Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is our episode right before Halloween episode. You're in Stuff you Should Know.
Yeah, big CoA here obviously. Yeah, I mean hopefully parents aren't gonna click on this if they're young children in the car, because it'll probably be Texas chainsaw mask or something or other in the title.
Yeah, it's not gonna be like how ponies work, right, I don't want to trick anybody.
Yeah, so CooA about that. Obviously, it's gonna have some pretty gruesome material in it. But also because we're gonna be talking a lot about this movie and we're gonna go over the plot and everything. So if it's kind of a spoiler situation where you don't want to hear about it and you haven't seen it somehow, then tune out. Some people like to know what happens before they go into a horror movie.
You know, Yes, but that's a that's a great spoiler alert.
If you haven't seen it, go watch it it. Like people use the word masterpiece about this movie a lot, and like not just fans of the film, like sickos, like critics, like academics who teach film appreciation, like it is a really, really good movie, whether you like horror movies or not, because the key to this is if you get scared at horror movies, approach it like it's a dark comedy, and it will make sense to use a dark comedy, and you will probably laugh out loud
in a couple of parts. So it can be taken both ways, and sometimes in some parts of this both ways at the same time.
Yeah, see that. I've never understood that take, because I don't see any dark comedy that notions about it whatsoever. I think it's I think it's one of the most terrifying movies I've ever seen, if not the most terrifying.
Well, you and Rex Reid feel the same way.
Yeah, every time I see it, and I just saw it for the first time a few years ago finally, and it's just it's so disturbing and unsettling every single time, even though I know it's coming.
I watched it again last night and yeah, so when it finished, when it cuts at the end and goes see the credits, I literally said out loud, that is a great movie, and you me. I was sitting there by myself watching it. I said it out loud. It just took it out of me. And I had never watched it as a comedy before either. I'd never even turned up that anybody considered it a comedy or a dark comedy. But going into it knowing that I definitely found some spots here or there.
Yeah, I didn't do. You know what I said at the end last night out loud by myself, what Jerry's gonna have to beat it? But it has that famous just abrupt ending and cut to black. Yeah, And I curled up on my couch and I just said, this movie like every time, it gets me in a place where I'm just like, like if there was a camera on my face while I'm watching it, it's just my face. It just gnarled up the whole time, Like, oh my god, it's just so disturbing.
I think me and a lot of people would love to watch a reaction video of you watching just that. Yeah, Texas Chainsaw Masker.
A camera trained on my face for eighty three minutes exactly.
Yeah, And it is just eighty three minutes. It's not even an hour and a half of your time, you know, like you just watch it, breeze through it and say that was a great movie, or what you said at the end. And let me ask you this, Can you think of another horror movie that makes you feel like that whenever you watch it?
Yeah? I mean there's quite a few movies that are still disturbing to me, but this one takes the cake for sure.
Wow. So yeah, if you haven't seen Texas Chainsaw Masker and you have any kind of curiosity, I strongly urge you to pause this and go watch it and come back whatever, it doesn't matter. I think you can still appreciate this episode, don't you. Because it's not just about the movie itself, it's about how it was made.
Because, yeah, it.
Was an independent picture. It's one of the most successful independent films of all time. Yeah, and it was made by students of film, literal students of film who loved making movies, and they made again, a masterpiece is what a lot of people call it.
Yeah. Yeah, And we're going to get to the plot and go through that, as we said, but even I just want to say, even the beginning, that first thirty minutes, before they even set foot inside the bad house. That's all just the way it's shot and laid out, and the sound, it's just all disturbs. It disturbs me. It's a no end, I know.
And to think like that it was shot by a twenty three year.
Old I know.
So let's talk about this. Let's get into the nuts and bolts of how the whole thing came about. How about that?
Yeah, and we can only start with director Toby Hooper, who apparently was inspired by a few different things to come up with this movie. One pretty obviously is ed Gein, who's a serial killer who we have not covered yet. At some point we'll probably get into the skin suit making crimes of ed Gin. Right, we did ed I think it's Geen, isn't it. We did a whole episode.
We did a whole episode on mister Gean.
The technic we did.
We did. It wasn't the best, so I can see how you wouldn't remember it.
Well.
I thought we just put him in something else. Okay, we'll scratch that. Then.
Yeah, he appeared in some episode, but we ended up making a whole episode about him.
I see it now, ed Gan the serial Killers, serial killer. Yes, it had to be your title. That's good.
I think it was. But ed Gen he wasn't just the inspiration for leather face from Texas Chainsaw Masker. And the reason why is if you're not familiar with ed Gean he wore skin suits. He was also the influence for a character Buffalo Bill and Sid to the Lambs,
and he inspired the movie Psycho. Not like Norman Bates bears any resemblance to him whatsoever, aside from the whole cross dressing thing, I guess is what inspired it, but more of the fact that there was someone out there who was capable of doing these things inspired a movie that about Norman Bates, who was capable of doing horrible things too.
Yeah, So that was the first thing. The second thing was he had a friend, Toby Hooper did the director, who was a doctor or I guess a med student at the time, who said that he had removed the face of a cadaver and wore it as a Halloween mask. So there's one for your nightmares.
Yeah, even if he hadn't done that, to be telling people that you had done that, ye'd be serious about it. That's pretty nuts.
Yeah. And then the last thing was Toby Hooper was apparently Christmas shopping at a Montgomery Ward store one time, and it was just really, really crowded, and I get the sense that he was having a bit of a panicky trying to get out of there, and saw some chainsaws on display, and it was like, I'd be great if I could grab one of those and just cut my way out of here.
Yeah, exactly, So he'd put all those things together. They came together end of nineteen seventy two, beginning of nineteen seventy three into this story that that just kind of clicked in his head. I also saw that Hansel and Gretel form some like loose influence on the.
Whole thing, too.
Sure, But he got together with a friend of his name Kim Henkel, and he and Henkel wrote the script together. They met Toby Hooper's house. They would map out the story arc on the floor, and then Kim Henkel would go in and type some pages and come back after a few and read it all to Toby Hooper and get a thumbs up or down, and then they'd continue on. And they wrote the script fairly quickly from what I understand, and they had some working titles for it that fortunately they did not go.
