Leatherface

Who they are

Leatherface is the hulking, masked figure at the center of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper's low-budget Texas nightmare. He lives in a decaying farmhouse with a family of men who once worked in a slaughterhouse, and he does the family's heavy work. He wears aprons and masks made from human skin, he uses a chain saw and a sledgehammer, and he almost never speaks. What he does produce are squeals, grunts and shrieks, which make him sound less like a man in control than like a frightened animal.

That is the first thing to understand about him. The later slasher tradition turned the masked killer into a patient, unstoppable stalker. The original Leatherface is something rougher: a limited, frightened and violent man who answers to other people and who panics when things go wrong. Gunnar Hansen, the actor who created him in 1974, always insisted that the character was not a villain in the usual sense, and the film never gives him an origin story or a motive that makes the violence comfortable.

He is also the face of a long, uneven franchise. Over nearly fifty years the character has been played by eight actors across nine films, each version reflecting what the filmmakers of the moment wanted him to be: a blunt child, a comic grotesque, a rage-driven murderer, an aging monster. The franchise entry tracks the films in order. This page follows the character.

Why they became iconic

The silhouette is one of the most recognized in cinema: a big man in a stained apron and a pale mask, with a chain saw raised overhead. Critics credit him with establishing the ordinary-tool weapon and the large, silent, nearly personality-free killer that later slasher villains refined.

His power comes from contradiction. He is terrifying in motion and pitiable at rest, and the film refuses to let the audience settle on either response. Because he is part of a household rather than a lone maniac, he also turns the idea of the family into something to fear. That makes him more unsettling than a killer who simply hunts.

Defining traits

• Wears masks of skin, which Hansen and co-writer Kim Henkel have both described as personalities he cannot express himself.
• Communicates through noises and gestures, not words.
• Acts in bursts of panic, rage or obedience instead of calm, patient stalking.
• Takes orders from his relatives and is shown as dependent on them.
• Carries a chain saw, a hammer and an apron, objects from a workplace rather than weapons made for a movie.

Where the character came from

Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel were young Texans working in Austin when they began the story. Hooper has said he was disturbed by the violence on the evening news in the early 1970s and came to feel that people were the real monsters. Henkel argued that a human killer was scarier than a supernatural one. The chain saw, according to Hooper's own account, came to him while he stood frustrated in a crowded hardware store and imagined the fastest way through the aisle.

Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein partly inspired the film. Hooper heard stories about Gein from relatives of people who lived near his crimes, though he said he did not realize the connection until after the film's release. The idea of masks and furniture made from human remains is one of the elements that the film took from the Gein case, and it appears in the earlier Deranged (1974), which was released about eight months before Hooper's movie. Hooper also pointed to the cartoon duckling Baby Huey as an influence, an odd and revealing detail: the ideal Leatherface is huge, childlike and dangerous because he does not understand his own strength. Early drafts gave him a tortured childhood, and that was removed.

Gunnar Hansen's performance

Hansen was a graduate student in Austin in 1973, born in Reykjavík, Iceland, and raised partly in Maine and Texas. He did not set out to be an actor. According to his own accounts, he landed the part almost by accident, through a friend of an actor who was originally wanted for it. At the audition, he recalled, Hooper asked whether he was violent and whether he was crazy, and joked that high heels might make him look bigger.

To prepare, Hansen visited a special-needs school to see how people there moved and spoke, and said later that he was not suggesting such people resembled the character. He saw Leatherface as having an intellectual disability and never having learned to speak properly. The conditions were harsh. The Texas summer pushed temperatures to 110 degrees Fahrenheit, shooting days ran as long as sixteen hours, and he said he wore the mask twelve to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for a month. The costume was not laundered, and the production could not afford a second. He also said he came close to actor William Vail with the running chain saw, within about three inches of his face.

Masks, apron and boots

Art director Robert A. Burns built three masks for the 1974 film: the Killing Mask, the Old Lady Mask and a third called the Pretty Woman Mask, which Henkel nicknamed the Clarabell Clown mask. The Killing Mask was modeled from the head of producer Jay Parsley, using face casts made with the help of Dr. W. E. Barnes. The pieces were made from latex and fiberglass insulation, and the dentures used baby teeth. Hansen wore a butcher's apron and his own cowboy boots, with heels added to make him taller.

