The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

The setup

On a hot summer day in rural Texas, five young friends drive out to check on a family grave and an old homestead. They pick up a hitchhiker who frightens them, stop at a gas station that has run out of fuel, and wander toward a farmhouse that looks abandoned. The film never explains itself in advance. It simply shows people who have left the road and entered a place where ordinary rules no longer apply.

Context

Tobe Hooper had worked in Austin as a documentary cameraman, and he directed the film as well as co-composing its music. With Kim Henkel he wrote the screenplay, and the two formed a company called Vortex, Inc., with Henkel as president and Hooper as vice president. The killer was inspired in part by Ed Gein, the Wisconsin murderer who also lay behind the novel Psycho, but the story is largely invented. Henkel has also cited a Houston serial killer, Elmer Wayne Henley, as a source of ideas.

Hooper said that the idea of the chain saw came to him while he was standing in the hardware section of a busy store. The film opens with a written statement and a narration, spoken by a young John Larroquette, that claim the events were real. They were not. Hooper has said the false claim was a reaction to the sense of being lied to by the government, and the framing gave the film an air of documentary that helped its notoriety.

Why it matters

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the sources of the backwoods strand of horror, in which outsiders wander into a community that does not follow their rules. It gave the genre a visual vocabulary of sun-bleached roads, dusty farm buildings and rooms full of bones and animal remains, and it showed that extreme fear could come from a rural family as easily as from a monster.

It is also an argument about what horror needs. The film is far less graphic than its title and reputation suggest: reference works note that it rarely shows the fatal blows and relies mainly on suspense, noise and exhaustion. That is why many viewers find it more disturbing than films with much larger amounts of blood. Its influence on the slasher film is widely acknowledged, and in 2024 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry, which it describes as culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.

What to look for

• A harsh, grainy look from 16mm photography, with low-speed film and strong sunlight that makes even daytime scenes feel feverish.
• A soundscape of engines, animal noise, screams and clattering objects, credited to Hooper and Wayne Bell.
• A long dinner sequence that stretches out the horror through close-ups, repetition and sheer duration.
• Leatherface, played by Gunnar Hansen, as a figure whose mask, apron and bellowing behavior appear childlike and monstrous at once.
• A cast of largely unknown actors whose performances feel raw and physical.
• A false claim of true events at the start, which sets the audience up for a film that feels like found evidence.

Financing and the Vortex deal

The money came from a mixture of investors and promises. Bill Parsley's company, MAB, Inc., put in $60,000 for half of the film. A group called Pie in the Sky, partly led by the lawyer Joe K. Longley, provided $23,532 for 19 percent of Vortex. The planned budget of $60,000 was exceeded during editing, and estimates of the final cost range from about $93,000 to $300,000. Reference works commonly list a budget of $80,000 to $140,000.

The cast and crew were paid little. Many received deferred wages and a small percentage of profits, from a quarter of a percent up to six percent. They were not told that Vortex owned only half of the film. That detail came back to matter once the picture became a hit, and it set the stage for the long argument about who was owed what.

A brutal summer shoot

Shooting took place in the summer of 1973 near Austin. The principal location was an early twentieth-century farmhouse on Quick Hill Road near Round Rock, where a housing development now stands; the building was later moved to Kingsland and turned into a restaurant. The gas station was in Bastrop. The crew worked seven days a week, up to sixteen hours a day, in heat that reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit on July 26, and the house had no air conditioning.

Conditions inside were harsh. The house was filled with animal remains, and the smell grew worse as the days passed. The film was shot on 16mm with an Éclair camera and slow Ektachrome stock, which required a lot of light and made the sets even hotter. Hooper later said that everyone hated him by the end of the production. It took years, he added, for the others to cool off. The strain is visible in the finished film, where exhaustion looks real because much of it was.

Performers and punishment

Marilyn Burns played Sally Hardesty, the young woman who carries the film's final stretch, and she endured the worst of it. Her costume was so soaked in stage blood that it was nearly solid by the last day. Gunnar Hansen later admitted in his book Chain Saw Confidential that after trouble with stage blood he removed the tape from a prop knife and cut her finger for real. Hooper said that every member of the cast was injured at some point.

Hansen prepared for Leatherface by visiting a school for people with special needs to observe movement and speech, a choice he later described. He wore a heavy mask for twelve to sixteen hours a day through a month of shooting. Edwin Neal played the hitchhiker, Jim Siedow the gas station owner, John Dugan the grandfather, with Paul A. Partain, Allen Danziger, William Vail and Teri McMinn as the other young travelers.