With Yeah, and you know, one of the reasons it went quickly is because after that first half hour, there's not a lot of dialogue aside from like you know, Pam Pam and then Sally Salie and then the dinner scene. You're going to get some more, but there's there are long stretches where it's just you know, a lot of action.
But yeah, you mentioned the alternate titles. Head Cheese was one which does make an appearance in the movie, and the dinner scene, I believe, and then Leatherface was one of the titles that would go on to be the title of the twenty seventeen prequel.
Yeah.
I think it's just called leather Face. Which I haven't seen any of those, by the way.
Neither of I. I've only seen the first one and I saw the second one.
I didn't see that. I don't think I care to see any of the rest of them.
Yeah, I mean, if you're into the first one, it might not make sense to see the second one because it's such a departure. But yeah, it's still if you take that as an actual comedy, which it is, it's kind of fun on its own.
I might see that one, but I definitely am not interested in the prequels and the reboots and the remakes and stuff like that.
Well, so the A twenty four just announced last month that they're rebooting Texas Chainsaw Masaker. Would you see those?
Well, they they're almost across the finish line. Apparently they're in the pole position to win the bid as of like a couple of weeks ago.
Oh okay, you'd.
Be interested to know that one of the other bidders was Oz Perkins and some other people. Oh yeah, your guy, and then Taylor Sheridan oddly put in a bid on the film and TV rights. But it looks like A twenty four is in the pole position and they're talking about a TV series.
So I would watch that, Okay, I would too for sure.
Yeah.
So they came up with the script and it was they never actually came up with the title themselves. There was a guy named Warren Scarin who came up with the title Texas Chainsaw Masker. One of the great titles of all time. Oh yeah, and it's forwards if you want to be pedantic about it. Saw they have it as two words for some reason. And Warren Scarin would play a bunch of really important roles over the course of getting this movie made. And he was in a
position too because he was Texas's first film commissioner. He also apparently was an investor in the film too, and he was a friend of a mutual friend between him and Kim Hankel, who would go on to become the production manager for the movie. Ron Boseman and Scarin also scared up the first investor, who was a former Texas legislator state legislator named Bill Parsley, who also apparently fancied himself a movie producer.
Yeah, and technically it's five words if you count the word the because the first one was the Texas chainsaw massacre.
So you out pedanticked my own pedanticness.
Well, because I knew we'd hear from somebody. Okay, So who was the last.
Person you named, Ron Bo Bill Parsley.
Or Bill Parsley. Yeah, so he you know, they came up with a few different budgets. The first one, you know, it was like, hey, what can we get, what can we make it for, and what could we really make it for if we just you know, kind of didn't have much and still had to do it. And that was sixty grand was like, hey, that'd be awesome. It's
about three hundred and eighty eight grand a day. Forty grand was the mid level, and twenty grand was the small budget that they still thought they could make it with, even though it would have to be black and white. I could see this in black and white like a Night of the Living Dead, But there are so many great color shots in this movie, like those green eyes of Sally that are so key in the in the third act, and the sunrise shot at the end. You know you'd lose all that.
Oh, speaking of third acts, I watched Thirty Days of Night again, that vampire movie. Have you ever seen it, Josh Hartnett.
I don't think I saw that one.
It's not bad, but I thought of you because they show like this metal crushing like trash compactor in the first like ten minutes, and I thought, show a metal crushing trash compactor, and act one you're gonna use it? And act three and sure, yeah they did.
Yeah, it's a classic classic move.
So they actually got their high, their pie in the sky high end budget of sixty grand. Most of it came from Bill Parsley, but there were a couple of other investors that got cobbled together, and ultimately, by the time the thing had its final cut, it was up to three hundred grand. But even that was a paltry amount of money even in the mid seventies, Like this is peanuts as far as making a movie is concerned.
Yeah, I mean, not too bad. I'll take issue with pe nuts. I mean, Rocky was made for one point one million, and the average was four million even back then. But I guess I've known friends who have made movies these days for a lot less than that. So it's I know people that would be very happy with three hundred grand.
Yeah, but they're not using film stock, and I'll bet that eats up a ton of budget. Yeah, well, how about this, can we agree on brazil nuts?
Brazil nuts sounds good?
Okay. So one of the ways that they cut cost Chuck was to hire no name actors like inexperienced actors, and ultimately the way it would wash out, that would make the whole thing that much more realistic, which is great. These were people who might have been drama students taking film classes at UT Austin. Some of them were just
Austin locals. And the other way that they cut costs was to get these casts, or this cast of no name actors who were already being paid brazil nuts at best peanuts, probably maybe even just the pa part of pe nuts, to defer even that amount, most of it until after the film got made, and they agreed to it. And they put together a cast of ten plus a few extras, and the only one who had any experience whatsoever was a guy named Jim Seadow seat ower Sideow.
Yeah, he played the cook and one of the three brothers in the Sawyer family. Marilyn burn to Sally. She had also been in a couple of things. She was in Robert Altman's Brewsters McLeod and she was actually cast as a lead in a movie, in a movie called Love and Molly that would have been before this, But she was replaced by Susan Sarandon.
Yeah, and she ended up being the body double for Sarandon.
And that one, I think it was a bitter pill.
I'm sure for sure. So Jim sidew was he was his experience was a radio soap opera actor, So that was the experience he had. And from what I could tell, he was the only SAG member. And then there's a non on screen I guess off screen is how you put it. If you have brains appearance by a guy named John Lara Keett. If you're a night Court fan, and even if you're not, you're probably still familiar with John Lara Keett.
Yeah, I didn't know this was John Larrocatt. Of my first two viewings of this, I had no idea until you've sent this along, So I don't know. I guess I didn't stay through the credits because I was always, you know, cowering in a corner or something.
Turn it off, turn it off.
Yeah, did not know that was John Larrocatt. That's the first thing he ever did in the film business.
Yeah, I didn't know that either. I ran across it. I also ran across that he was friends with Toby Hooper and he did it as a favor. Apparently it took an hour of his time to record it, and Toby Hooper paid him in pot and John Learri Kett apparently confirmed that to none other than Parade Magazine years later.
I love it.
So you want to talk about the plot and then get into how they made this thing after that?
Yeah? Should we take a break first or should we do the plot first?
No, it's a good idea.
Let's do a break all right, Well, everyone, brace yourselves, go, you know, chill out, do some yoga, maybe meditate, and then we'll tell you the plot of Texas Chainsaw Maaska right after this.