Every later film redesigned the face. Tom Savini and Mitch Devane made a patchwork mask for the 1986 sequel; the KNB EFX Group, led by Robert Kurtzman and Greg Nicotero, made a more disfigured one in 1990; and the 2003 remake's effects artist, Scott Stoddard, pictured him as an amateur taxidermist. For the 2022 film, Illusion Industries produced around twenty masks in five looks, and the filmmakers have said producers first asked for something closer to Michael Myers. The history of the masks is the history of the series in miniature.

Nine films, eight actors

Hansen was followed in the 1986 sequel by Bill Johnson, with stunt doubles Bob Elmore and Tom Morga also working in the costume. R. A. Mihailoff took the part in Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), and Robert Jacks played him in the 1995 film that is variously titled The Next Generation and The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Andrew Bryniarski played him in the 2003 remake and its 2006 prequel, The Beginning, the only actor to play the role in more than one film. Dan Yeager appeared in Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013) with Hansen in a supporting role, and Sam Strike played a young version in the 2017 prequel Leatherface. Mark Burnham played an older Leatherface in the 2022 film released by Netflix.

The character changed with each hand. In the 1986 film he is treated as a figure coming of age, a view that Carol J. Clover has described as a state of being locked in childhood before a change. The third film makes him a rebellious teenager. The 1995 film is the most openly comic, and one critic called it a tortured drag queen. The 2003 remake turns him into a sadistic serial killer. The 2013 film makes no reference to the other sequels, and the 2022 film is set fifty years after the original and gives him an older, motherly figure in his life.

Reception and what critics make of him

Reaction to the character has tracked reaction to the film. When The Texas Chain Saw Massacre opened in Austin on October 11, 1974, it was rated X, then cut to earn an R, and it was banned for years in the United Kingdom and in other countries. Over time it became accepted as a landmark. The Museum of Modern Art holds it in its permanent collection, and the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 2024.

Scholars have read the character in several ways. Lorna Piatti-Farnell treats the mask as a symbol of the evil inside humanity. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Kim Newman have analyzed his cross-dressing and maternal role as a mockery of traditional family roles. Jason Zinoman compared him to Boris Karloff's version of Frankenstein's monster, a being who provokes both pity and dread. Hooper himself called him a big baby.

Influence

The mask-and-tool killer became standard equipment for the slasher film. Michael Myers in Halloween and Jason Voorhees are widely seen as heirs to Leatherface's template, and in 1980 the critic Morris Dickstein compared Leatherface and Myers in an essay called The Aesthetics of Fright. Yet most imitators dropped the quality that made Hooper's film work, which was the sense that the killer is not in charge.

The character has traveled well outside cinema. The British punk band Leatherface took its name from him, and the Ramones wrote a song inspired by the film. Professional wrestlers adopted the gimmick in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He has been a playable character in Mortal Kombat X, Dead by Daylight and other games, a figure in Halloween Horror Nights, and a collectible from many toy companies. The manga artist Tatsuki Fujimoto has named the original film as a main inspiration for Chainsaw Man. Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 7 drew on his design and his family dynamic, and critics have compared later television killers to him.

Related reading and how to approach the films

Start with the 1974 film and then pick the version you want. Anyone interested in the relationship between a real crime and a horror character should also read the entry on Norman Bates, who drew on the same Wisconsin case in a very different way. The two characters share a source and little else: Norman hides behind politeness, Leatherface hides behind a mask.

For the tradition that grew from his film, move to Michael Myers and the 1978 Halloween, where the killer is patient and the camera is elegant. The contrast makes Hooper's rawness clearer. Hansen himself later wrote a book about the shoot, Chain Saw Confidential (2013), and acted in about twenty more films. He died in November 2015 at age 68.

Verified details

• Gunnar Hansen was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, and later wrote a travel memoir, Islands at the Edge of Time (1993).
• The film premiered in Austin, Texas, on October 11, 1974.
• The original three masks were designed by Robert A. Burns.
• The Killing Mask used a cast of producer Jay Parsley's head.
• Hansen wore his own cowboy boots, with heels added, in the first film.
• Hooper has said the idea of the chain saw came to him in a hardware store.
• Andrew Bryniarski played Leatherface in both the 2003 remake and the 2006 prequel.
• The 2022 film was released on Netflix on February 18, 2022, after David Blue Garcia replaced the original directors.
• The Library of Congress selected the original film for the National Film Registry in 2024.
• The British punk band Leatherface took its name from the character.

Sources and further reading

• Leatherface, Wikipedia
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Wikipedia
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (franchise), Wikipedia
• Gunnar Hansen, Wikipedia
• Ed Gein, Wikipedia
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains, Wikipedia

Connections

• Franchise hub: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.