The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Masterpiece

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and and Jerry's here too.

Speaker 3 And this is our episode right before our Halloween episode. You're in stuff you should know.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 big

Speaker 2 COA here, obviously.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, hopefully parents aren't going to click on this if their young children are in the car because it'll probably be

Speaker 2 Texas Chainsaw Mask or something or other in the title.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's not going to be like

Speaker 3 how ponies work.

Speaker 3 I don't to trick anybody.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so COA about that. Obviously, it's going to have some pretty gruesome material in it.
But also,

Speaker 2 because we're going to be talking a lot about this movie and we're going to go over the plot and everything.

Speaker 2 So if it's kind of a spoiler situation where you don't want to hear about it and you haven't seen it somehow,

Speaker 2 then tune out. But some people like to know what happens before they go into a horror movie, you know?

Speaker 3 Yes. But that's a great, that's a great spoiler alert.
If you haven't seen it, go watch it.

Speaker 3 People use the the word masterpiece about this movie a lot. And not just fans of the film, like sickos, like critics, like academics who teach film appreciation.

Speaker 3 Like it is a really, really good movie, whether you like horror movies or not. Because the key to this is if you if you get scared at horror movies,

Speaker 3 approach it like it's a dark comedy. And it will make sense to use a dark comedy and you will probably laugh out loud loud in a couple of parts.

Speaker 3 So it can be taken both ways and sometimes in some parts

Speaker 3 both ways at the same time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, see, I've never understood that take because I don't see any dark comedy notions about it whatsoever.

Speaker 2 I think it's one of the most terrifying movies I've ever seen, if not the most terrifying.

Speaker 3 Wow, you and Rex Reed feel the same way.

Speaker 2 Yeah, every time I see it, and I just saw it for the first time a few years ago, finally, and

Speaker 2 it's just, it's, it's so disturbing and unsettling every single time, even though I know it's coming.

Speaker 3 I watched it again last night. And it, yeah, so when it finished, when it cuts at the end and goes to the credits, I literally said out loud, that is a great movie.

Speaker 3 And Yumi was, I was sitting there by myself watching it. And I said it out loud.
It just took it out of me.

Speaker 3 And I had never watched it as a comedy before either. I'd never even turned up that anybody considered it a comedy or a dark comedy.

Speaker 3 but going into it, knowing that, I definitely found some spots here or there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I didn't.

Speaker 2 Do you know what I said at the end last night out loud by myself? What? Jerry's going to have to beep it, but it has that famous just abrupt ending and cut to black. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I was curled up on my couch and I just said,

Speaker 3 this movie.

Speaker 2 Like, every time it gets me in a place where I'm just like, like, if there was a camera on my face while I'm watching it, it's just my face is just gnarled up the whole time.

Speaker 2 Like, oh my God, it's just so disturbing.

Speaker 3 I think me and a lot of people would love to watch a reaction video of you watching

Speaker 3 Texas Chainsaw Masker.

Speaker 2 A camera trained on my face for 83 minutes.

Speaker 3 Exactly. Yeah, and it is just 83 minutes.
It's not even an hour and a half of your time.

Speaker 3 You know, like you just watch it, breeze through it, and say, that was a great movie, or what you said at the end. And let me ask you this.

Speaker 3 Can you think of another horror movie that makes you feel like that whenever you you watch it? Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 there's quite a few movies that are still disturbing to me, but this one takes the cake for sure. Wow.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, if you haven't seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre and you have any kind of curiosity, I strongly urge you to pause this and go watch it and come back. Whatever.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 I think you can still appreciate this episode, don't you? Because it's not just about the movie itself. It's about how it was made because it was an independent picture.

Speaker 3 It's one of the most successful independent films of all time.

Speaker 3 And it was made by students of film, literal students of film, who loved making movies. And they made,

Speaker 3 again, a masterpiece is what a lot of people call it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And we're going to get to the plot and go through that, as we said.
But even, I just want to say, even the beginning, that first 30 minutes before they even set foot inside the bad house,

Speaker 2 that's all just the way it's shot and laid out and the sound, it's just all

Speaker 2 disturbs me to no end.

Speaker 3 I know. And to think like that was shot by a 23-year-old.
I know.

Speaker 3 So let's talk about this.

Speaker 3 Let's get into the nuts and bolts of how the whole thing came about. How about that?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And we can only start with director Toby Hooper, who apparently was inspired by a few different things to come up with this movie.