Joke mad Josh stuff.
You should know.
Satisfaction.
Okay, So we're back when we're talking about the plot. And again you already gave a spoiler alert, but it's worth saying again if you haven't seen the movie and you want to go in fresh, don't listen to this part. Okay, Yeah, and maybe we'll shout we're done with the plot after we're done with it, so that everybody can put their headphones back on.
Yeah. I think maybe we should read that narration since it's so short.
Oh, okay, go ahead, yeah, because it gets the point across.
So it's sort of framed as a docu drama shot at in a lot of moments, very documentary style, and they set it up as if it's a real thing. So here's John Larrickett, well me as John Larrochette. The film which you were about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five views
in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother Franklin. It is all the more tragic in that they were young, but had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected, nor would they have wished to see as much mad and macabre as they were to see. That day for them and a dylic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Pretty great. That's a good John Larrachett too, by the way.
Thanks. It indicates that they all die too, which was a nice little slide of hand because it makes the ending a little more surprising and suspenseful, I think exactly.
And so you said it like, this is presented as a docudrama, so people are going into it not thinking it's a documentary that they're actually seeing real things, but that it's depicting an actual event that happened specifically on October eighteenth, nineteen seventy three. It says that's the date that this all happens. Yeah, it just happens over a one day period, so that in and of itself kind of was totally new, as we'll see as far as
horror movies went. It was almost prefiguring the found footage genre like Blair Witch and stuff like that. And then the whole action starts. Everything's prompted by news that a cemetery in the middle of rural Texas, Central Texas has there been grave robbings going on. And not only grave robbings or they're just removing specific parts of bodies, they're also taking some of the bodies in basically making him into these really gruesome statues.
Yeah, and it's a great way to open the movie. The opening shot and everything is just very disturbing to kind of get that ball rolling. And they are in a van traveling. They have space cleared out for the wheelchair for Franklin, and you know, it's like a sort of set the standard. But we've seen this so many times since then, like teenagers off, you know, having a good time going on a trip, maybe going camping or something like that. But they were sort of the first,
you know, movie to do that kind of thing. It set that standard.
Yeah, and they were the reason they were there. Was there Franklin and Sally's grandfather was buried at the cemetery, so they're going to check to see if his grave had been dug up, and they find that it's not.
Well.
While they're there, they'll say, Hey, why don't we go check out grandfather's old homestead. We used to spend summers there once in a while. So the whole gang agrees to do that, but first they need gas, and they go to a gas station, a Rundown gas station slash barbecue pit that's owned by a man known as the Cook, who also would turn out to be Drayton Sawyer like who you mentioned before, one of the three brothers of
this scary family. And it turns out they don't have any gas, which I've read was a big commentary on the gas shortages going on at the time. But the kids decide to head on to the what it turns out to be the abandoned Hardesty Homestead. Anyway, just look around.
Yeah, did you catch the name of the gas station?
Yeah? W e Slaughter Barbecue.
Well that was the restaurant. It was the Last Chance Gas.
I did see that, Yes, I totally forgot.
So I immediately thought of my last chance garage hat that I wore for many many years.
Do you still have that thing?
I have like four or five of them because I lost the original one in Austin, Texas. Oh wow, and at south By one year. And then I got a patch maker here in Atlanta to make me patches, and so I made like or four of them, but I just haven't more than those in a long time.
I remember that very kind patchmaker replacing it. And since you lost in Austin, I'm now convinced that there is no way it wasn't a Texas Chainsawmascar fan who stole that.
Yeah, I mean this Last Chance Garage, which was his own brand. But I thought Last Chance Gas was kind of fun.
I now that I think about it. I've seen on Etsy vials of skin scrapings that say that you're they're you're skin scraping. So I wonder if it came from that hat. Probably, so it does ship out of Texas, it says, all right, there you have it. So anyway, this gas station's out of gas, and they head onto the abandoned house and just start exploring it. But before they get there, they pick up a hitchhiker and he turns out to be one of the sawyers too, but
he plays this character so nuts. Yeah, he dances right along the edge of this is ridiculous. He's being ridiculous. It's totally over the top, but it still manages to be more disturbing than like, come on, you know, oh.
Yeah, it's again completely unsettling. His name, by the way, they do have names. His name is Nubbins Sawyer, but he's kind of mainly known as the hitchhiker, and his very short ride is just full of disturbing things. He looks like he's got you know, blood on his face. He's kind of rambling incoherently. He takes out a or
he I'm sorry. He grabs Franklin's sort of whittling pocket knife at one point and cuts his own hand in front of everyone's faces, which is terrifying, and then slashes Franklin I think with his razor that he has in his boot.
H Yeah, and he's real squarely too, so he's moving around a lot, and he's like just doing all sorts of weird stuff. But once he slashes, like they're really put off by this guy. But once he slashes Franklin, they don't even fully stop. They just slow down and basically push him out of the van, yeah, and take off. So they go to the Hardesty Homestead. Franklin tells them that there's a swimming hole nearby, and this couple, Pam and Kirk, go off to find it, but they find
that it's dried up. Yeah, And they're just kind of hanging out, and Kirk spies a house nearby and he thinks, hey, maybe they have some gas that we can get because the van's getting awfully low and they don't know where another gas station is.
Yeah, so they go to this house. Kirk stupidly enters the house. He's kind of knocking on the door, and the door just you know, opens from him knocking, and he's the first to be killed. And it happens in such a brutally fast way when he goes down this straight hallway into this you know, it looks like another hallway off the entryway where they have animal skins and skulls and things on the wall, and he gets clubbed
by a hammer very quickly. And the speed at which that happens, the speed at which you see leather face for the first time, whose name is Bubba, by the way, and then the ferocity and speed that he slams shut that metal sliding or is just terrifying.
It's yeah, that's a hell of a way for the first person to get picked off to go.
It's very fast and just all of a sudden, you're already disturbed because everything before it was so even Franklin, like every word out of his mouth is annoying and upsetting.
