Former schoolteacher Tobe Hooper decided that his Hollywood calling card would be to make a movie about ‘a whole family of Geins’. Having grown up listening to tales about the Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, Hooper ‘borrowed’ the same inspiration for his tale that author Robert Bloch did for his novel Psycho, and Thomas Harris later did for The Silence of the Lambs. It was when he was Christmas shopping that he got the idea for the implement that was to adorn the hand of his story’s lead nutcase Leatherface. ‘I was shopping in a crowded Sears’s department store in Austin, Texas, when I started to have a panic attack. I was thinking, ‘Please God, show me a way out of here…’ And there right in front of my eyes was a big display of chainsaws.’
Hooper apparently thought that if he kept the amount of blood shown down in his movie, called initially Leatherface, he would get away with a PG certificate and therefore get a larger audience and more money. Whether he was joking when he imparted this little fact, I am unsure. What I am sure about is that his plan didn’t work. In fact the reaction went the other way. In Britain it was banned outright in 1975 until 1999 when the censors changed their policy and passed the movie uncut. It did make the video shelves at the start of the video entertainment revolution in an ‘uncensored’ cut, however, like most movies that had a title like this baby; it was subsequently accused of being a video nasty.
In the States it was a different story. From it’s limited budget of $140,000 it went on to gross an estimated $31million. I say estimated because no one really knows for certain how much money ‘Chainsaw’ actually did take, given that gangsters had helped fund the movie and were pilfering off most of the box office receipts before anyone else got a whiff of them. In terms of what the public thought, the movie was voted the best horror ever by the team behind UK’s Total Film magazine. Even the likes of the late film critic Alexander Walker of the London Evening Standard had something nice to say about it calling the movie ‘The purest of all horror films.’
After hearing that the graveyard where her grandfather is buried has been desecrated, Sally Hardesty along with wheelchair-bound Franklin, boyfriend Jerry and another couple, Kirk and Pam travel out to investigate. Whilst in the area, the group stops off to visit their childhood home. They also let about the most insane hitchhiker, period, into their vehicle. Humouring him for far too long, they are shocked when their passenger slashes himself and then Franklin before jumping out and marking the side of their van with his blood.
Whilst at the homestead, Kirk and Pam go looking for a waterhole only to find it no longer there and then come across another property. Upon entering Kirk is smashed over the head with a hammer by Leatherface and promptly chain sawed up in front of his girlfriend now impaled on a meat hook. Soon the others become victims of Leatherface and family, with only Sally managing to get away after a protracted and horrific half hour of torment and violent abuse.
Although the movie’s tagline proudly proclaims that ‘…it happened’, and has an opening prologue narrated by actor John Larroquette (Hooper wanted someone that sounded like Orson Welles) tricking the audience into believing it did. It is true that a fellow by the name of Ed Gein DID wear human skin, however he never used a chainsaw, worked alone rather than with other family members, and looked nothing like the loonies in Hooper’s movie so the ‘true story’ link is tenuous at best. The device is merely a scare tactic used to gee up the audience. If the film was released in 1973 and the events take place in 1973 you would think that someone would have twigged it wasn’t based on anything real. The same stunt was pulled for the more recent release Wolf Creek.
As Hooper intended, there is very little blood spilled onscreen, however, even without red stuff I fail to see how the guy thought that his baby would get a rating for a family audience. From the first surprise attack, when the steel door pulls back to reveal Leatherface in all his grisly glory it is fair to say that the audience were probably expecting him to chase Kirk around a bit. Instead out comes the hammer and smack, down goes Kirk, twitching and convulsing as Leatherface slams the door shut on his bleeding victim and on the audience’s shattered nerves. There is no ominous score building up to the ‘reveal’, no wink to the audience that something awful is about to happen.