Speaker 2 One,

Speaker 2 pretty obviously is Ed Gine, who's a serial killer who we have not covered yet. At some point, we'll probably get into the skin suit-making crimes of Ed Guine, right?

Speaker 3 We did

Speaker 3 an episode on him.

Speaker 2 I think it's Gein, isn't it? We did a whole episode?

Speaker 3 We did a whole episode on Mr. Gein, the serial killer.
I didn't think we did.

Speaker 3 We did. It wasn't the best, so I can see how you wouldn't remember it.

Speaker 2 Oh, I thought we just put him in something else. Okay, we'll scratch that then.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he appeared in some episode, but we ended up making a whole episode about him.

Speaker 2 I see it now. Ed Guine, Ed Gein, the serial killer, serial killer.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 2 That had to be your title. That's good.
Yeah, I think it was.

Speaker 3 But Ed Gein, he wasn't just the inspiration for Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Masker. And the reason why is, if you're not familiar with Ed Gein, he wore skin suits.

Speaker 3 He was also the influence for the character Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. And he inspired the movie Psycho.

Speaker 3 Not like Norman Bates bears any resemblance to him whatsoever, aside from the whole cross-dressing thing, I guess, is what inspired it.

Speaker 3 But more the fact that there was someone out there who was capable of doing these things inspired a movie

Speaker 3 about Norman Bates, who's capable of doing horrible things too.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so that was the first thing. The second thing was he had a friend Toby Hooper did, the director, who was a doctor, or I guess a med student at the time,

Speaker 2 who said that he had removed the face of a cadaver and wore it as a Halloween mask. So there's one for your nightmares.

Speaker 3 Yeah, even if he hadn't done that, to be telling people that you had done that and be serious about it, that's pretty nuts.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And then the last thing was Toby Hooper was apparently Christmas shopping at a Montgomery Ward

Speaker 2 store one time, and it was just really, really crowded. And he was,

Speaker 2 I get the sense that he was having a bit of a panicky moment trying to get out of there and saw some chainsaws on display.

Speaker 2 And I was like, that'd be great if I could grab one of those and just cut my way out of here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. So he put all those things together.
They came together end of 1972, beginning of 1973, into this story that just kind of clicked in his head.

Speaker 3 I also saw that Hansel and Gretel formed some loose influence on the whole thing, too. Sure.
But he got together with a friend of his named Kim Henkel, and he and Henkel wrote the script together.

Speaker 3 They met at Toby Hooper's house. They would map out the story arc on the floor.

Speaker 3 And then Kim Henkel would go in and type some pages and come back after a few and read it all to Toby Hooper and get a a thumbs up or down, and then they continue on.

Speaker 3 And they wrote the script fairly quickly from what I understand. They had some working titles for it that fortunately they did not go with.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And, you know, one of the reasons it went quickly is because after that first half hour, there's not a lot of dialogue

Speaker 2 aside from like, you know, Pam, Pam, and then

Speaker 3 Sally, Sally.

Speaker 2 And then the dinner scene, you're going to get some more, but there are long stretches where it's just a lot of action. But yeah, you mentioned the alternate titles.

Speaker 2 Head Cheese was one, which does make an appearance in the movie

Speaker 2 and the dinner scene, I believe. And then Leatherface was one of the titles.
That would go on to be the title of the 2017 prequel.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think it was just called Leatherface, which I haven't seen any of those, by the way.

Speaker 3 Neither have I. I've only seen the first one, and I saw the second one.
I didn't see that.

Speaker 2 I don't think I care to see any of the rest of them.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, if you're into the first one, it might not make sense to see the second one because it's such a departure, but it's still, if you take that as an actual comedy, which it is,

Speaker 3 it's kind of fun on its own.

Speaker 2 Well, I might see that one, but I definitely am not interested in the prequels and the reboots and the remakes and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 Well, so

Speaker 3 A24 just announced last month that they're rebooting Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Would you see those?

Speaker 2 Well, they're almost across the finish line. Apparently, they're in the poll position to win the bid as of like a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 3 Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 You'd be interested to know that one of the other bidders was Oz Perkins and some other people.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Your guy.

Speaker 2 And then Taylor Sheridan, oddly, put in a bid on the film and TV rights, but it looks like A24 is in the poll position and they're talking about a TV series. So I would watch that.

Speaker 3 Okay, I would too, for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So they came up with the script and it was they never actually came up with the title themselves.

Speaker 3 There was a guy named Warren Skarin who came up with the title Texas Chainsaw Massacre, one of the great titles of all time. Oh, yeah.
And it's four words, if you want to be pedantic about it.