Yeah, we should say Franklin. Among film appreciators and horror fans, he's almost universally despised, ye Franklin. Yeah, so yeah, it is because I was. I went into it again thinking how much everybody hates Franklin. I was like, he's not that bad. He's pretty bad, but there's still there's some redeeming qualities to him. But I don't want to just
be contrarian, you know, now I'm with you. So Pam, who was with Kirk but is waiting outside on a swinging bench, starts deciding that Kirk's been gone too long and goes in after him. And she goes in, there's this classic shot dolly shot from the ground going upward, and it follows her going up to the house and it's just this amazing shot. Like anybody who knows anything about cinemas, like This is one of the best Dolly shots of all time. Again, a twenty three year old
did this. And the reason they did is because the house just grows bigger and bigger, almost like it's gonna swallow Pam up. And I would never think about that if I hadn't read someone describing it. But that's exactly what it does.
Yeah, it's very creepy. It starts it goes under the swing, which is a nice little trick. Her backside is very prominently in frame, So I think at the time that was their version of selling something slightly sexy. Sure, but it's so foreboding and you get that blue blue sky and the clouds and that up angle shot of the house, like you said, and it's just it's a great, great shot.
It is. So Pam goes in there and her fate is not met quite as quickly as Kirk. She stumbles into this room where, yeah, there's a live chicken in a bird cage meant for basically canary. So the chicken's almost stuffed in there. Yeah, there's feathers everywhere, there's bones everywhere, carcass is hanging everywhere, The couches and the chairs are all basically upholstered with bones and these weird but kind
of in a strange way, beautiful designs. And you can just tell it's so nasty in there that she starts to gag and tries to get out, And as she's trying to get out, she meets leather Face and it goes downhill from there.
Yeah, and this is equally as brutal. I mean, leather Face is I don't think we said it's like six four and how much did he weigh?
Three hundred pounds?
Yeah, very large dude sort of looks like a professional wrestler, but he's wearing a skin mask with other hair you know that's not his.
Yeah, like almost a curly wig. That just that makes it so much worse too.
Yeah, So everything he does is just you know, brutal. I mean, clearly, as the movie he goes on, we realize that he's has, you know, some pretty severe cognitive issues, Like I'm not going to diagnose Bubba Leatherface, sure, but at any rate, he's he's terrifying. And the way he moves is just very sort of herky jerky, and the way he's so big, and the way he grabs her and brings her into that room. It's just it's all again. It's terrifying.
Yeah. One of the other things that's terrifying that also gets across the fact that cognitively seems to be challenged, at least to some degree. They took away all of the dialogue that he had written for in the script, so he doesn't do anything but make weird sounds.
Yeah, he kind of babbles at one point.
Later he does. And then also if you pay attention, there's times where he's clearly talking, but they dub in a hog squealing. Yeah, and it's not supposed to be him him making a hog call, like, it's just like, that's what came out of his mouth, weirdly, and it happens so fast, and they don't make any kind of point to point it out that when you notice it, you're like, what the heck just happened. But it makes him,
especially if you don't notice it, even creepier. I mean, the fact that he's wearing a mask made of a dead person's face is bad enough, but all the extra little details they put into it, the apron that he's wearing, which clearly demonstrates he's a butcher with that chainsaw all of the details they put together just make him one of the great horror film villains of all time.
Oh yeah, and set the mold for the sort of non verbal mask wearing dudes to come, like Michael Myers and certainly Jason Voorhees for sure.
So what happens to Pam?
Yeah, Pam gets meat hooked immediately, She gets taken into this butcher room, impaled on a meat hook, but still living, and gets to watch we finally see the chainsaw fire up here for the first time. We get to see her boyfriend, you know, get it doesn't show it, and we'll talk about that later, but you see the leather face fire that thing up and kind of start to get to work on him.
Yeah. So, like you said, Pam's still alive and she's umpaled on that meat hook just a few feet from where Kirk's body is on this table. That leather Face is now dismembering with the chainsaw. So as she's dying, she gets to watch that. And then I think it goes back to the homestead where Franklin and Sally and Jerry, who Sally's boyfriend, are still hanging out, and Jerry decides to go look for them, drawn into the same trap that Kirk and Pam fell for by looking for them,
and he gets picked off too. His death happened so quickly that I actually thought for a second that he was going to come back, because I hadn't seen it in a while. Yeah, and then I realized, like, no, he just he got taken out with one one hammer swing.
Yeah, And that all makes it pretty scary too, because there's not this big tense build up like a lot of modern horror. People are just just very kind of quickly and without regard.
Which makes it seem like that's probably how it would be in that situation. It makes it more realistic, I think, yeah, totally. And by the way, I've seen Jerry refer to as disco Stew across the internet, because he really does bear a resemblance to him, for sure.
So he before he gets dispatched, though, he does open the freezer in the butcher room and sees that Pam is in there and sort of barely alive and kind of comes up, And that's right when he gets taken.
Out for sure. So Jerry's gone, Kirk and Pam are gone, there's just Franklin and Sally left and they wait until nightfall until they just can't not look for their friends anymore, so they go chomping through the woods. And this is
where Hansel and Gretel really kind of becomes clear. Yeah, Sally's pushing Franklin in his wheelchair basically overland, and as they're wandering kind of aimlessly through the woods, they come upon leather Face, who starts chopping Franklin up in his wheelchair, and Sally, realizing there's nothing she can do for her brother, takes off and this kind of chase through the woods that leads back to leads her to the Sawyer House, which she's not familiar with, so she goes in there
looking for help, realizes this is not the place to find help, has to jump out a second story window, goes back to running through the woods, and then makes it to that original gas station slash barbecue pit, thinking she's found safety, and it turns out that's not the case at all.
Yeah, because that's when it all comes together that Drayton is in on it. He's one of the family members. He kidnaps her in a this Okay, this scene I could see is maybe being kind of funny. The broom attack when he's smacking her with the broom.
Yeah, especially if you know the little behind the scenes trivia that Jim Seadau did not want to do that he was basically forced to and goad it on to actually hit Marilyn Burns with the broomstick to make it look real. And if you know that, the first few hits are kind of tentative and he's almost looking like can I get away with this? And they clearly cut and then say like, dude, you need to actually hit her,
and he does. And it's I mean, I think the fact that he didn't want to do it and then had to do it, there had to be some sort of transformation in his character that you can't quite put your finger on there.
Yeah, And I guess I could see how that scene could come across his bunny a little bit. But again, it's so terrifying because the way she screams and the brutality of it all despite the weird broom thing. Yeah, Like, I couldn't come back to a place of laughing. There's just no way.
