Tobe Hooper’s heartbreaking 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not based on a true story, despite what the film’s marketing might have you believe. There was no Texas serial killer nicknamed Leatherface, nor was there ever a real family of backcountry cannibals called the Sawyers. In fact, even within the mythology of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it’s difficult to keep the facts straight, as the series has been rebooted several times. At this point in time, The Texas Chainsaw series consisted of nine filmsand at least four of them are reboots, reimaginings or prequels.
To summarize: Texas Chain Saw follows a quintet of teenagers as they travel in a van through a more remote area of
However, as all TCM fans know, the events in Hooper’s original film were actually based on fact. Hooper and his co-screenwriter Kim Henkel followed the news closely and were impressed by the details surrounding notorious serial killers like Ed Gein and Elmer Wayne Henley. In fact, many of the details of Leatherface’s murders come from the actual Ed Gein murders (which we’ll discuss below). Hooper also commented on the raw violence seen in the news media in 1974. Below are the true events that inspired the film.
Ed Gein influenced horror classics outside of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The many TCM fans 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 series of grisly crimes from around 1947 until his arrest in 1957. Nickname: Plainfield Ghoul (based on his base of operations in Plainfield, Wisconsin), Gein was known for looting the local cemetery, exhuming corpses and using their bones to make furniture and other souvenirs.
Gein was arrested after kidnapping and murdering a shopkeeper named Bernice Worden, whose body he also severely mutilated. When police searched his home looking for Worden, they found his large collection of spooky crafts, including some too hideous to list here. Gein actually made masks from several women’s facial skin, as well as a corset from female skin. It was rumored that Gein claimed he was recreating a suit out of human skin so he could put it on and “resurrect” his mother, but His case became a major sensation over the years. Gein confessed to kidnapping and killing Worden and a woman named Mary Hogan three years earlier. Gein was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and died of lung cancer in 1984.
The cauldron in which he cooked the flesh of some corpses is on display Zak Bagan’s Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. The details of Gein’s habit of collecting corpses attracted widespread attention from morbid onlookers, and his home became a tourist attraction.
Some of the Sawyer family crafts featured in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were directly inspired by Geins, including all of the human skulls and lampshades made from human skin, not to mention the woman’s skin mask that Leatherface infamously wore. Gein was not a cannibal. His obsession with female bodies, particularly his mother’s, also served as inspiration for Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs.
Gein also got his own film in a 2000 film called Ed Gein.
Elmer Wayne Henley, the lesser-known inspiration for Leatherface
Ed Gein operated out of Wisconsin. So where does Chain Saw’s Texas location come from? Less known to TCM fans was the real-life murderer and sex trafficker Elmer Wayne Henley, a native Texan and a person Hooper has also cited it as an inspiration. Henley, along with his partner Dean Corll, kidnapped and/or trafficked teenagers for a human trafficker named David Brooks, who sold the boys. The pair attacked and killed six boys while retrieving them.
No such assaults occur in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which focused much more on Ed Gein’s crimes as inspiration. On the DVD commentary track for “Chain Saw” Co-screenwriter Kim Henkel admitted that he had seen Henley’s video confession and was fascinated. He was deeply attracted to Henley’s claims that he would endure his punishment “like a man” and that he oscillated between humility and moral superiority. According to Henkel, Henley’s attitudes were used as the basis for the portrayal of the murderers in the film. They know that killing and assaulting are wrong, but only occasionally. And they don’t always care. Henkel called it “moral schizophrenia.”
Shortly before his arrest in 1973, Henley shot Corll in the head because he went too far with his murder/sex games. Henley himself was captured in 1973 and sentenced to six consecutive 99-year sentences. Brooks was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2020 due to complications from COVID-19. Henley remains in captivity to this day.
For Tobe Hooper, the sensational media coverage of the Henley trial also marked a change in the way American audiences consumed violence. That also inspired him.
How “Texas Chain Saw” director Tobe Hooper created his killer
While the violence of Hooper’s original “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” stands out, the film is more often praised for its gritty style. The film is shabby and dirty, and the footage itself appears to have been stored on a slaughterhouse shelf for a long time, giving it a greasy, almost yellowed quality. “Texas Chain Saw” is difficult for many viewers to understand because it almost looks like a real snuff film. It should be noted that Hooper worked as a documentary cameraman while studying film at the University of Texas at Austin.
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 in detail or even graphically depicted. Remember, 1973 was in the midst of the Vietnam War, and many of the horrors of that conflict found their way onto American television screens and newspapers. 1974 was too in the wake of the Watergate scandal and experienced a major oil crisis and an economic recession. No one felt like they could trust the government anymore, and cynicism was high. In a 2004 edition of Rue Morgue MagazineHooper told an interviewer that he remembered seeing “brains all over the street” on television and concluded that “the human was the real monster here, just with a different face, so I went with that.” Monster put a literal mask on my face.” Movie.”
While the violence in “Texas Chain Saw” is horrifying, Hooper saw it as a logical extension of the evil he saw on the news every day. Texas Chain Saw may be a dark, dirty documentary film about evil cannibals, but Hooper clearly didn’t think it was fantastic. People are violent and devastating rural poverty can lead to utter insanity.
Did anything really inspire the Texas Chain Saw Massacre sequels?
As mentioned, There were eight other “Texas Chainsaw” films that followed the original, and everyone looked at the original 1974 story a little differently. Hooper’s 1986 follow-up, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, was a wilder, more cartoonish version of the original, had a flashier, more cinematic style, and featured a more action-packed revenge subplot (starring Dennis Hopper). 1990’s Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, directed by Jeff Burr, is notable only for being the last film to receive an X rating from the MPAA (before they changed the rating to NC-17 ).
Henkel’s own 1996 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation starred Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger before they became big stars, and it’s one of the craziest – and worst – things you’ll ever see . It seems that the Illuminati had been controlling the cannibal family all along (!).
In 2003, there was a souped-up remake directed by Marcus Nispel that transformed the dreck of the original into MTV-esque, over-photographed super-style. It was a hit and spawned its own prequel. Since it was a remake, Ed Gein’s true crimes were used as inspiration.
2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3-D was a reboot of the series that ignored all sequels and starred a young Alexandra Daddario. It’s a pretty good movie. The 2017 film Leatherface served as a prequel to the original, while 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre was another reboot that ignored the sequels, including Texas Chainsaw 3-D. Yes, it’s confusing that three of the films in the series have titles that are slight variations on the phrase “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” while two of them are called “Leatherface.”
Aside from the remake, have any sequels and prequels been inspired by true crimes? Not really. Some of them reference Ed Gein more than others, but aside from Gein and Henley, the filmmakers haven’t thought of any new crimes that could reshape the TCM narrative. The sequels all follow their own internal mythologies.