Speaker 3 Chainsaw, they have it as two words for some reason.

Speaker 3 And Warren Skarin would play a bunch of really important roles over the course of getting this movie made. And he was in a position too because he was Texas's first film commissioner.

Speaker 3 He also apparently was an investor in the film too. And he was a friend of a mutual friend between him and Kim Henkel, who would go on to become the production manager for the movie Ron Boseman.

Speaker 3 And scare and also scared up the first investor, who was a former Texas legislator, state legislator named Bill Parsley, who also apparently fancied himself a movie producer.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and technically, it's five words if you count the word the, because the first one was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Speaker 3 So you out-pedanticked my own pedanticness.

Speaker 2 Well, because I knew we'd hear from somebody.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 2 So who was the last person you named?

Speaker 3 Ron Bozeman?

Speaker 2 Bill Parsley. Or Bill Parsley, yeah.
So he,

Speaker 2 you know, they came up with a few different

Speaker 2 budgets. The first one, you know, it was like, hey, what can we get? What can we make it for?

Speaker 2 And what could we really make it for if we just, you know, kind of didn't have much and still had to do it. And that was 60 grand was like, hey, that'd be awesome.
It's about 388 grand a day.

Speaker 2 40 grand was the mid-level and 20 grand was the small budget that they still thought they could make it with, even though that would have to be black and white.

Speaker 2 I could see this in black and white, like a Night of the Living Dead, but there are so many great color shots in this movie, like those green eyes

Speaker 2 of Sally that are so key in the third act and the sunrise shot at the end. You know, you'd lose all that.

Speaker 3 Oh, speaking of third acts, I watched 30 Days of Night again,

Speaker 3 that vampire movie. Have you ever seen it? Josh Hartnett?

Speaker 3 I don't think I saw that one. It's not bad, but I thought of you because they show like this metal-crushing trash compactor in the first 10 minutes.
And I thought,

Speaker 3 show a metal-crushing trash compactor in Act 1, you're going to use it in Act Three. And sure enough, they did.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's classic. Classic move.

Speaker 3 So they actually actually got their

Speaker 3 pie-in-the-sky high-end budget of 60 grand. Most of it came from Bill Parsley, but there were a couple of other investors that got cobbled together.

Speaker 3 And ultimately, by the time the thing had its final cut, it was up to 300 grand.

Speaker 3 But even that was a paltry amount of money,

Speaker 3 even in the mid-70s. Like, this is...
peanuts as far as making a movie is concerned.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, not too bad. I'll take issue with peanuts.

Speaker 2 I mean, Rocky was made for $1.1 million and the average was $4 million even back then, but I guess I've known friends who have made movies these days for a lot less than that. So

Speaker 2 I know people that would be very happy with 300 grand.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but they're not using film stock, and I'll bet that eats up a ton of budget.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Well, how about this? Can we agree on Brazil nuts?

Speaker 2 Brazil nuts sounds good.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 So one of the ways that they cut costs, Chuck, was to to hire no-name actors, like inexperienced actors.

Speaker 3 And ultimately, the way it would wash out, that would make the whole thing that much more realistic, which is great.

Speaker 3 These were people who might have been drama students taking film classes at UT Austin. Some of them were just Austin locals.

Speaker 3 And the other way that they cut costs was to get these casts or this cast of no-name actors

Speaker 3 who were already being paid Brazil nuts at best, peanuts probably, maybe even just the P part of Peanuts

Speaker 3 to defer even that amount, most of it, until after the film got made. And they agreed to it, and they put together a cast of 10 plus a few extras.

Speaker 3 And the only one who had any experience whatsoever was a guy named Jim Seadow. Seedow or Seidow?

Speaker 2 Yeah, he played

Speaker 2 the cook.

Speaker 2 And one of the three brothers in the Sawyer family.

Speaker 2 Marilyn Burns is Sally. She had also been in a couple of things.

Speaker 2 She was in Robert Altman's Brewsters McLeod, and she was actually cast as a lead in a movie, in a movie called Love and Molly that would have been before this, but she was replaced by Susan Sarandon.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and she ended up being the body double for Sarandon and that one, I think.

Speaker 2 It was a bitter pill, I'm sure.

Speaker 3 For sure.

Speaker 3 So Jim Seidow was

Speaker 3 his experience was a radio soap opera actor. So that was the experience he had.
And from what I could tell, he was the only SAG member.

