User:Paleface Jack/Michael Myers (Halloween)/Concept and creation

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Directed by	Tobe Hooper
Written by	Kim Henkel Tobe Hooper
Produced by	Tobe Hooper
Starring	Marilyn Burns Paul A. Partain Edwin Neal Jim Siedow Gunnar Hansen
Narrated by	John Larroquette
Cinematography	Daniel Pearl
Edited by	Sallye Richardson Larry Carroll
Music by	Tobe Hooper Wayne Bell
Production company	Vortex
Distributed by	Bryanston Distributing Company
Release date	October 11, 1974 (1974-10-11)
Running time	83 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$80,000–140,000
Box office	$30.9 million

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a 1974 American horror film produced and directed by Tobe Hooper from a story and screenplay by Hooper and Kim Henkel. It stars Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow and Gunnar Hansen, who respectively portray Sally Hardesty, Franklin Hardesty, the hitchhiker, the proprietor, and Leatherface. The film follows a group of friends who fall victim to a family of cannibals while on their way to visit an old homestead. The film was marketed as being based on true events to attract a wider audience and to act as a subtle commentary on the era's political climate. Although the character of Leatherface and minor story details were inspired by the crimes of murderer Ed Gein, its plot is largely fictional. It is the first film of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise.

Hooper produced the film for less than $140,000 ($900,000 adjusted for inflation) and used a cast of relatively unknown actors drawn mainly from central Texas, where the film was shot. The limited budget forced Hooper to film for long hours seven days a week, so that he could finish as quickly as possible and reduce equipment rental costs. Due to the film's violent content, Hooper struggled to find a distributor, but it was eventually acquired by Louis Perano of Bryanston Distributing Company. Hooper limited the quantity of onscreen gore in hopes of securing a PG rating, but the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rated it R. The film faced similar difficulties internationally.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was banned in several countries, and numerous theaters stopped showing the film in response to complaints about its violence. While it initially drew a mixed reception from critics, it was highly profitable, grossing over $30 million at the domestic box office, equivalent with roughly over $150.8 million as of 2019, selling over 16.5 million tickets in 1974. It has since gained a reputation as one of the best and most influential horror films. It is credited with originating several elements common in the slasher genre, including the use of power tools as murder weapons, the characterization of the killer as a large, hulking, masked figure, and the killing of victims. It led to a franchise that continued the story of Leatherface and his family through sequels, prequels, a remake, comic books and video games.

Plot

In the early hours of August 18, 1973, a grave robber steals several remains from a cemetery near Newt, Muerto County, Texas. The robber ties a rotting corpse and other body parts onto a monument, creating a grisly display which is discovered by a local resident as the sun rises.

Driving in a van, five young people take a road trip through the area: Sally Hardesty, Jerry, Pam, Kirk, and Sally's handicapped brother Franklin. They stop at the cemetery to check on the grave of Sally and Franklin's grandfather, which appears undisturbed. As the group drive past a slaughterhouse, Franklin recounts the Hardesty family's history with animal slaughter. They pick up a hitchhiker who says that his own family also has experience with animal slaughter. When the group refuse to pay the hitchhiker for a photograph, he attacks Franklin and smears a bloody symbol on the side of the van as he is ejected. Low on gas, the van stops at a station whose proprietor says that no fuel is available. The group explore a nearby abandoned house, owned by the Hardesty family.

Kirk and Pam leave the others behind, planning to have sex. They discover another nearby house, running gas-powered generators. Hoping to barter for gas, Kirk enters the house. A large man wearing a mask made of skin attacks Kirk with a hammer, killing him. When Pam enters the house, she finds its living room strewn with human and animal bones. The man grabs her, impales her on a meat hook, and starts up a gas-powered chainsaw to dismember Kirk's body as Pam watches. In the evening, Jerry searches for Pam and Kirk. When he enters the other house, he finds Pam's nearly-dead, spasming body in a chest freezer. The masked man kills Jerry with a hammer.

At night, Sally and Franklin start towards the other house. The masked man ambushes them, killing Franklin with the chainsaw. The man chases Sally into the house, where she finds a very old, seemingly dead man and a woman's rotting corpse. The man chases Sally back to the gas station and vanishes. The station's proprietor comforts Sally for a moment, after which he beats and subdues her, loading her into his pickup truck. The proprietor drives to the other house, and the hitchhiker appears. The proprietor scolds him for his actions at the cemetery, identifying the hitchhiker as the grave robber. As they enter the house, the masked man reappears, dressed in women's clothing. The proprietor identifies the masked man and the hitchhiker as brothers, and the hitchhiker refers to the masked man as "Leatherface". The two brothers bring the old man—"Grandpa"—down the stairs and cut Sally's finger so that Grandpa can suck her blood. Sally faints.

