Indeed, Texas Chainsawis now such a horror staple that discussions surrounding it have become well-worn: the initial shock and controversy surrounding its release, particularly in the UK, where the BBFC banned it for several years. Even today, Texas Chainsawis rightly mentioned in the same breath as such boundary-pushing features as Night of the Living Dead, The Last House on the Left, and Halloween.
As history now recalls, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as its title calls it – joined a growing club of low-budget horror movies that changed the genre forever.
#GUNNAR HANSEN THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE MOVIE#
Partain (who played the wheelchair-bound Franklin) were kept away from the rest of the cast.Īll of this for a movie that, at least in theory, should have shown at a few grindhouse theatres and drive-ins before vanishing without a trace. Then there were the psychological bruises from Hooper’s exacting approach: the punishingly long days (one stretched to 18 hours or more, depending on who’s telling the story), the multiple takes, his insistence that actors Hansen and Paul A. Actor William Vail still had the fading remnants of a black eye from where Gunnar Hansen (the hulking man behind the Leatherface mask) had struck him with a prop hammer. At one pivotal moment, a special effect failed to work properly so Burns had her finger sliced open for real, so that Dugan’s “grandfather” could lick the blood from the wound as the camera rolled.īy the time the wrap party took place at the end of 32 days’ filming, just about everyone involved in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was tired, sore, and angry. Marilyn Burns, who played the film’s tormented “final girl,” had it even worse: she was forced to spend hours tied to a chair, covered in fake blood. Several actors, including 18-year-old John Dugan, who plays a catatonic “grandfather,” had to spend hours each day in stifling old-man makeup. Funds didn’t stretch to a wardrobe of multiple costumes, so the cast were forced to wear the same filthy outfit day after day in order to maintain continuity. The stench was so bad that some crewmembers were throwing up outside between takes.ĭirected by Tobe Hooper, then a largely unknown 20-something filmmaker from Austin, the film’s painfully low budget only added to the misery. The interior location where much of the film’s third act took place, an old farmhouse outside Round Rock, was dressed with animal bones and blood, which had begun to stink in the broiling Texas air. The heat and humidity were almost unbearable.
In the summer of 1973, the cast and crew of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were suffering through what was, by most accounts, a thoroughly miserable shoot.