Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkle, the original writers of the classic horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, are students at the University of Texas. These writers who are based in the state of Texas could have a plausible advantage over local lore. Was your 1974 slasher movie about a real life event? This question usually gets vague explanations and seems to be the stuff of urban legend. The quick and easy answer to the question is no, the movie does not depict an actual event. This article will explore what influenced the creation of the story told in the movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and how it has come to be perceived as a fine line between fact and fiction.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre premiered on October 1, 1974 in Austin, Texas, nearly a year after filming ended. The film was screened nationally in the United States as a Saturday afternoon matinee, and was successful with a wider audience after it was falsely promoted as a “true story.” After 1976, the film was reissued to be shown in theaters for the first time, every year for eight years, with full-page advertisements. The sequels to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise fueled the suggestion that there was some truth in the original in which it was announced that it was not based on a true story, but rather on the original film.
The concept for the film emerged in the early 1970s while Hooper was working as a university professor at the University of Texas at Austin and as a documentary cameraman. He had previously developed the idea for a film focused on isolation, forest and darkness, and he continued to explore these ideas while solidifying the concept of the film. He also credited local San Antonio news as part of the inspiration for the film, due to the graphic nature of the stories presented. Seeing the local news whose coverage was graphic, “showing brains scattered all the way” led him to believe that the man was the real monster, just with a different face, so in his movie “he put a literal mask on the monster. “. The additional “lack of sentimentality and brutality of things” that Hooper noted took shape with the idea of introducing a chainsaw that came to Hooper while he was in the hardware section of a crowded store as he contemplated a way out of the crowd quickly. .
Hooper also cites the impact of the changes he observed in the cultural and political landscape as influences for the film. He directly correlates the willful misinformation that “the movie you are about to see is true” as a response to the government’s lies about things “like Watergate, the gasoline crisis, and the massacres and atrocities of the Vietnam War.” . Leatherface and his family present themselves as credible victims of industrial capitalism, as their jobs as slaughterhouse workers have been rendered obsolete by technological advances. Hooper loosely based the plot on the murders committed by the 1950s Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, a murderer whose story has inspired several horror films, such as “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Psycho.”
Kim Henkle stated that he “definitely studied Gein …” but also noticed a murder case in Houston at the time, a serial killer named Elmer Wayne Henley. He was a young man who recruited victims for the murderer and rapist Dean Corll. Henkle remembers seeing Elmer Wayne on the news saying, “I committed these crimes and I will get up and take it like a man.” He found this Henley quote interesting, that he “had this conventional morality at the time. He wanted it to be known that now that he got caught, he would do the right thing. So this kind of moral schizophrenia is something that I tried to ‘build into the characters. .
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, considered one of the greatest horror films of all time, has significantly influenced the horror genre. Wes Craven, Ridley Scott, and Stephen King have cited him as an influence on their work. Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle called the film “a masterpiece of fear and hate, Texas-style.” The film has also been declared one of the few horror films to invoke “the true quality of the nightmare.” The story lives on in the minds of those who are not quite sure whether the events portrayed happened or were completely imagined.
Thirty-six years later, some critics have called The Texas Chain Saw Massacre one of the scariest movies ever made. Mike Emery of the Austin Chronicle said the film was “horrible, but fascinating … it never seems to be too far from what might be the truth.” This realism and similarity to the coverage of criminals in the news, along with the deceptive marketing gimmick used to attract people, has proven to be very successful. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre grossed over $ 30 million in the United States, making it one of the most successful independent films of the 1970s.