No.
So I'm glad you mentioned her screaming because, like you said, there's not a lot of dialogue in the second and third acts. But I can't imagine how many times they wrote Sally screams. Yeah, she screamed, maybe more than any other horror film victim in history. But fortunately for us, her scream almost has like a pleasing quality to it, and she has a huge range. It's not the same scream over and over again. There's one point where she's like, oh, like,
it's like it's just a bunch of different screams. And she screams a lot. So she was very rightly and still is called a scream queen. She's one of the scream queens. But she screams a lot in this movie. But it it It doesn't get annoying, it's not grating, and it just makes the whole thing that much more terrifying.
Yeah, I wouldn't say annoying, but I kept wanting it to stop because it's so relentless, you.
Know, sure it is. It is relentless, for sure.
It's very upsetting. So she gets taken, you know, after the little broom fracas, she gets you know, bagged and taken back to the house. And this is where I mean, in a movie of disturbing scenes, maybe the most disturbing scene is the dinner scene for sure with the whole family, which is we don't really learn this here. I think we just sort of learned and later in other movies the relations. But it's three brothers, it's Bubba, Nubbins and
Drayton and then Grandpa. What I wondered is about the parents. I guess that's explained maybe in prequels and stuff.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, I have no idea because I haven't seen those. But there's a grandpa who it turns out was played by a nineteen year old in a face mask. Also, the grandpa doesn't speak, and it's just this macabre dinner scene where it just shows how this family of cannibals is so like, they're all just so disturbed. It's just disgusting.
Yeah. At one point, leather Face grabs Sally's finger and cuts it with a knife and then puts her finger in Grandpa's mouth so Grandpa can partake drinking her blood, right, and then so she's being tormented this whole time. This is a ten minute long scene at least depending on when you say it starts.
Yeah, where she's just.
Being tormented and terrorized and mocked. Nubbins the hitchhiker is just mocking her. Please let me go, Yeah, and which makes so much worse, and then just the terror on her face. She sells it so well. But anyway, Grandpather, who's essentially immobile and just a couple of degrees away from catatonic. Yeah, they're like Grandpa used to be the best at killing people. He could kill him with one
hammer blow. Let's let her let him kill her. So they actually drag her over to like a metal tub, lean her over it, her head over it so that she doesn't get blood everywhere, and give Grandpa the hammer. But he's so aged and so just withered, he can't hold the hammer, so he keeps dropping it out of his hand and it lands like in the tub next to Sally's head, over and over again, which, oh my god, dude.
It's way scarier than if he had just hauled off and hit her with all of his strength.
Wait, because it goes on for a minute or so.
Right, Yeah, it's really disturbing.
Finally she gets away, she goes through another window, and then we reached the end of the movie.
Yeah, it just real quick. We should mention that leather Face has changed his attire for dinner and is wearing a dress and a new I guess woman's skin mask because it's all made up with this heavy, like you know, clown makeup, almost and that just makes it even more disturbing.
Well, don't forget his lovely cravat too that he was wearing. That's right, So Sally's getting away. She runs out of the house. It's now sunrise daylight, which is a good sign for Sally at this point. Also the fact that she's the last person and she's still alive. You can start to think like maybe Sally's gonna get away. But she's running down the driveway and Nubbins catches up with her.
But unfortunately for Nubbins, he doesn't really take her escape seriously and continues to mock her while he's chasing her.
Well, he's slashing her back with that razor the whole time too.
Which I didn't notice. That is that what it is?
Yeah, that's why she ends up such a bloody mess. I mean, besides everything else that happened to her.
Gotcha. But she makes it to the end of the driveway to the main road with Nubbins right at her heels, and they run out into the street. Just as a mac truck. A tractor trailer essentially is barreling down the street and runs right over Nubbins.
Yeah, so Nubbins has gone a little bit of trivia. The name on the side of the truck is black Maria.
M hmm.
I looked up to see if there was any significance and I didn't verify this, But there's no way it's a coincidence that Black Maria was the name of Thomas Edison's very first motion picture studio that he built.
Oh, no, way, that's a coincidence. But also doesn't that go to show like what students of film these filmmakers were, that.
They knew they totally Yeah, that had to be the case though.
Yeah, and that they made an homage to Thomas Edison's first movie studio.
Yeah, it's pretty great. All right. So back to the movie, Nubbins has been run over. The truck driver obviously stops. A truck driver is played by ed g u I n n I guess Gwenn, but very close to Ed Geen.
Oh yeah, by.
Coincidence, I'm sure. And the truck driver is one of the weird heroes of this movie. He has no lines,
he's in it for a couple of minutes. Only African American character in here, and in a spin on that trope that they're the first ones to die, he's actually the only guy that inflicts any damage on this family at all, because he runs over Nubbin right, and he gets a big pipe wrench when he's getting out of the truck and throws it at leather Face, which causes leather Face to fall down with the chainsaw, and the chainsaw like cuts into his own thigh.
Which is probably the most brutal thing that they show in the entire movie. It's gross, like you can see the fat and his leg come out like bubble out of the wound.
Oh God, blake fat.
So Sally is still running around in the middle of the road here, and luckily a pickup truck comes by and she manages to jump in the back and now she's finally got away. But she's clearly lost her mind the way that she's reacting to it sinking in that she's gotten away, and Leatherface is not happy about this. He's very frustrated, and he shows it by swinging the chainsaw around wildly, hair whirling. You can tell he's just so mad and this is the only way that he
can show it or get it out. Yeah, and he's swinging and swinging against the sunrise. And then, like you said, it just cuts to black.
Yeah, and heard that shot of her in the back of that truck with the blood oliver and her madly cackling. It's it's the perfect ending and the abrupt ending, like it's so loud with that chainsaw. Yeah, and then to cut. I can't imagine what it was like in a theater in nineteen seventy four. Yeah, when it cuts to black and it's just dead silent, Like, what the hell did that audience like do?
Had I been there, it wouldn't have been dead silence, because I would have been like, that is a.
Great hearingvie that would have said, what did I just want? Right by the way, pickup truck driver played by Perry Lorenz, who I think now is an Austin real estate developer.
Okay cool. He was also the stunt driver I think for the truck.