Speaker 3 And then there's a um a non-on-screen i guess off screen is how you put it if you have brains yeah um appearance by a guy named john larroquette yeah if you're a night court fan and even if you're not you're probably still familiar with john lariquette Yeah, I didn't know this was John Lariquette.

Speaker 2 My first two viewings of this, I had no idea until you've sent this along. So I don't know.
I guess I didn't stay through the credits because I was always, you know, cowering in a corner or something.

Speaker 3 Turn it off. Turn it off.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Did not know that that was John Lariquette.
That was the first thing he ever did in the film business.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I didn't know that either. I ran across it.
I also ran across that he was friends with Toby Hooper and he did it as a favor. Apparently it took an hour of his time to record it.

Speaker 3 And Toby Hooper paid him in pot. And John Lariquette apparently confirmed that to none other than Parade magazine years later.

Speaker 2 I love it.

Speaker 3 So you want to talk about the plot and then get into how they made this thing after that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, should we take a a break first or should we do the plot first?

Speaker 3 No, it's a good idea. Let's do a break.

Speaker 2 All right, well, everyone, brace yourselves, go, you know, chill out, do some yoga, maybe meditate, and then we'll tell you the plot of Texas Chainsaw Masker right after this.

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from public.com. You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 2 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 3 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there.

Speaker 4 Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 2 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.
That's public.com slash SYSK.

Speaker 6 Paid for by Public Investing.

Speaker 7 All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 8 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds, and a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 10 CryptoTrading provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 7 Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

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Speaker 3 Okay, so we're back and we're talking about the plot. And again, you already gave a spoiler alert, but it's worth saying again.

Speaker 3 If you haven't seen the movie and you want to go in fresh, don't listen to this part, okay? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And maybe we'll shout, we're done with the plot after we're done with it so that everybody can put their headphones back on.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think maybe we should read that narration since it's so short.

Speaker 3 Oh, okay, go ahead. Yeah, because that gets the point across.

Speaker 2 So it's sort of framed as a docudrama.

Speaker 2 shot a lot in a lot of moments, very documentary style.

Speaker 2 And they set it up as if it's a real thing.

Speaker 2 So here's john larroquette well me as john larroquette uh the film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths in particular sally hardesty and her invalid brother franklin it is all the more tragic in that they were young but had they lived very very long lives they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much mad and macabre as they were to see that day For them, an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare.

Speaker 2 The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Speaker 3 Pretty great. That was a good John Lariquette too, by the way.

Speaker 2 Thanks. And it indicates that they all die, too, which was a nice little sleight of hand because it makes the ending a little more surprising and suspenseful, I think.

Speaker 3 Exactly. And so you said it like this is presented as a docudrama.

Speaker 3 So people are going into it, not thinking it's a documentary or that they're actually seeing real things, but that it's depicting an actual event that happened specifically on October 18th, 1973.

Speaker 3 It says that's the date that this all happens. It just happens over a one-day period.

Speaker 3 So, that in and of itself kind of is totally new, as we'll see, as far as horror movies went.

Speaker 3 It was almost prefiguring the found footage genre, like Blair Witch and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 And then the whole action starts, everything's prompted by news that a cemetery in the middle of rural Texas, central Texas, has there've been grave robbings going on.

Speaker 3 And not only grave robbings, where they're just removing specific parts of bodies, they're also taking some of the bodies and basically making them into these really gruesome statues.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it's a great way to open the movie. The opening shot and everything is just very disturbing to kind of get that ball rolling.

Speaker 2 And they are in a van traveling. They have space cleared out for the wheelchair for Franklin.
And, you know, it's like

Speaker 2 it sort of set the standard, but we've seen this so many times since then, like teenagers off, you know, having a good time, going on a trip, maybe going camping or something like that.

Speaker 2 But they were sort of the first, you know, movie to do that kind of thing. It set that standard.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and they were, the reason they were there was their Franklin and Sally's grandfather was buried at that cemetery.

Speaker 3 So they're going to check to see if his grave had been dug up, and they find that it's not.

Speaker 3 But while they're there, they say, hey, why don't we go check out grandfather's old homestead uh we used to spend summers there once in a while so the whole gang agrees to do that but first they need gas and they go to a gas station a rundown gas station slash barbecue pit that's owned by a man known as the cook who also would turn out to be drayton sawyer like who you mentioned before one of the three brothers of the scary family

Speaker 3 and it turns out they don't have any gas which i've read was a big commentary on the gas shortages going on at the time.