The next morning, Sally regains consciousness. The men taunt her and bicker with each other, resolving to kill her with a hammer. They try to include Grandpa in the activity, but Grandpa's grip is weak, and he drops the hammer repeatedly. Sally breaks free and runs onto a road in front of the house, pursued by the brothers. An oncoming truck accidentally runs over the hitchhiker, killing him. The truck driver attacks Leatherface with a large wrench, injuring him, and escapes on foot. Sally, covered in blood, flags down a passing pickup truck and climbs into the bed, narrowly escaping Leatherface. As the pickup drives away, Sally laughs giddily. Leatherface flails his chainsaw in frustration as the sun rises.

Cast

• Marilyn Burns as Sally Hardesty
• Allen Danziger as Jerry
• Paul A. Partain as Franklin Hardesty
• William Vail as Kirk
• Teri McMinn as Pam
• Edwin Neal as Hitchhiker
• Jim Siedow as Old Man
• Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface
• John Dugan as Grandfather
• Robert Courtin as Window Washer
• William Creamer as Bearded Man
• John Henry Faulk as Storyteller
• Jerry Green as Cowboy
• Ed Guinn as Cattle Truck Driver
• Joe Bill Hogan as Drunk
• Perry Lorenz as Pick Up Driver
• John Larroquette as Narrator

Production

Development

The concept for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre arose in the early 1970s while Tobe Hooper was working as an assistant film director at the University of Texas at Austin and as a documentary cameraman. He had already developed a story involving the elements of isolation, the woods, and darkness. He credited the graphic coverage of violence by San Antonio news outlets as one inspiration for the film and based elements of the plot on murderer Ed Gein, who committed his crimes in 1950s Wisconsin; Gein inspired other horror films such as Psycho (1960) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). During development, Hooper used the working titles of Headcheese and Leatherface.

I definitely studied Gein ... but I also noticed a murder case in Houston at the time, a serial murderer you probably remember named Elmer Wayne Henley. He was a young man who recruited victims for an older homosexual man. I saw some news report where Elmer Wayne ... 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.

— Kim Henkel

Hooper has cited changes in the cultural and political landscape as central influences on the film. His intentional misinformation, that the "film you are about to see is true", was a response to being "lied to by the government about things that were going on all over the world", including Watergate, the 1973 oil crisis, and "the massacres and atrocities in the Vietnam War". The "lack of sentimentality and the brutality of things" that Hooper noticed while watching the local news, whose graphic coverage was epitomized by "showing brains spilled all over the road", led to his belief that "man was the real monster here, just wearing a different face, so I put a literal mask on the monster in my film". The idea of using a chainsaw as the murder weapon came to Hooper while he was in the hardware section of a busy store, contemplating how to speed his way through the crowd.

Hooper and Kim Henkel cowrote the screenplay and formed Vortex, Inc. with Henkel as president and Hooper as vice president. They asked Bill Parsley, a friend of Hooper, to provide funding. Parsley formed a company named MAB, Inc. through which he invested $60,000 in the production. In return, MAB owned 50% of the film and its profits. Production manager Ron Bozman told most of the cast and crew that he would have to defer part of their salaries until after it was sold to a distributor. Vortex made the idea more attractive by awarding them a share of its potential profits, ranging from 0.25 to 6%, similar to mortgage points. The cast and crew were not informed that Vortex owned only 50%, which meant their points were worth half of the assumed value.

Casting

Many of the cast members at the time were relatively unknown actors—Texans who had played roles in commercials, television, and stage shows, as well as performers whom Hooper knew personally, such as Allen Danziger and Jim Siedow. Involvement in the film propelled some of them into the motion picture industry. The lead role of Sally was given to Marilyn Burns, who had appeared previously on stage and served on the film commission board at UT Austin while studying there. Teri McMinn was a student who worked with local theater companies, including the Dallas Theater Center. Henkel called McMinn to come in for a reading after he spotted her picture in the Austin American-Statesman. For her last call-back he requested that she wear short shorts, which proved to be the most comfortable of all the cast members' costumes.

