The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, famous American horror film directed by Tobe Hooper and written by Hooper and Kim Henkel. Released in 1974, the film follows a group of young people who are victimized by a family of cannibals in rural Texas after their van runs out of gas at their abandoned family home. The film has proved both controversial and enduring, spawning an eight-film franchise and earning its chainsaw-wielding antagonist, Leatherface, a spot among film’s most iconic horror villains.

Inspiration

According to interviews with Hooper, the concept for the film crystallized for him after a Christmastime visit to a Montgomery Ward department store. He had been working on an idea for a film that involved “isolation, the woods, the darkness, and the unknown,” Hooper told The Austin Chronicle in 2000. He was overwhelmed by the crowds of holiday shoppers, and, spotting the store’s chainsaw display, he realized that the sound of a running chainsaw would reduce the crowd in seconds. When he got home he began listening to what was probably Elton John’s popular song “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” which commends returning to a simple life:

All of the elements of the film suddenly came to him, including “the structural puzzle pieces, the way it folds continuously back in on itself, and no matter where you’re going, it’s the wrong place,” he said. Although the plot of the film is fictional, the character of Leatherface was inspired by the American grave robber and serial killer Ed Gein.

Discover how ordinary objects work, and expand your understanding of the familiar.

SIGN UP

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">

Thank you for signing up!"

Back to homepage

By clicking "Sign Up", you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Plot

The film opens with news reports of a string of grave robbings in Texas, along with a litany of other violent and distressing reports of world events. A group of young adults—Sally Hardesty (played by Marilyn Burns), her brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain), and their friends Jerry (Allen Danziger), Kirk (William Vail), and Pam (Teri McMinn)—is traveling to check on the grave of Sally and Franklin’s grandfather to confirm that it is undisturbed. After they leave the graveyard, they pick up a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), whose strange and erratic demeanor unsettles the group. When he cuts himself with a razor and then attempts to attack Franklin, the group kicks him out of the van. Running low on gas, they stop at a gas station that’s out of gas. The group moves on and arrives at the now-abandoned Hardesty family home, where they break up to explore various parts of it.

Kirk and Pam go off in pursuit of a nearby swimming hole and come across a house with a running generator outside. Thinking he can barter for gasoline, Kirk enters the house and looks for its owners. Suddenly, Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), a large man wearing a mask made of human skin, appears and kills Kirk with a hammer. When Kirk doesn’t reappear, Pam enters the house looking for him, and she is grabbed by Leatherface and carried, screaming, into his butchering room. He suspends her on a meat hook and dismembers Kirk’s body with a chainsaw in front of her.

Later that night, Jerry goes looking for Kirk and Pam and comes across the same house. He enters and, looking around, hears a rattling coming from a deep freezer, which he opens to discover Pam, convulsing and nearly dead; she dies soon afterward. Leatherface notices Jerry and kills him with a sledgehammer. Back at the Hardesty house, Sally and Franklin are getting quite worried about their missing friends. They argue about which of them should go look for Kirk and Pam. Sally wants Franklin to stay with the van because he uses a wheelchair, but he is determined to join her in her search. Looking through the nearby woods in the dark, they are chased by Leatherface, who kills Franklin with his chainsaw. Sally manages to run back to the gas station she had visited earlier in the day and pleads with the owner (Jim Siedow) to help her. He initially tries to console her but soon attacks, subdues, and transports her to Leatherface’s house. While he is driving a captive Sally to the house, he encounters the hitchhiker, whom he beats with a stick and scolds, “I told you to stay away from that graveyard!” The hitchhiker is revealed to be the grave robber, and Leatherface is identified as his brother.

When the men take her to their family house, they summon their grandfather, a decrepit man in a wheelchair who appears almost mummified, and they cut Sally’s finger for him to suck her blood. Sally faints from the horror of the scene. When Sally comes to, she is tied to a chair at a gruesome dinner table, as the men mock her terror, discuss how they plan to kill her, and bicker among themselves. The hitchhiker decides that their grandfather should get the “fun” of killing Sally, so he hands Grandpa a hammer and positions Sally on her knees in front of him, leaning over a metal basin. At his son and grandson’s encouragement, Grandpa attempts to hit Sally on the head with a hammer and repeatedly misses as she screams. She eventually wrestles free and escapes by jumping out of a second-story window. She runs toward the highway, narrowly pursued by the hitchhiker and by Leatherface and his chainsaw. They chase her into the highway, where the hitchhiker is hit by a truck and killed. The truck driver pulls over to attempt to help Sally, who is covered in blood and screaming uncontrollably, but they both end up running from Leatherface. The driver hits Leatherface in the head with a wrench, incapacitating him long enough for the driver to run away and Sally to jump into the cab of a passing pickup truck. As the truck carries her to safety, she laughs hysterically, and Leatherface dances with his chainsaw held aloft in the setting sun on the road behind them.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Aesthetics

The film was falsely marketed and framed in the opening credits as a true story, a choice that Hooper told Rue Morgue magazine in 2004 was influenced by his disillusionment with “being lied to by the [U.S.] government about things that were going on all over the world” in the early 1970s and by the brutality of news reporting about the Vietnam War and local news in Austin. With a production budget of $140,000, the creative team used documentary-style techniques, including hand-held cameras and washed-out colors, to further a sense of realism. Hooper often positioned the camera at the same height as the characters, which emphasized their extreme emotional experiences and drew in the audience.

Reception

Although Hooper had initially hoped that the film would receive a PG rating, since most of the film’s violence is implied rather than shown, including little visible blood, the Motion Picture Association of America rated the film X, eventually softening its determination to an R after Hooper removed several minutes of footage. Similarly, the film was not widely well received; it inspired such anger and disgust in many viewers that it was banned, for some length of time, in 11 countries. Despite this, the film was a commercial success, grossing more than $30 million domestically, and has developed a cult following.

Franchise

After The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, eight sequel films were produced between 1986 and 2022. Hooper returned to his original success to create The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986), also featuring Leatherface and his family. The sequel involved much more gore than the original. Hooper did not direct any other films in the franchise, but Henkel cowrote (with Hooper) and directed the fourth entry, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995). Each of the films in the franchise features Leatherface, although their plots vary. None of the franchise installments matched the success of the original film in terms of return on investment, although, overall, the franchise has gained more than $250 million in worldwide box office revenue.

Legacy

Many critics have identified The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a foundational film in the modern horror genre, crediting it with pioneering the slasher genre and introducing both the use of power tools as weapons and the archetype of the masked, remorseless killer.