Speaker 3 But the kids decide to head on to the what it turns out to be the abandoned Hardest E homestead anyway, just look around.

Speaker 2 Yeah, did you catch the name of the gas station?

Speaker 3 Yeah, W.E. Slaughter BBQ.

Speaker 2 Well, that was the restaurant. It was the Last Chance Gas.

Speaker 3 I did see that. Yes.
I totally forgot.

Speaker 2 So I immediately thought of my Last Chance Garage hat that I wore for many, many years.

Speaker 3 Do you still have that thing?

Speaker 2 I have like four or five of them because I lost the original one in Austin, Texas.

Speaker 3 Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 And at South by one year, and then I got a patch maker here in Atlanta to make me patches. And so I made like three or four of them, but I just haven't worn those in a long time.

Speaker 3 I remember that very kind patch maker replacing it.

Speaker 3 And since you lost it in Austin, I'm now convinced that there is no way it wasn't a Texas Chainsaw Masker fan who stole that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it was Last Chance Garage, which was his own brand, but I thought Last Chance Gas was kind of fun.

Speaker 3 Now that I think about it, I've seen on Etsy vials of skin scrapings that say that they're your skin scraping. So I wonder if it came from that hat.
Probably so.

Speaker 3 It does ship out of Texas, it says. All right.
There you have it. So anyway, this gas station's out of gas, and they head on to the abandoned house and just start exploring it.

Speaker 3 But before they get there, they pick up a hitchhiker. And he turns out to be one of the Sawyers, too.
But he plays this character so nuts. Yeah.
He dances right along the edge of this is ridiculous.

Speaker 3 He's being ridiculous. It's totally over the top, but it still manages to be more disturbing than

Speaker 3 like, come on, you know?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. It's again, completely unsettling.

Speaker 2 His name, by the way, they do have names. His name is Nubbins Sawyer.

Speaker 2 But he's kind of mainly known as the hitchhiker.

Speaker 2 And his very short ride is

Speaker 2 just full of disturbing things. He looks like he's got, you know, blood on his face.
He's kind of rambling incoherently.

Speaker 2 He takes out a, or he, he, I'm sorry, he grabs Franklin's sort of whittling pocket knife at one point and cuts his own hand in front of everyone's faces, which is terrifying. Right.

Speaker 2 And then slashes Franklin, I think, with his razor that he has in his boot.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and he's real squirrely, too, so he's moving around a lot and he's like just doing all sorts of weird stuff.

Speaker 3 But once he slashes, like they're really put off by this guy, but once he slashes Franklin, they don't even fully stop they just slow down and basically push him out of the van yeah and take off so they go to the hardest sea homestead um franklin tells uh them that there's a swimming hole nearby and this couple pam and kirk go off to find it but they find that it's um dried up yeah and they're just kind of hanging out and kirk spies a house nearby and he thinks hey maybe maybe they have some gas that we can get because the van's getting awfully low and they don't know where another gas station is.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so they go to this house. Kirk stupidly enters the house.
He's kind of knocking on the door and the door just, you know, opens from him knocking. And he's the first to be killed.

Speaker 2 And it happens in such a brutally fast way when he goes down this straight hallway into this, you know, it looks like another hallway off the entryway where they have animal skins and skulls and things on the wall.

Speaker 2 And he gets clubbed by a hammer very quickly. And the speed at which that happens, the speed at which you see Leatherface for the first time, whose name is Bubba, by the way,

Speaker 2 and then the ferocity and speed that he slams shut that metal sliding door is just terrifying.

Speaker 3 It is. Yeah, that's a hell of a way for the first person to get picked off to go.

Speaker 2 It's very fast and just all of a sudden you're already disturbed because everything before it was so even Franklin, like every word out of his mouth is annoying and upsetting.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we should say Franklin among film appreciators and horror fans, he's almost universally despised.

Speaker 2 Yeah, poor Franklin.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, it is. Because I was, I went into it again, thinking how much everybody hates Franklin.
I was like, he's not that bad.

Speaker 3 He's pretty bad, but there's still, there's some redeeming qualities to him, but I don't want to just be contrarian. No, I'm with you.
So,

Speaker 3 Pam, who was with Kirk but is waiting outside on a swinging bench,

Speaker 3 starts deciding that Kirk's been gone too long and goes in after him. And she goes in, there's this classic shot.

Speaker 3 It's a dolly shot from the ground going upward, and it follows her going up to the house. And it's just this amazing shot.

