The Real Story Behind The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Explained

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Tobe Hooper's 1974 gut-wrenching horror classic "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" is not based on a real story, despite what the film's marketing might have you believe. There was no Texan serial murderer nicknamed Leatherface, nor was there ever a real-life family of backwoods cannibals named the Sawyers. Indeed, even within the mythology of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," it's hard to keep the facts straight, as the series has been rebooted multiple times. As of this writing, there have been nine films in the "Texas Chainsaw" franchise, and at least four of them are reboots, re-imaginings, or prequels. 

To briefly recap, "Texas Chain Saw" follows a quintet of teens who are traveling in a van through a more remote area of Texas, looking for the gravesite of two travelers' grandfather. They pick up a mad hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) who threatens them with a razor and cuts himself. The quintet flees to a local house where they disturb a dynasty of abattoir workers that has been isolated for so long, that they have taken to eating passing humans to stay alive, often making furniture out of their victims' bones. The rest of the film is a fight for survival as audiences learn more and more about the sick practices that the cannibals have been involved in.

As all TCM fans know, though, the events of Hooper's original film were indeed based on fact. Hooper and his co-screenwriter Kim Henkel paid attention to the news, and they were struck by the details surrounding notorious serial killers like Ed Gein and Elmer Wayne Henley. Indeed, a lot of the details of Leatherface's slayings come from Ed Gein's actual murders (and we'll get into those below). Hooper was also commenting on the raw violence one might see in news media in 1974. Below are the true events that inspired the movie.

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The world's many TCM fans will likely be able to tell you that Ed Gein was a huge influence on the film. Ed Gein, for the uninitiated, was a real-life murderer and grave robber who committed a long series of ghoulish crimes from about 1947 until 1957 when he was apprehended. Nicknamed the Plainfield Ghoul (after his base of operations in Plainfield, Wisconsin), Gein was known for raiding the local cemetery, exhuming corpses, and using their bones to fashion furniture and other souvenirs. 

Gein was apprehended after he kidnapped and murdered a shop owner named Bernice Worden, whose body he also extensively mutilated. When the police raided his home looking for Worden, they found his large collection of ghoulish crafts, including some which are too nasty to list here. Gein did indeed fashion masks made from the facial skin of several women, as well as a female-skin corset. It was rumored that Gein claimed he was recreating a human skin suit so that he could put it on and "resurrect" his mother, but his case has been wildly sensationalized over the years. Gein did confess to kidnapping and killing Worden, as well as a woman named Mary Hogan three years earlier. Gein was put in a mental hospital and died in 1984 of lung cancer. 

The cauldron where he boiled the flesh off of some of the corpses is on display at Zak Bagan's Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. The details of Gein's habit of corpse collection earned a great deal of attention from morbid looky-loos, and his home became a tourist attraction. 

Some of the Sawyer family's crafts seen in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" were inspired directly by Gein's, including all the human skulls and lampshades of human skin, not to mention the female-skin mask that Leatherface infamously wore. Gein was not a cannibal. His obsession with female bodies, specifically that of his mother, also served as the inspiration for "Psycho" and "The Silence of the Lambs." 

Gein also got his own movie in a 2000 film called, natch, "Ed Gein."

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Ed Gein operated out of Wisconsin, so where did the Texan location of "Chain Saw" come from? Less well-known to TCM fans was the real-life killer and sex trafficker Elmer Wayne Henley, a native Texan, and a person Hooper has also cited as an inspiration. Henley, with his partner Dean Corll, would kidnap and/or hustle teenage boys for a trafficker named David Brooks who would sell the boys. The pair assaulted and killed six boys in the process of their procurement. 

No such acts of assault take place in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," which was far more focused on the crimes of Ed Gein as inspiration. On the DVD commentary track for "Chain Saw," co-screenwriter Kim Henkel admitted that he watched Henley's video confession, and was fascinated. He was darkly drawn to Henley's assertions that he would take his punishment "like a man," and that he vacillated between humility and moral superiority. Henley's attitudes, Henkel said, were used as the basis of the film's murderers. They know killing and assault are wrong, but only occasionally. And they don't always care. Henkel called it "moral schizophrenia." 

Shortly before being apprehended in 1973, Henley shot Corll in the head for taking his murder/sex games too far. Henley himself was captured in 1973, and sentenced to six consecutive 99-year prison stints. Brooks was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2020 due to COVID-19. Henley is still in captivity to this day. 

The sensationalized media coverage of the Henley trial, for Tobe Hooper, also marked a change in the way American audiences consumed violence. That, too, inspired him. 

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While the violence of Hooper's original "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" is striking, the film is more often noted for its gritty style. The film is shabby and grimy, and the film stock itself seems to have been stored on the shelf of a slaughterhouse for a long while, affecting a greasy, almost yellowed quality. "Texas Chain Saw" is hard for many audiences to get through because it nearly resembles a legitimate snuff film. It should be noted that Hooper, while he was a film student at the University of Texas at Austin, served as a documentary cameraman. 

In an interview on one of the many "Texas Chain Saw" DVDs, Hooper noted that news coverage in San Antonio had become incredibly violent, with crimes being described or even depicted in graphic detail. Recall that 1973 was right in the middle of the war in Vietnam, and a lot of the horrors of that conflict were making their way to American TV screens and newspapers. 1974 was also in the wake of the Watergate scandal and saw a major oil crisis as well as an economic recession. No one felt they could trust the government anymore, and cynicism was running high. In a 2004 issue of Rue Morgue Magazine, Hooper told an interviewer that he recalled seeing "brains all over the road" on TV, and came to the conclusion that "man was the real monster here, just wearing a different face, so I put a literal mask on the monster in my film."

While the violence in "Texas Chain Saw" is horrifying, Hooper saw it as a logical extension of the evil he saw every day on the news. "Texas Chain Saw" may be a bleak, grimy, documentary-like film about evil cannibals, but Hooper clearly didn't find it fantastical. Humans are violent, and the ravages of rural poverty can lead to utter madness. 

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As mentioned, there were eight additional "Texas Chainsaw" movies that followed the original, and they all took slightly different looks at the original 1974 story. Hooper's 1986 follow-up, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2" was a wilder, more cartoonish version of the original, affecting a more striking, cinematic style, and sporting a more action movie revenge subplot (involving Dennis Hopper). 1990's "Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III," directed by Jeff Burr, is only notable for being the last film to receive an X-rating from the MPAA (before they transformed the rating into NC-17).

Henkel's own 1996 film "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation" starred Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger before they were big stars, and it's one of the craziest — and worst — things you'll ever see. It seems the Illuminati had been controlling the cannibal family this whole time (!). 

In 2003, there was a slicked-up remake directed by Marcus Nispel, and it turned the grime of the original into MTV-like overphotographed super-style. It was a hit and spawned a prequel of its own. Because it was a remake, it went back to the real-life crimes of Ed Gein for inspiration. 

2013's "Texas Chainsaw 3-D" was a reboot of the series that ignored all the sequels, and starred a young Alexandra Daddario. It's a pretty okay movie. The 2017 film "Leatherface" served as a prequel to the original, while 2022's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" was another reboot that ignored the sequels, including "Texas Chainsaw 3-D." Yes, it's confusing that three of the films in the series have titles that are slight variations on the phrase "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" while two of them are called "Leatherface." 

Apart from the remake, were any of the sequels and prequels inspired by real-life crimes? Not really. Some of them allude to Ed Gein more heavily than others, but other than Gein and Henley, no new crimes entered the filmmakers' consciousnesses to reshape the TCM narrative. The sequels all follow their own internal mythologies.