Yeah.
I mean you can barely see him, but got to shout out Perry Lorenz.
So that's the movie. I mean, there's not that much more to it. Honestly, it was very bare bones, which I think again makes it that much more believable. And we need to take a second break. I say, we plug on and make this just one big, fat episode.
What do you think, Yeah, we gotta do it.
Okay, So we're gonna take our second break and then we're gonna come back and you'll find out the bulk of the show is still to come.
Chalk ad Josh stop.
Should know.
All right, So we're back. We know what happened in the movie. You know, hopefully if you came back and you didn't want it spoiled, this won't spoil too much of it.
But yeah, we're done with the plot.
But we need to talk about the making of the movie. The film was shot in just over well right out a month and thirty one days, mid July to mid August, in what are now suburbs of Austin and bass Drop and Round Rock. But I imagine then they were a little more rural than they are now. There was you know, weren't strip malls and stuff everywhere.
No, they look pretty rural, pretty.
Rural a little bit around aust than itself. Obviously, the heat, the conditions were brutal, like you know, one hundred degrees plus on the on the roads and in the streets and fields, and more than that inside the Sawyer house. M hmm, with what little film lighting they had, and it was it was a brutal experience. They had a Ford van that drove around the gear, had an old camper which was the hair and makeup trailer, and shot at basically at about six places overall.
I counted five. So I've got the Rundown gas station, barbecue pitt, the abandoned house which is the hardest e homestead, the neglected cemetery, the dirt road, and then the Sawyer family house.
Then you're in the van too. Baby.
Oh wow, that's great man. You just blew my mind.
Yeah. So basically six ish places, which is a great way to you know, write a cheap independent film, you know, as a just a little tip.
Yeah, and they were again they were on a shoe string. I suspect that the Ford van they used to carry the film equipment around was the same Ford van that the teenagers drive around in.
I bet it was. That was my hunch.
And they also apparently got some guff because the road scenes that they filmed, they did not get a permit.
For Oh, I'm surprised he got a permit for any of it.
Right, So, unfortunately for the cast and crew, most of the filming was done in the Sawyer House. And again, like you said, one hundred degrees outside, apparently in the house for our friends except in Liberia who used the metric system, that's thirty seven point eight degrees celsius.
Which seems very cold to me.
Right, And apparently it got ten degrees more than that inside the house. And because this film was inspired in part by egg Gean, the production designer Bob Burns used photos that were taken like crime scene photos taken in Egggan's house as inspiration for the set decoration.
Yeah, I mean Toby Hooper himself said that the movie is about meat. Yeah, it's a case for veganism. Apparently he became a vegan during and you found out that Guillermo del Toro apparently became a vegan after seeing the movie as well. And I'm sure they're not the only ones.
Yeah, And if you look out for that, all of the meat eating that's done in the movie is disgusting.
Yeah.
The truck that runs over Nubbins is a cattle truck that is empty, which means it just is returning from having dropped off a bunch of cows at a slaughterhouse.
They talk a lot about that.
Yeah, yeah, they talk about a slaughterhouse nearby. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And also not to mention that there's that live chicken, tons of carcasses hanging everywhere, lots of like sausages and stuff all over the house, skins, bones, all that stuff. It just it makes sense, like because if there's one word, it screams its meat.
Yeah. Well Franklin's chewing on that looks like a raw sausage. Yeah, it's pretty gross for a while. In that one scene where he's trying to get into his old grandparents' house, and the implication here is that these the Draytons are this is, you know, human meat that they're grinding up into sausage. It's never explicitly said, but I think that's what you're supposed to believe.
Yeah, that that's what the barbecue that they're selling.
Is made from, too, right, Well that's what I mean.
Yeah.
Okay, So because Bob Burns is hanging actual meat around this house, and because it's one hundred and ten degrees in the house. The house started to smell wretchedly, so much so I saw from multiple sources that they would go outside between takes and throw up sometimes. Yes, at the very least they had to get out to get some air because it got gainy in there, terribly nasty just from the meat. But then you also throw in what the actors themselves must have smelled like, because they
had one set of clothing. Yeah, and they had to wear it every day for the shoot, because this action takes place over just one day.
Yeah. Yeah, usually when you shoot a movie of multiples of your clothes, so if something happen to them, obviously you can switch it out, or if they get stinky, you can switch them out. On a modern movie, they probably have like eight versions of the chainsaw. They had one chainsaw, so on a budget you just get one of everything. So they were very stinky. They had Bill Parsley, the you know, one of the early financiers, stopping by almost every day basically saying like when are you going
to wrap this picture? Threatening to shut it down. They shot, you know, twelve to eighteen hours a day. One day they went for twenty six hours inside that house. Obviously they're blacking out the windows because most of it takes place at night in that house, which is you know, psychologically that's upsetting to a cast and crew for sure.
Also, like this experience of just being treated like this during filming the cast itself, like in real life, like there was a lot of tension, a lot of squabbling and bickering and people just kind of being disgruntled, and that came through from other stuff. I've read that Toby Hooper was making that, like really beefing that kind of tension up to get more just angst out of his actors.
Yeah, totally using that to his advantage, as every great manipulating director should.
Sure he also isolated Gooner Hansen, who played Leatherface. I read that each of the actors who was dispatched by Leatherface met Gooner Hansen when they filmed their scene for the first time. Yeah, so that they couldn't get comfortable with him. And we're I mean again, like you said, six foot four, three hundred pounds and the chainsaw, it was a poolin and apparently it's one of their heavier ones,
and he's just swinging this around like it's nothing. So clearly he was an intimidating person in real life, and again that was something Toby Hooper did to manipulate things.
Yeah, and he stayed in character too, which is also means he's walking around either babbling or or not saying anything. I don't imagine they had a recording of a pig square ill to that he could just kind of play for fun as he walked around.
Yeah.
Uh yeah, but it's uh, they were, they were. It wasn't a pleasant shoot.
I also read that the guy who played Franklin, Paul Partain, stayed in character as well, and everyone hated him. Yeah, so there was also physical suffering too. We talked about how Marilyn Burns was actually hit in the head with the broomstick to make it more realistic looking. Uh, she was. She did almost all of her own stunts from what I could tell. A woman named Mary Church was the only stunt she did was actually jumping out of the windows.