If the audience were expecting someone to save the day it’s not going to happen. Instead we get a bloodied and hysterical Sally fleeing her prison and into the arms of a lorry driver that also runs away. It isn’t until she manages to flag down another vehicle that she manages to completely get away, probably the first time in the horror genre that we witness a resourceful and determined female that survives for a change – albeit with long-term psychological damage. As she is driven away, we see Leatherface spinning in the rising sun with his chainsaw in some bizarre dance. Hell even the bogeyman isn’t dead and this wasn’t for some quick cash-in sequel, it was there to freak out an audience that still thinks that what they are watching actually happened.
The last half hour where Sally is a ‘guest’ at Leatherface’s family home is pretty rough viewing, with the sound consisting of buzzing chainsaws; Sally screaming; the family shouting at each other; Sally screaming and um, Sally screaming. Like Sally, the audience’s sanity ends up frayed, so come the final credits they stumble numb and shocked back to their reality. This isn’t a movie – this is a trip – and a bad one at that. The movie’s low budget and quick filming schedule of twenty days has helped produce an almost fly-on-the-wall feel to the proceedings.
Marilyn Burns who played Sally had a pretty rough time filming. When chased by Leatherface through the undergrowth she actually cut herself on the branches quite badly, so a lot of the blood on her body and clothes is real. Also during the dinner scene towards the end of the film, when Leatherface cuts Sally’s finger, he actually does cut Marilyn’s finger because he kept failing to get the fake blood to come out of the tube behind the blade.
It’s fair to say that much of her screaming wasn’t just down to acting. Take the scene where she collapses on the garage floor after fleeing Leatherface. Marilyn had to do the same thing for seventeen takes. The blood that you see on her knees is real. To make matters worse for Marilyn she wasn’t exactly the fastest runner in the world, even when chased by twenty two stone Gunnar Hansen, so the actor had to pretend to chainsaw through twigs and other flimsy foliage to buy Burns some time to get away.
Whilst Hansen found his scenes with Marilyn a bit of a giggle, in retrospect he really didn’t get on with Paul Partain who played Franklin, who was so into being his character that he niggled him. Hansen joked that he was pleased when he got to film the scene where he killed Franklin, given that the movie was being shot chronologically this would mean Partain would not be on set anymore. He wasn’t alone in his opinion – Marilyn Burns didn’t get on with Partain either and spent most of her time with him bickering.
Hansen declined Hooper’s request that Leatherface could and should talk on the grounds that it made him seem more human than subhuman. Apparently in order to prepare for his role, Hansen did research at a mental institution. Whether this research attributed to the fact that Leatherface has three different masks he wears during the movie, who knows, but the research does seem a bit involved for a film that was only scheduled to shoot three to four weeks with minimal budget. The masks imply that there is nothing inside Leatherface and that the mask dictates his personality for each occasion, such as a lady mask for when he prepares the family meal, chillingly smudged with lipstick. There is a cut scene where we see Leatherface touching up his make-up during the dinner scene. The mask is also an imitation of how Ed Gein used to take the face of a victim to wear as his own.
The cheapness of the budget made for more effective set designs; the sort a bigger budget would have added far too much polish to. Bob Burns has created a disturbing set clearly inspired by the story’s source in Ed Gein, aping his home stylings with furniture made of bone and skin. Hooper states that the skeletons used were actually real human skeletons purchased from India.
In putting the script together, Hooper and Kim Henkel said they knew they had it right when it read as funny to them. I often wonder it Hooper and his team really had any idea of how potent and raw his vision when transferred to the screen. The movie redefined horror by not following the conventional pattern that had taken to that point. Seen to be influenced by the disillusionment in the United States at the time – Vietnam, Watergate – it paved the way for the likes of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes and a whole plethora of imitators and parodies such as Kevin Connor’s Motel Hell.
Tobe Hooper went on to make the well received TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979) and had terrific success with the Spielberg-produced Poltergeist, however, much of his other outcome could be called interesting at best. His own sequel to Chainsaw released in 1986 was a badly executed mess and the likes of vampires from space movie Lifeforce was laughable at best. However of late Hooper has enjoyed a slight return to form with his 2003 take on the Toolbox Murders proving a guilty pleasure.