How many people die in ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’?
When it comes to mask-covered, bloodletting horror movies, 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the granddaddy of them all. Several years before the arrival of Halloween’s Michael Myers or Friday 13th’s Jason Voorhees on the scene, homicidal maniac Leatherface was already terrorising audiences with a chainsaw in hand.
Tobe Hooper’s movie not only laid the blueprint for all mask and weapon-based horror cinema to come. It’s a remarkable piece of cinema in its own right, beautifully shot on a shoestring budget and expertly edited into a perfectly paced New Hollywood masterpiece. There are plenty of reasons to put it up there with the greatest horror movies ever made, alongside the likes of Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Shining.
Leaving aside its technical brilliance for a moment, it’s time to focus on what first attracted us to the film. Let’s be honest: with a movie title like that, we all knew what we were getting.
The perpetrator of said massacre is the towering figure of a man with a taste for human flesh and his face draped in someone else’s skin. Late in the film, he is identified as ‘Leatherface’. On the other hand, his victims are a group of young people on a summer road trip through the Texas countryside.
But how many of them does Leatherface actually kill?
Leatherface doesn’t actually appear in the movie until about halfway through when he arrives unexpectedly from behind a doorway to bludgeon blindsided road-tripper Kirk to death with a hammer. What makes the scene so horrifying isn’t the obscene level of gore commonplace in more contemporary slasher movies but its raw simplicity.
We, as viewers, don’t get any real visual or audio cues that Leatherface is about to appear. Only the unsettling background noise of a pig squealing and a wall covered in animal skulls. The audience gets the sense that something is about to happen, but not Leatherface. None of us is expecting him. Within four seconds of screen time, Kirk has gone from being alive and well to being brutally murdered with bone-crushing force.
But wait. What about the chainsaw of the title? That arrives a little later when Leatherface uses it to carve up Kirk’s dead body in front of his friend Pam. The cannibalistic killer later uses it to carve open Franklin, another of the five youths, while he’s still alive.
Other than that, Pam’s other friend, Jerry, is a second victim of Leatherface’s hammer. Meanwhile, Pam herself is left to die slowly in a freezer.
These four are, in fact, the only victims of the massacre that we see die in the movie. The fifth young road-tripper, Sally, manages to escape Leatherface at its climax, leading to the iconic scene of him slashing the air with his chainsaw in frustration.
A fifth person does die in the film, but they’re not a victim of Leatherface. It’s actually his brother who gets hit by a truck while trying to catch Sally, who is escaping.
While other shots of rotting corpses appear at other points in the movie, we don’t know how or when these people died. The original Texas Chain Saw Massacre features just five deaths, then. Only one of which was by chainsaw. That’s hardly what I call a massacre.