Yeah, bad wig in that shot, Yeah for sure.
But when when Sally falls down over you know whatever, when she's running through mesquite and gets trapped in it, running through cockle burrs like that was actually Marilyn Burns, the actress, having to do that over and over.
Yeah, and you get that sense too when she's freaking out in that long chase scene through the thick. It's terrifying and it looks like she's not enjoying things at all, as you know, So it comes really comes across on film, Yeah.
Because she gets stuck and she's like ah and has to pull herself out and yeah, I think she really did.
Yeah. And then you know the we mentioned in the plot the scene again this is a big spoiler. At one point her fingers cut at the dinner scene and it's put into the mouth of Grandpa to suckle her blood. Apparently the blood squib didn't work and they really cut her finger, and that nineteen year old grandpa kid and the face mask really drank her blood.
Yeah, unknowingly apparently until after year.
Good god.
So one of the things that people point to is what made this movie so great? Was this the inexperience of these novice filmmakers. Yeah, we said that Daniel Pearl, the cinematographer, was twenty three. Toby Hooper apparently was the oldest at twenty nine. Yeah, and they had like documentary backgrounds. Daniel Pearl was he apparently caught Toby Hooper's eye from a Texas Department of Public Safety PSA, right.
Like blood spills Red on the Highway kind of.
Thing, Yeah, basically, except this is about a drug bust and Toby Hooper noticed, like, wow, that was shot really interestingly and who did that. That's how they came together. They made their own dollies out of wood, their own crane out of wood too, I believe. And then the editing too, gets a lot of credit for making the movie what it was.
Yeah, I mean, like we said it's a trim eighty three minutes. You can thank Larry Carroll and Sally Richardson as the editors for just you know, like I kept mentioning, like the speed at which the kills happen and the abruptness in which they end and with the movie ends, like those are all just great editing decisions to like, you know, it's tough because you know they call it like losing your babies. You don't want to lose stuff
you shot or the great line. But a good editor knows like no, tighter is better, shorter is better, and it helps create a lot of the unsettling feeling. I think by how quickly they cut away to stuff for sure.
So they finally got it done. I think I said, three hundred grand is the highest I saw as an estimate for what they actually what the budget actually was. They got it done to eighty three minutes, they had the final cut. They have investors like breathing down their neck because remember they initially got eighty grand. The budget ended up being three hundred grand, So Toby Hooper and Kim Hankel kept having to go back and find new
people to get them money. And over time a lot of different investors, including the cast and crew, owned that movie. They owned portions of it, and as true indie filmmakers, Kim Hankel and Toby Hooper watered down their own share to get the money to get the movie completed, and they ended up just with a seven and a half percent cut each. These are the guys who thought of and made the movie. They ended up with fifteen percent between them.
Yeah, so you know, I mean, we'll see, it made a ton of money, but how those things pay out, It just it never pays out like you think it would. Even though it was cheap to make and made a ton of money. That got creative accounting and in this case sort of mob accounting, right, because well, I guess we should say first, it did get picked up. The commissioner, Warren Scarn that we were talking about, the Film Commissioner
of Texas shopped it around. You know, there weren't a ton of big movies being shot in Texas at the time, so it was sort of a you know, before Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linkladder put Austin on the map, Toby Hooper was first, so it wasn't like a big film scene, so it took the film commissioner to really champion it
for distribution. Almost got bought by Columbia. Eventually was bought by the distribution company who put out Deep Throat, the famous porn and their name was Brianston Distributing Company.
Yes, and their whole business model was based just generate as much publicity as you can. Negative publicity is just as good as positive, yeah, and then they would just promote the heck out of it, publicize all of this outrage and everything that the movie was getting. And the reason why is because they couldn't afford traditional marketing. As it worked out, it was basically a shell game house of cards, and like you said, it was a mobbed up movie distribution company.
Yeah, so Brianston was owned by the Colombo crime family or you know members of that family, specifically Big Tony Perino. He also helped finance the part of this film and other of their films. And yeah, I think they distributed Dark Star from John Carpenter, which is a sci fi cult classic. But because it was mob connected, it was kind of one of those things where they knew that no one was going to see the money. They were
probably owed. And I think, you know, some of them made a little bit of money, but the total even though it made well, we'll talk about the grosses, but I think a little over a quarter of a million bucks are a little under a quarter of a million bucks to dole out to everybody.
Yeah, and the cast and crew was left with eighty one hundred dollars to split between them.
So I mean it's not terrible.
No, it's not great either. I mean, divide that by about twenty. Oh.
I don't think those extras got much if anything.
Okay, still so divided by ten because the crew was involved too.
Yeah, I'm not saying they got paid a lot, but in today dollars, if that cast walked away with like five grand then, I mean, that's not terrible for an indie movie.
Sure, the investors sued Brianston, and there was a judge who ruled like, yeah, you need to give them more money than that, and Brianston said, we would if we could, but we're bankrupt now, so see you guys later. Finally, New Line picked it up in nineteen eighty three and some real money started to flow in, but still not much trickled down to the people who actually made the movie.
Yeah, for sure. One of the most startling facts of this whole podcast to me is it Toby Hooper was trying for a PG rating. Yeah, it was pre PG thirteen. The board the NPA basically said that meatthook scene, like, you can't have that in your movie at all and get a PG thirty get a PG rating Because he was like, how could I cut that scene in a way that gets it a PG And they're like they're incompatible, my friend.
Right, and he responded with you come on.
Yeah, he got an X rating instead.
Yeah he did. He managed to lobby it down to an R because this is the time when you got an X rating, like you can kiss any success for your movie. Goodbye, unless, of course Brianston owns it, because we should say being distributed by Brianston wasn't a total like scam or a bust. They actually did do some good stuff. Like we said, they generated some really negative publicity and then publicized that they also made managed to get this film the year it came out into the
Museum of Modern Arts permanent collection. You can believe they publicized that they also got it shown it can yeah, which is I mean we could say like that's actually some a couple of good things that they did for sure for the movie, which certainly remember this when it came out, it's going to be a drive in b movie slasher film, and before anyone knew what a slasher film really was, and then it would probably be gone
in a month or two at best. And these things started to help make it like, Okay, maybe we should pay a little more attention to this, because at first the critics panned it, and then they started to see like, Okay, actually there's some really good cinematic stuff in here that we're overlooking.
