With Texas Chainsaw 3D, the latest in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, officially in UK cinemas nationwide on Wednesday 9th January, we thought we’d take a look at the legend of Texas Chainsaw.
The Film
1974 saw the release of Tobe Hooper’s cult classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The film, with its minimal budget, was primarily shot over the course of a month in the intense heat of rural Texas, seven days a week for up to 16 hours a day.
The Family
Five unsuspecting youths encounter the notorious Sawyer family whilst on a summer road trip. The Sawyers – a family of sadistic cannibals include serial killer Leatherface, his equally deranged brothers “the Cook” and “the Hitchhiker”, grotesque Grandpa Sawyer and of course the deceased Grandma Sawyer, lovingly preserved by her family and kept in their attic.
The Real Story
Whilst the Sawyers were the work of Hooper’s vivid imagination, the story itself is loosely based on the real life murderer and body snatcher Ed Gein. Gein was known for exhuming corpses from graveyards and fashioning their remains in to trophies and ornaments made from human skin and bone.
The Response
The film has gone down in history as being one of the greatest and simultaneously controversial horror movies ever made. Described as “intelligent in its bloodless depiction of violence” and “as violent and gruesome as the blood-soaked title promises” it is unsurprising that the legacy of Leatherface lives on in subsequent films. Leatherface himself has become one of the most iconic characters of his genre and his weapon of choice, the chainsaw, was one of the first murder implements to link specifically to a film.
The Next Instalment
Lionsgate’s Texas Chainsaw 3D continues the legendary story of the homicidal Sawyer family, picking up where Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror classic left off in Newt, Texas, where for decades people went missing without a trace. The townspeople long suspected the Sawyer family, owners of a local barbeque pit, were somehow responsible. Their suspicions were finally confirmed one hot summer day when a young woman escaped the Sawyer house following the brutal murders of her four friends. Word around the small town quickly spread, and a vigilante mob of enraged locals surrounded the Sawyer stronghold, burning it to the ground and killing every last member of the family – or so they thought…
Are you revving to go? Texas Chainsaw 3D…in cinemas January 9th 2013
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