#The texas chain saw massacre ed gein movie#
#The texas chain saw massacre ed gein series#

I said, “Ooh, I know how I could get out of this place fast - if I just start one of these things up and make that sound.” Of course I didn’t.

And the focus just racked from my eyeball to the people to the saws - and the idea popped. And I was just standing there in front of an upright display of chainsaws. There were just so many people to go through. And those big crowds have always gotten to me. It was around holiday season, and I found myself in the Ward’s hardware department, and I was still kind of percolating on this idea of isolation and such. I had been working on this other story for some months - about isolation, the woods, the darkness, and the unknown. I was in the Montgomery Ward’s out in Capital Plaza. Writer/director Tobe Hooper said the inspiration for the film came from his spotting a display of chainsaws while standing in the hardware section of a crowded store:

#The texas chain saw massacre ed gein series#

So, true story or not? Certainly there was no real family of cannibalistic chainsaw murderers slaughtering people in Texas, nor any actual series of chainsaw-related killings. One by one they disappear to be brutally butchered, each murder more horrendous than the last with one victim being hung live on a meat hook, another trapped in his wheelchair as he is hacked to death and the surviving member of the group making a frantic bid for escape in the horrific climax.This video cassette is based on a true incident and is definitely not for the squeamish or the nervous. For them an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare when they were exposed to an insane and macabre family of chain saw killers. The film is an account of a tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty. The 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been touted with the tagline “Inspired by a true story,” leading many horror fans to wonder whether the grisly film was actually based on real events, or whether the claim is simply another bit of Hollywood promotion intended to attract filmgoers via the extra-chilling lure of a macabre tale not entirely the product of a screenwriter’s imagination (a technique successfully used by the Coen brothers to entice viewers into suspending disbelief for 1996’s Fargo, their gruesome cinematic depiction of a kidnapping-for-hire scheme gone awry).Īctually, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been promoted as being “based on a true incident” for quite a few years now, as the original videocassette cover includes the following synopsis: The tale of five young students who unwittingly meet up with a sinister hitchhiker and the mask-wearing maniac Leatherface (whose mask is actually made from dried human skin, not leather), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre turned “a lumberjack’s tool into the stuff of nightmares and the blood-curdling scream into an art form,” in the words of Toronto Star writer Melissa Aronzyk.

#The texas chain saw massacre ed gein movie#

When The Texas Chain Saw Massacre hit movie theaters in 1974, it quickly supplanted the previous year’s top horror flick, The Exorcist, as “the most terrifying movie ever made.” Unlike The Exorcist, however, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre eschewed standard production values and modern special effects in favor of a grainy documentary-like approach with decidedly low-tech visual effects.