Icelandic-American actor Gunnar Hansen was selected for the role of Leatherface. He regarded Leatherface as having an intellectual disability and having never learned to speak properly. To research his character in preparation for his role, Hansen visited a special needs school and watched how the students moved and spoke. John Larroquette performed the narration in the opening credits, for which he was paid in marijuana.

Filming

The primary filming location was an early 1900s farmhouse located on Quick Hill Road near Round Rock, Texas, where the La Frontera development is now located. The small budget and concerns over high-cost equipment rentals meant the crew filmed seven days a week, up to 16 hours a day. The environment was humid and the cast and crew found conditions tough; temperatures peaked at 110°F (43 °C) on July 26. Hansen later recalled, "It was 95, 100 degrees every day during filming. They wouldn't wash my costume because they were worried that the laundry might lose it, or that it would change color. They didn't have enough money for a second costume. So I wore that [mask] 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for a month."

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was mainly shot using an Eclair NPR 16mm camera with fine-grain, low-speed film that required four times more light than modern digital cameras. Most of the filming took place in the farmhouse, which was filled with furniture constructed from animal bones and a latex material used as upholstery to give the appearance of human skin. The house was not cooled, and there was little ventilation. The crew covered its walls with drops of animal blood obtained from a local slaughterhouse. Art director Robert A. Burns drove around the countryside and collected the remains of cattle and other animals in various stages of decomposition, with which he littered the floors of the house.

The special effects were simple and limited by the budget. The on-screen blood was real in some cases, such as the scene in which Leatherface feeds "Grandpa". The crew had difficulty getting the stage blood to come out of its tube, so instead Burns's index finger was cut with a razor. Burns's costume was so drenched with stage blood that it was "virtually solid" by the last day of shooting. The scene in which Leatherface dismembers Kirk with a chainsaw worried actor William Vail (Kirk). After telling Vail to stay still lest he really be killed, Hansen brought the running chainsaw to within 3 inches (8 cm) of Vail's face. A real hammer was used for the climactic scene at the end, with some takes also featuring a mock-up. However, the actor playing Grandpa was aiming for the floor rather than his victim's head. Still, the shoot was somewhat dangerous, with Hooper noting at the wrap party that all cast members had obtained some level of injury. He stated that "everyone hated me by the end of the production" and that "it just took years for them to kind of cool off."

Post-production

The production exceeded its original $60,000 (about $371,000 adjusted for inflation) budget during editing. Sources differ on the film's final cost, offering figures between $93,000 (about $575,000 inflation-adjusted) and $300,000 (about $1,900,000 inflation-adjusted). A film production group, Pie in the Sky, partially led by future President of the Texas State Bar Joe K. Longley provided $23,532 (about $145,000 inflation-adjusted) in exchange for 19% of Vortex. This left Henkel, Hooper and the rest of the cast and crew with a 40.5% stake. Warren Skaaren, then head of the Texas Film Commission, helped secure the distribution deal with Bryanston Distributing Company. David Foster, who would later produce the 1982 horror film The Thing, arranged for a private screening for some of Bryanston's West Coast executives, and received 1.5% of Vortex's profits and a deferred fee of $500 (about $3,100 inflation-adjusted).

On August 28, 1974, Louis Peraino of Bryanston agreed to distribute the film worldwide, from which Bozman and Skaaren would receive $225,000 (about $1,400,000 inflation-adjusted) and 35% of the profits. Years later Bozman stated, "We made a deal with the devil, [sigh], and I guess that, in a way, we got what we deserved." They signed the contract with Bryanston and, after the investors recouped their money (with interest),—and after Skaaren, the lawyers, and the accountants were paid—only $8,100 (about $50,000 inflation-adjusted) was left to be divided among the 20 cast and crew members. Eventually the producers sued Bryanston for failing to pay them their full percentage of the box office profits. A court judgment instructed Bryanston to pay the filmmakers $500,000 (about $3,100,000 inflation-adjusted), but by then the company had declared bankruptcy. In 1983, New Line Cinema acquired the distribution rights from Bryanston and gave the producers a larger share of the profits.

