How the actor behind Leatherface almost killed himself on set
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre shocked the world on its release in 1974 with its horrendous depiction of a monstrous family and relentless violence. To this day, the most memorable character is Leatherface, the main chainsaw-wielding monster with a seemingly leatherbound face, and the horrors onscreen weren’t the only ones to plague the production.
Like many horror movie sets, the set was littered with difficult-to-see props and unwanted reminders of brutal mortality. Such places are often thought of as cursed, and there are some instances that would lead you to believe that the only logical reason for all the goings-on is some kind of occultist occurrence. However, for the cast and crew of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, most of the issues were explained away, even if they were a little frightening.
This 1970s film set was most definitely a product of the time. Health and safety precautions were not like they are now, and plenty of the methods used by cast and crew wouldn’t fly now, we hope. One example is the 26-hour shoot director Tobe Hooper insisted on getting the haunting ‘dinner party’ scene just right.
The scene where Sally (Marilyn Burns) is forced to sit at the dinner table with the cannibal family, tied to a corpse while being tortured. Of course, this would be horrific in any circumstance, but it turns out that during this marathon of a shoot, the temperature soared to over 45 degrees Celsius, and some of the actors hadn’t washed or changed clothes in five weeks for continuity.
If this wasn’t bad enough, Hooper wanted to make the environment as realistic as possible, so they insisted on littering dead dog and cattle parts along with rotting cheese around the Round Rock set, making the air completely putrid – unsurprisingly, actors had to take regular breaks to vomit and get some oxygen outside the barn.
The stories go on forever, reciting true violence in favour of realism, the director having fantasies of murder with chainsaws in a shopping centre after having been present at a mass shooting, and even the original choice for Leatherface locking himself in a hotel room, drunk out of his mind, refusing to play the character.
Things almost ended in real-life bloodshed when the actor who plays Leatherface almost met his untimely end. The villain was played by Icelandic-born American actor Gunnar Hansen, whose mammoth appearance made him perfect for this terrifying role. The story goes that Hansen was chasing his co-stars with a real chainsaw while filming The Texas Chain Saw Massacre when he almost died.
One day, he slipped in the mud and sent the running chainsaw flying into the air – when it landed, the whirring death machine was just inches from his head, narrowly avoiding leaving the actor with an offensively large hole in his cranium. There was clearly a lot going on on the set of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that wouldn’t happen now, but it all seemed to combine to create the landmark film it was intended to be.