Yeah, I mean, it grossed more than The Great Gatsby that year Chinatown Death Wish it took in in that year's dollars about twenty six million bucks and change. Eventually went on to gross one hundred and fifty million dollars in present day dollars, so it was a At one point it was known as the most successful independent film of all time money wise, right.
I think Rocky knocked it out a couple of years later, from what I understand, but it was definitely huge.
Rocky knocked it out. You're sure it wasn't the TJ Wow.
I didn't even mean to do that. The spirit of Jonathan Strickland just flowed through.
Me, that's right. But yeah, you mentioned the critics. They, you know, they kind of got on board a little bit. Like rex Reid said, it was, you know, the most terrifying like me film he'd ever seen. Ebert said it was some kind of weird off the wall achievement. I can't imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it's well made, well acted, and all too effective.
Right. But they still ultimately said they panned it, right, although I don't think rex Reid did. I think he might have given it a thumbs up, however he did that, But they would invariably say that it was blood soaked that it was gory and those that's just not true because if you watch the movie, there is very little blood, very little gore, and a lot of the violence is
just implied it's not actually shown. Certainly, you don't see the meat hook go into Pam now, but you see her dangling from a meat hook, and that confused people at first. So people walked away thinking they just seen a ton of gore and blood and they hadn't.
Yeah, I mean that's a good point. That the hammer blows are kind of shot from far away and very fast, and again, you know, you don't see blood spatter everywhere. There's just an overall like the NPA to just say, hey man, I don't care if we don't see one drop of blood. This gets an X for disturbing factor.
Yeah, I mean I could see that too, And I mean it's a credit to Toby Hooper that he managed to get it reduced to an R. But yeah, you can imagine his disappointment making the film based on the idea that he was making it a PG movie. I mean, that's just as naive as it gets really for a filmmaker.
Yeah, for sure, And it really you know, like I said in our act one that really set a standard for films to come, slasher films, teenagers kind of driving through the woods and coming upon an abandoned, seemingly abandoned place. This was the first movie to do that stuff. Really like horror movies before this, A lot of them were the hammer movies, like the Gothic like Vampire and the Castle kind of stuff. The final Girl trope was either birth with this or which one Black Christmas?
Yeah. Those two usually are the rivals for the first one, yeah.
And the final Girl is obviously the trope where there's one girl left alive at the end, you know, the last either victim or one who survives. And those movies were both released in the same year and clearly didn't know about one another, So I give them the co lead.
And like I said, over time, people started to especially film appreciate, started to see this as like a cinematic treasure, a masterpiece. Quentin Tarantino apparently listeded among six perfect movies, among the likes of Jaws, Exorcists, Young Frankenstein, and Back to the Future in any Hall like People. Apparently, Stanley Kubrick owned a thirty five millimeter print of it himself. That's kind of all you need to say right there.
But maybe in spite of that, or because of that, or whatever, everyone agrees that you could never remake the Texas Chainsaw Masaker and capture the spirit of the original because of the way that it was hamstrung, all the different ways it was hamstrong, and the inexperience and naivety of the filmmakers, which also freed them up to take chances that an experienced filmmaker wouldn't take, like dubbing in
a hog squeal instead of a voice for leatherface. At some point you put all that together, you just can't recapture that.
No, you can't. Sometimes there's just a way you shoot a movie. You capture lightning in a bottle. I read The Dazed and Confused Oral History recently. That's a great book that was sort of a similar movie. Like that's why that was maybe the best movie about teenagers in high school of all time, because of the way they did it and the inexperience and like, you don't know what you don't know, And this movie is very much the same thing, like they've tried. There been countless sequels
and remakes. I think it would have been like nine or ten of them now.
If you want to count them.
Yeah, yeah, and you know, none of them hold a candle to this. Most of them are not very good for my money. The thing that comes closest is Rob Zombie's House of one Thousand Corpses in Spirit and which was you know, this was a very big influence on that movie, obviously, But I don't think anything. And again I haven't seen these, but I've seen enough of them and read enough about them where it seems like none of them come close.
I also see Wolf Cree and X as given high marks for being inspired by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and managing to do something worthwhile too.
Wolf Creek is great. I don't think I know x X.
It's part of the Maxine trilogy. X Girl and Maxine the first thing.
Yeah, I saw those, Okay, I forgot it was called X.
Yeah.
Those are all good too.
I've only seen X. Are the other two worth watching too?
I think?
So?
Okay? And then so I think John Landis put it how impossible it would be to remake or capture that same spirit from the original Texas Chainsaw Masacre when he described the remake in two thousand and three, like a shampoo commercial kids at across.
Yeah, that's a pretty sick burn.
Wow, you got anything else?
I got nothing else. I try to watch this every Halloween. I don't know why it took me so long to see it, because I had gotten into horror movies in the past, like twenty years more and more. It was just kind of hanging out there until a few years ago and I was like, wait a minute, I've never seen the granddaddy of them all.
Yeah, and when you watch it, you said, wow, this is a great movie.
I no, no, you know what I said.
We got to watch it together. I want to just watch you watch.
It, all right, we'll do it.
Okay, Well, since Chuck agreed to let me watch him while he watches the Texas chainsaw massacre as it was predicted in two thousand and eight by Chuck Shredamis himself, I just triggered listener mail.
This is from Tequarius. Hey guys, Nineteen years ago, when I was just thirteen, I was allowed to visit our local skating rink along with my uncle as an experience that stood out for my previous visits because that night was full of black culture left a lasting impact on me, and I would often jokingly think to myself, it must
have been black night or something. After listening to your roller skating episode, I was astonished to learn that such events were actually a thing after the Civil Rights movement. I'm uncertain whether that night was a tradition that dated back to that time, but I like to think that it was and that I was a part of the experience. Thank you for helping me a black man make connections that I was completely unaware of. And he attached a photograph from that night that he took with his uncle
and his friends. That was pretty sweet and a time capsule, and he said, have a great day, guys, and that is from Tiquarius. McMurray.
Nice. Thanks to Quarius. That's a great one. I love that episode in part to that because I had no idea about that either. Yeah, same, that's awesome. If you have recently listened to an old episode and want to tell us what you think about it, Like Taquarius, we love that kind of stuff. You can send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.