Release

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre premiered in Austin, Texas, on October 1, 1974, almost a year after filming concluded. It screened nationally in the United States as a Saturday afternoon matinée and its false marketing as a "true story" helped it attract a broad audience. For eight years after 1976, it was annually reissued to first-run theaters, promoted by full-page ads. The film eventually grossed more than $30 million in the United States and Canada ($14.4 million in rentals), making it the 12th highest-grossing film initially released in 1974, despite its minuscule budget. Among independent films, it was overtaken in 1978 by John Carpenter's Halloween, which grossed $47 million.

The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin. [...]

— The opening crawl falsely suggests that the film is based on true events, a conceit that contributed to its success.

Hooper reportedly hoped that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) would give the complete, uncut release print a "PG" rating due to its minimal amount of visible gore. Instead, it was originally rated "X". After several minutes were cut, it was resubmitted to the MPAA and received an "R" rating. A distributor apparently restored the offending material, and at least one theater presented the full version under an "R". In San Francisco, cinema-goers walked out of theaters in disgust and in February 1976, two theaters in Ottawa, Canada, were advised by local police to withdraw the film lest they face morality charges.

After its initial British release, including a one-year theatrical run in London, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was initially banned on the advice of British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) Secretary Stephen Murphy, and subsequently by his successor, James Ferman. While the British ban was in force the word "chainsaw" itself was barred from movie titles, forcing imitators to rename their films. In 1998, despite the BBFC ban, Camden London Borough Council granted the film a license. The following year the BBFC passed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre uncut for release with an 18 certificate, and it was broadcast a year later on Channel 4.

When the 83-minute version of the film was submitted to the Australian Classification Board by distributor Seven Keys in June 1975, the Board denied the film a classification, and similarly refused classification of a 77-minute print in December that year. In 1981, the 83-minute version submitted by Greater Union Film Distributors was again refused registration. It was later submitted by Filmways Australasian Distributors and approved for an "R" rating in 1984. It was banned for periods in many other countries, including Brazil, Chile, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Singapore, Sweden and West Germany. In Sweden, it would also symbolize a video nasty, a discussed topic at the time.

Sources

Books

• Allon, Yoram; Patterson, Hannah (2002). Contemporary North American Film Directors: A Wallflower Critical Guide. Wallflower Press. ISBN 978-1-903364-52-9.
• Chibnall, Steve; Petley, Julian (2002). British Horror Cinema. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-23004-9.
• Clover, Carol J. (1993). Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-00620-8.
• Cook, David (2000). Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23265-5.
• Freeland, Cynthia (2002). The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-8133-6563-3.
• Haines, Richard (2003). The Moviegoing Experience, 1968–2001. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-1361-4.
• Hansen, Gunnar (2013). Chain Saw Confidential: How We Made the World's Most Notorious Horror Movie. Chronicle Books. ISBN 978-1-4521-1449-1.
• Jaworzyn, Stefan (2004). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Companion. Titan Books. ISBN 978-1-84023-660-6.
• Macor, Alison (2010). Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas. University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-72243-9.
• Muir, John (2002). Horror Films of the 1970s. McFarland & Company. p. 332. ISBN 978-0-7864-1249-5.
• Muir, John (2002). Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-1282-2.
• Rockoff, Adam (2002). Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-1227-3.
• Sharrett, Christopher (2004). "The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre". In Grant, Barry Keith; Sharrett, Christopher (eds.). Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-5013-2.
• Worland, Rick (2006). The Horror Film: An Introduction. Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-3902-1.
• Dika, Vera (2003). Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Uses of Nostalgia. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-01631-5.
• Greenberg, Harvey (1994). Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-07287-8.
• Hand, Stephen (2004). The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Games Workshop. ISBN 978-1-84416-060-0.
• Phillips, Kendall (2005). "The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)". Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-275-98353-6.

Periodicals

• Bloom, John (November 2004). "They Came. They Sawed". Texas Monthly. Vol. 32. Archived from the original on 2011-07-08.
• Bowen, John (November 2004). "Return of the Power Tool Killer". Rue Morgue. No. 42. Marrs Media. pp. 16–22. ISSN 1481-1103.
• Merritt, Naomi (2010). "Cannibalistic Capitalism and other American Delicacies: A Bataillean Taste of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre". Film-Philosophy. 14 (1): 202–231. doi:10.3366/film.2010.0007. ISSN 1466-4615.
• Donaldson, Lucy Fife (2010). "Access and Excess in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (PDF). Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism (1).

Media

• David Gregory (Director) (2000). Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth (Documentary). United States: Blue Underground.}}