Speaker 3 Like anybody who knows anything about cinema is like, this is one of the best dolly shots of all time. Again, a 23-year-old did this.

Speaker 3 And the reason they did it is because the house just grows bigger and bigger, almost like it's going to swallow pam up and i would never think about that if i hadn't read someone describing it but that's exactly what it does yeah it's very creepy it starts uh it goes under the swing which was a nice little trick

Speaker 2 um her her backside is very prominently in frame so i think at the time that was their version of selling something slightly sexy sure but it's so foreboding and you get that blue blue sky and the clouds and that up angle shot of the house like you said it's just it's a great great, great shot.

Speaker 3 It is. So, Pam goes in there, and her fate is not met quite as quickly as Kirk.
She stumbles into this room where

Speaker 3 yeah, there's a live chicken in a birdcage meant for basically canary. So, the chicken's almost stuffed in there.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there's feathers everywhere, there's bones everywhere, carcasses hanging everywhere.

Speaker 3 The couches and the chairs are all basically upholstered with bones and these weird, but kind of in a strange way, beautiful

Speaker 3 designs. And you can just tell it's so nasty in there that she starts to gag and tries to get out.
And as she's trying to get out, she meets Leatherface and it just, it goes downhill from there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and this is equally as brutal. I mean, Leatherface is, I don't think we said, is like 6'4.
And

Speaker 2 how much did he weigh?

Speaker 3 300 pounds.

Speaker 2 Yeah, very large dude, sort of looks like a professional wrestler, but he's wearing a skin mask with other hair, you know, that's not his.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like almost a curly wig.

Speaker 3 That makes it so much worse, too.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So everything he does is just, you know, brutal.
I mean, clearly as the movie goes on, we realize that he's has, you know, some pretty severe cognitive issues.

Speaker 2 Like, I'm not going to diagnose Bubba Leatherface.

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 2 But at any rate, he's terrifying, and the way he moves is just very sort of herky jerky.

Speaker 3 And the way he, he's so big, and the way he grabs her and brings her into that room is just, it's all, again it's terrifying yeah one of the other things that's terrifying that also gets across the fact that cognitively he seems to be challenged at least to some degree they took away all of the dialogue that he had written for him in the script so he doesn't do anything but make weird sounds yeah he kind of babbles at one point later

Speaker 3 he does and then also if you pay attention there's times where he's clearly talking but they dub in a hog squealing yeah and it's not supposed to be him making a hog call.

Speaker 3 Like, it's just like that's what came out of his mouth, weirdly. And it's, it happens so fast, and they don't make any kind of point to point it out that

Speaker 3 when you notice it, you're like, what the heck just happened? But it makes him, especially if you don't notice it, even creepier.

Speaker 3 I mean, the fact that he's wearing a mask made of a dead person's face is bad enough, but all the extra little details they put into it, the apron that he's wearing, which clearly demonstrates he's a butcher with that chainsaw.

Speaker 3 All of the details they put together just make him one of the great horror film villains of all time. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 And set the mold for the sort of

Speaker 2 non-verbal mask-wearing dudes to come, like Michael Myers and certainly Jason Voorhees.

Speaker 3 For sure.

Speaker 3 So what happens to Pam?

Speaker 2 Yeah, Pam gets

Speaker 2 meat hooked immediately. She gets taken into this butcher room,

Speaker 2 impaled on a meat hook, but still living, and gets to watch. We finally see the chainsaw fire up here for the first time.

Speaker 2 We get to see her boyfriend,

Speaker 2 you know, get it, doesn't show it, and we'll talk about that later, but you see the you know, Leatherface fire that thing up and kind of start to get to work on him.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so like you said, Pam's still alive, and she's impaled on that meat hook just a few feet from where Kirk's body is on this table that Leatherface is now dismembering with the chainsaw.

Speaker 3 So, as she's dying, she gets to watch that.

Speaker 3 And then I think it goes back to the homestead where Franklin and Sally and Jerry, who's Sally's boyfriend, are still hanging out.

Speaker 3 And Jerry decides to go look for them, drawn into the same trap that Kirk and Pam fell for

Speaker 3 by looking for them. And he gets picked off too.
His death happened so quickly that I actually thought for a second that he was going to come back because I hadn't seen it in a while.

Speaker 3 And then I realized, like, no, he just, he got taken out with one, one hammer swing.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And that, that all makes it pretty scary too, because there's not this big tense buildup like a lot of modern horror.
People are dispatched up just very kind of quickly and without regard.

