Fifty years after the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: How the most terrifying film ever made was inspired by the crimes of real serial killers By Brian Viner, Film Critic for the Daily Mail Published: 03:46, 30 October 2024 | Updated: 03:48, 30 October 2024 e-mail View comments Not many horror films are as appallingly gruesome to make as they are to watch. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which opened 50 years ago this month, is a notable exception. It is one of the most controversial yet enduringly influential horror movies in cinematic history, which despite its starkly unsubtle title was described in the New York Times as ‘a formally exquisite art film, packed full of gorgeously nightmarish images as poetic as they are deranged’.
Yet it was shot at the height of an oppressively hot Texan summer in such ‘intolerably putrid’ conditions that the Icelandic-born actor Gunnar Hansen, who played the story’s depraved villain ‘Leatherface’, later claimed he wasn’t sure whether the cast would get out alive. Leatherface, a psychopathic masked cannibal who liked to torture his victims before killing and eating them, was truly the stuff of nightmares. But so was the set – a farmhouse in Round Rock, Texas, in which the temperature consistently soared above 110F (43C).
Gunnar Hansen created Leatherface the chainsaw-wielding maniac in 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Actress Marilyn Burns pictured as Sally Hardesty, in a scene from 1974 The Texas Chainsaw Massac.