The dinner scene

The most famous ordeal was the dining room sequence. According to accounts of the shoot, the cast and crew worked on it for more than twenty-six hours straight, with blackout drapes covering the windows to match the nighttime story. Temperatures in the room passed 100 degrees, and the heat caused the formaldehyde that preserved the animal props to evaporate, so the props rotted and had to be moved from shot to shot while the crew tried to match earlier takes.

Hooper wanted extensive coverage, with multiple master shots and point-of-view close-ups, and that meant many setups. John Dugan reportedly refused to endure another day in his heavy effects makeup, so his scenes had to be filmed that day. Production manager Ronald Bozman later called the experience a living nightmare, though he also allowed that it may have improved the film. In the finished sequence, the repeated cutting between eyes, hands, and objects stretches time until it feels unbearable.

Release, ratings and the Bryanston dispute

Bryanston Distributing agreed to handle the film on August 28, 1974, and it premiered in Austin on October 11, 1974. It was sold as a true story. The film was first rated X, and after several minutes were cut the MPAA gave it an R rating, though Hooper had hoped for something milder. The film was then shown across the country, including in Saturday matinees, and it earned more than $30 million in the United States and Canada, making it the 12th-highest-grossing film first released in 1974.

The filmmakers saw little of that money. Accounts describe how the investors were repaid first, leaving only about $8,100 to divide among twenty members of the cast and crew. A court later ordered Bryanston to pay the filmmakers $500,000, but by then the company had declared bankruptcy. New Line Cinema acquired the rights in 1983 and gave the producers a larger share. The film's commercial success and the creators' hardship are part of its history.

Reception, bans and recognition

Reaction was divided from the start. Roger Ebert praised its technical execution while noting that it was as violent as the title promised, and Variety called it well made despite heavy doses of gore. In San Francisco, viewers walked out in disgust, and in February 1976 police in Ottawa advised two theaters to withdraw it. Several countries restricted or banned the film, including the United Kingdom, where the BBFC cleared it uncut with an 18 certificate in 1999, and Australia, where it was approved with an R rating in 1984.

Its critical standing has grown. The film was shown in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 1975, became part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and was inducted into the Horror Hall of Fame in 1990. Aggregators now show strong approval, with Metacritic giving it 92 out of 100. In December 2024 the Library of Congress announced its selection for the National Film Registry.

Reading the film

Critics have read the film as a story about meat, and Hooper himself described it that way. The film is full of animal remains and butchery imagery, and it blurs the line between people and livestock. Some critics link this to the film's political moment, with its mix of economic decline and disillusion in the early 1970s. Robin Wood tied Leatherface's family to industrial capitalism, while Christopher Sharrett saw in it a statement about the dead end of American experience.

The film is also a key text in discussions of gender. Carol J. Clover discussed it in Men, Women and Chain Saws, the book that popularized the idea of the final girl. Sally's long ordeal, and her scream, anchor the film. Whether the story punishes or empowers her is still debated, and it is part of why the film remains useful to critics. Read next to Psycho and Halloween, it shows how the slasher form developed in stages.

Legacy and the franchise

The film launched a franchise that is covered in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre franchise hub. Hooper directed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in 1986, with Dennis Hopper, and later films include a 2003 remake produced by Michael Bay and a 2022 sequel released on Netflix. None of them replaced the original in critical standing. The character at the center of the series is explored in the entry on Leatherface.

Hooper went on to direct Poltergeist (1982) and Lifeforce (1985). For viewers following the slasher thread, the best next steps are the slasher subgenre entry and Night of the Living Dead, another American independent film from a regional base. For how noise itself becomes a weapon, read how horror uses sound.

Verified details

• Hooper and Kim Henkel formed Vortex, Inc., to make the film.
• John Larroquette narrates the opening and was reportedly paid in marijuana.
• The farmhouse stood near Round Rock, Texas, and was later moved to Kingsland.
• Temperatures reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit on July 26, 1973.
• The film was shot on 16mm with an Éclair NPR camera.
• Gunnar Hansen wore the Leatherface mask for twelve to sixteen hours a day.
• The dinner scene reportedly took about a day of shooting.
• Bryanston agreed to distribute the film on August 28, 1974.
• It was first rated X and received an R after cuts.
• It was shown at the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 1975.
• The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 2024.

Connections

• Part of the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre franchise hub.
• Character profile: Leatherface.
• Subgenre: Slasher.

Sources and further reading

• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Wikipedia
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Filmsite
• The Last Supper, Austin Chronicle
• National Film Registry class of 2024, ScreenCrush