Speaker 3 Which makes it seem like that's probably how it would be in that situation. It makes it more realistic, I think.
Yeah, totally. And by the way,

Speaker 3 I've seen Jerry referred to as Disco Stew across the internet because he really does bear a resemblance to him for sure.

Speaker 2 So he, before he gets dispatched, though, he does open the freezer in the butcher room and sees that

Speaker 2 Pam is in there and sort of barely alive and kind of comes up and that's right when he gets taken out.

Speaker 3 For sure. So Jerry's gone.
Kirk and Pam are gone. There's just Franklin and Sally left and they wait until nightfall until they just can't not look for their friends anymore.

Speaker 3 So they go tromping through the woods and this is where Hansel and Gretel really kind of becomes clear. Yeah.
Sally's pushing Franklin in his wheelchair, basically overland.

Speaker 3 And as they're wandering kind of aimlessly through the woods, they come upon Leatherface, who just starts chopping Franklin up in his wheelchair.

Speaker 3 And Sally, realizing there's nothing she can do for her brother, takes off.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 this kind of chase through the woods that leads back to, leads her to the Sawyer house, which she's not familiar with.

Speaker 3 So she goes in there looking for help, realizes this is not the place to find help, has to jump out a second-story window, goes back to running through the woods, and then makes it to that original gas station/slash barbecue pit, thinking she's found safety.

Speaker 3 And it turns out that's not the case at all.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 because that's when it all comes together, that Drayton is in on it. He's one of the family members.

Speaker 2 He kidnaps her.

Speaker 2 Okay, this scene I could see is maybe being kind of funny, the broom attack. Right.
When he's smacking her with the broom.

Speaker 3 Yeah, especially if you know the little behind-the-scenes trivia that Jim Seadow did not want to do that.

Speaker 3 He was basically forced to and goaded on to actually hit Marilyn Burns with the broomstick to make it look real.

Speaker 3 And if you know that, the first few hits are kind of tentative and he's almost looking like, can I get away with this? And they clearly cut and then say, like, dude, you need to actually hit her.

Speaker 3 And he does.

Speaker 3 And it's, I mean, I think the fact that he didn't want to do it and then had to do it, there had to be some sort of transformation in his character that you can't quite put your finger on there.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I guess I could see how that scene could come across as Spunny a little bit.

Speaker 2 But again, it's so terrifying because the way she screams and the brutality of it all, despite the weird broom thing. Yeah.
Like, I couldn't come back to a place of laughing. There's just no way.

Speaker 3 No, so I'm glad you mentioned her screaming because, like you said, there's not a lot of dialogue in the second and third acts, but I can't imagine how many times they wrote Sally Screams.

Speaker 3 She screamed maybe more than any other horror film victim in history. But fortunately for us, her scream almost has like a pleasing quality to it, and she has a huge range.

Speaker 3 It's not the same scream over and over again. There's one point where she's like,

Speaker 3 it's just a bunch of different screams, and she screams a lot. So she was very rightly and still is called a scream queen.
She's one one of the scream queens. But she screams a lot in this movie, but

Speaker 3 it doesn't get annoying. It's not grading.
And it just makes the whole thing that much more terrifying.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wouldn't say annoying, but I kept wanting it to stop because it's so relentless, you know? Sure, it is.

Speaker 3 It is relentless for sure.

Speaker 2 It's very upsetting.

Speaker 2 She gets taken, you know, after the little broom fracas, she gets, you know, bagged and taken back to the house.

Speaker 2 And this is where, I mean, in a movie of disturbing scenes, maybe the most disturbing scene is the dinner scene for sure with the whole family, which is, we don't really learn this here.

Speaker 2 I think we just sort of learn later in other movies, the relations, but it's three brothers. It's Bubba, Nubbins, and Drayton.
And then grandpa.

Speaker 2 What I wondered is about the parents.

Speaker 2 I guess that's explained maybe in prequels and stuff.

Speaker 3 I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I have no idea because I haven't seen those, but there's a grandpa who it turns out was played by a 19-year-old in a face mask.

Speaker 2 Also, the grandpa doesn't speak. And it's just this macabre dinner scene where it just shows how this family of cannibals is so, like, they're all just so disturbed.
It's just disgusting.

Speaker 3 Yeah, at one point, Leatherface grabs Sally's finger and cuts it with a knife and then puts her finger in grandpa's mouth so grandpa can partake drinking her blood, right?

