many of the horrors of that conflict were making their way onto American television screens and newspapers. 1974 it was In the wake of the Watergate scandal It witnessed a major oil crisis in addition to an economic recession. No one felt they could trust the government anymore, and cynicism was growing. In the 2004 issue From Morgue Street magazineHopper told an interviewer that he remembered seeing “brains all over the road” on television, and coming to the conclusion that “the guy was the real monster here, just wearing a different face, so I literally put a mask on the monster in my face.” film.”

While the violence in “Texas Chain Saw” is terrifying, Hopper saw it as a logical extension of the evil he saw every day on the news. “Texas Chain Saw” may be a bleak, dreary, documentary-like film about evil cannibals, but Hopper clearly didn’t find it fictional. Humans are violent, and the ravages of rural poverty can lead to absolute madness.

As mentioned, There were eight additional “Texas Chainsaw” films. that followed the original, and they all took a slightly different look at the 1974 original’s story. Hopper’s 1986 follow-up, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2,” was a more brutal, more cartoonish version of the original, influencing a more visually striking, sports-driven cinematic style The most action-revenge movie subplot (including Dennis Hopper). “Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III,” a 1990s film directed by Jeff Burr, is the last film to receive an X rating from the MPAA (before they switched the rating to NC-17).

Henkel’s 1996 special “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation,” starring Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger before they became big stars, is one of the craziest, worst things you’ll ever see. It seems the Illuminati has been controlling the cannibal family the whole time(!).

In 2003, there was a brilliant remake directed by Marcus Nispel, transforming the grime of the original into an ultra-shot, MTV-like style. It was a huge success and spawned its own introduction. Since it was a remake, he looked back to real-life crimes committed by Ed Gein for inspiration.

The 2013 film “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” was a reboot of the series that ignored all sequels, and starred a young Alexandra Daddario. It’s a very good movie. 2017’s “Leatherface” served as a prequel to the original film, while 2022’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” was another reboot that ignored sequels, including “Texas Chainsaw 3-D.” Yes, it’s confusing that three of the films in the series have titles that vary slightly from the phrase “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” while two of them are called “Leatherface.”

Aside from the remake, were any of the sequels and prequels inspired by real-life crimes? Not real. Some of them allude more to Ed Gein than others, but other than Gein and Henley, no new crimes enter the filmmakers’ consciousness to reshape the TCM narrative. All sequels follow their own internal mythology.