Gunnar Hansen - Chain Saw Confidential: How We Made the Worlds Most Notorious Horror Movie

for Betty

TEXT COPYRIGHT 2013

BY GUNNAR HANSEN.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2950-1

The Library of Congress cataloged the previous edition as follows:

Hansen, Gunnar, 1947

Chain saw confidential : how we made the worlds most notorious horror movie /

Gunnar Hansen.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4521-1449-1

1. Texas chain saw massacre (Motion picture) 2. Hansen, Gunnar, 1947 3. Motion

picture actors and actressesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

PN1997.T4265H36 2013

791.4372dc23

2013014844

Photographs and film stills copyright Vortex, Inc.

Kim Henkel/Tobe Hooper. All rights reserved.

Used with permission.

Texas Chain Saw Massacre game image courtesy videogamecritic.com

DESIGNED AND TYPESET BY LYDIA ORTIZ

Chronicle Books, LLC

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Once upon a time in 1973 some college students in Texas decided to get together at a friends farm and make a movie. They had never made one, but they figured it would be fun. And if they did it right, they would all get rich. Especially if they made a film of the horrific story that had been in all the Texas papersa series of killings and mutilations by a cannibal family near Corsicana, Texas, that had been exposed only days before, when a victim escaped her would-be killers. (There are those today who say one killer escaped and is still out there.)

With this story in hand, the filmmakers got some mob money, slapped together an outline, and called it Stalking Leatherface. They could work out the scripts details, they figured, as they went along. Then they found a bunch of acting students itching to get rich, too.

Unfortunately, nothing went right during the shooting. Everyone was incompetent and people hated each other. Most were so stoned that later they remembered only that they had had a lot of fun. The sensitive-poet teenager playing the lead killer suffered terrible psychological damage from his role; he couldnt act, so the director cut all his lines and put a mask on him.

Neighbors complained about disturbing events at the farmhouse. The police came. People died. No one wanted their name on the credits. The film was an inept, blood-soaked disaster. The director had to prove to the FBI that it was not a snuff film.

Everyone hated the movie when it came out, except for a few perceptive academics who could see past the chain saw to recognize allegorical echoes of both the corrupting influence of the Viet Nam war and the collapse of the American family. Oh, and also bourgeois sexual repression.

Then everyone got rich, and they lived happily ever after.

And that is how The Texas Chain Saw Massacre became the Mother of All Splatter Movies.

None of this is true.

But if we pasted together all the tales and rumors about Chain Saw, this is roughly the story we would end up with. It is the accumulated myth of the making of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, one of the most notorious, reviled, and beloved horror movies ever made.

So lets set the story straight.

There are a lot of questions to be addressed: Why is Chain Saw so controversial? How did it enter the culture? How has it influenced other movies? How could it become such a landmark movie? Why is it so successful as a horror movie and yet so hated by many mainstream film and social critics? And why did these myths attach themselves to this movie?

To answer these questions, or try to, we must go back to Chain Saws beginnings. So lets talk about how this movie got made, who made it, what happened on the set day to day, and how the actors and crew survived it. Lets talk about what these filmmakers were trying to do, what they expected, and what they ended up withand why. Lets talk about what the critics and audiences said about the movie when it was released and how that reception has evolved over the years.

Lets talk about what has made this movie what it is, what horror is, what horror movies are, and how Chain Saw fits into that puzzle. Lets talk about why some people dismiss it as a bunch of crap, others consider it the greatest horror movie ever made, and still others blame it for everything that is wrong with American society and, of course, the corruption of its children.

The reason I want to talk about this movie is that I played Leatherface, Chain Saws brutish, relentlessyet apparently lovablekiller. Through an improbable series of events, one sweaty summer afternoon I found myself dancing on a Texas hilltop, spinning a chain saw over my head, hell-bent on scaring the bejesus out of the director. It had been a long trip getting to that hilltop, and it has been a long trip since.

I remember the filming. Unlike many of those who claim to have been involved with Chain Saw, I was actually there. And I have had plenty of time to gather my thoughts about what happened and about the significance of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Telling the true Chain Saw story is a bit like being a character in Kurosawas Rashomoneach player has his or her own take on what happened and what it means. And each of us has an emotional interest in remembering the story a certain way. A Chain Saw crew member once told a writer, I happen to know the truthwhatever anybody says, thats fine, but I happen to know the truth. Really? I have also heard other Chain Saw actors tell stories about what I did on set that couldnt possibly be true. Could they?

Memory is a bit flexible, but while each of us remembers the same event differently, I know Im right most of the time. And when we remember something, we really dont remember the event itself. We remember the last time we remembered the event; a psychologist once told me that. You can see how that hall of mirrors leads to a kind of infinitely regressing truth, never quite visible but somewhere in the background of that mirroror is it this mirror?

Lets say, then, that this is what I remember of how it went, reinforced by conversations with many of those other cast and crew members who were there when we made the worlds most notorious horror movie. Maybe the truth will lie somewhere among these stories.

Besides, someone has to explain what happened.

Call me Leatherface. Some years agonever mind how long preciselyhaving little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me otherwise, I thought I would do a little acting and see how movies are made. Every once in a while, when the world gets to be too much and I start to feel a bit spleeny, I feel the need to lift my spirits by killing someone. Whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet, I know its high time to get onto a horror movie set to harmlessly act out my impulses.