Speaker 3 And then, so she's being tormented this whole time. This is a 10-minute long scene, at least, depending on when you say it starts, where she's just being tormented and terrorized and mocked.

Speaker 3 Nubbins, the hitchhiker, is just mocking her, like, please, please, let me go,

Speaker 3 and which makes it so much worse.

Speaker 3 And then just the terror on her face.

Speaker 3 She sells it so well.

Speaker 3 But anyway, grandpa there, who's essentially immobile and just a couple degrees away from catatonic. Yeah.

Speaker 3 They're like, grandpa used to be the best at killing people. He could kill them with one hammer blow.
Let's let her, um, let him kill her.

Speaker 3 So they actually drag her over to like a metal tub, lean her over it, her head over it, so that she doesn't get blood everywhere, and give grandpa the hammer.

Speaker 3 But he's so aged and so just withered, he can't hold the hammer. So he keeps dropping it out of his hand and it lands like in the tub next to Sally's head over and over again.
Which, oh my god, dude.

Speaker 2 It's way scarier than if he had just hauled off and hit her with all of his strength way because it goes on for a minute or so right yeah it's really disturbing finally she gets away she goes through another window and then we're we reach the end of the movie yeah it just real quick we should mention that leatherface has uh changed uh his attire for dinner and is uh wearing a dress and a new,

Speaker 2 I guess, woman's skin mask because it's all made up with this heavy, like, you know, clown makeup almost. And that just makes it even more disturbing.

Speaker 3 Well, don't forget his lovely cravat, too, that he was wearing. That's right.

Speaker 3 So Sally's getting away. She runs out of the house.
It's now sunrise, daylight,

Speaker 3 which is a good sign for Sally at this point. Also, the fact that she's the last person and she's still alive.

Speaker 3 You can start to think, like, maybe Sally's going to get away, but she's running down the driveway, and Nubbins catches up with her.

Speaker 3 But unfortunately for Nubbins, he doesn't really take her escape seriously and continues to mock her while he's chasing her.

Speaker 2 Well, he's slashing her back with that razor the whole time, too.

Speaker 3 Oh, I didn't notice that. Is that what it is?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's why she ends up such a bloody mess. I mean, besides everything else that happened to her.

Speaker 3 Gotcha. But she makes it to the end of the driveway to the main road with Nubbins right at her heels.
And they run out into the street just as a Mac truck,

Speaker 3 a tractor trailer essentially, is barreling down the street and runs right over Nubbins.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so Nubbins is gone.

Speaker 2 A little bit of trivia. The name on the side of the truck is Black Maria.

Speaker 2 I looked up to see if there was any significance, and I didn't verify this, but there's no way it's a coincidence that Black Maria was the name of Thomas Edison's very first motion picture studio that he built.

Speaker 3 Oh, no way that's a coincidence. But also, doesn't that go to show like what students of film these filmmakers were? That they knew that? Totally.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that had to be the case, though.

Speaker 3 yeah and that they made an homage to thomas edison's first movie studio yeah it's pretty great all right so uh

Speaker 2 back to the movie uh nubbins has been run over the truck driver obviously stops uh truck driver is played by ed uh g u i n n i guess gwen but very close to ed geen oh yeah

Speaker 2 by coincidence i'm sure uh and the truck driver is one of the weird heroes of this movie he has no lines he's in it for a couple of minutes uh only african-american character in here.

Speaker 2 And a spin on that trope that they're the first ones to die.

Speaker 2 He's actually the only guy that inflicts any damage on this family at all because he runs over Nubbin and he gets a big pipe wrench when he's getting out of the truck and throws it at Leatherface, which causes Leatherface to fall down.

Speaker 2 with the chainsaw and the chainsaw like cuts into his own thigh.

Speaker 3 Which is probably the most brutal thing that they show in the entire movie. It's gross.
Like you can see the fat in his leg come out, like bubble out of the wound.

Speaker 2 Oh God.

Speaker 2 Leg fat.

Speaker 3 So Sally is still running around in the middle of the road here. And luckily a pickup truck comes by and she manages to jump in the back.
And now she's finally gotten away.

Speaker 3 But she's clearly lost her mind. The way that she's reacting to it sinking in that she's gotten away.
And Leatherface is not happy about this. He's very frustrated.

Speaker 3 And he shows it by swinging the chainsaw around wildly, terrifying. Swirling.
You can can tell he's just so mad, and this is the only way that he can show it or get it out. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And he's swinging and swinging against the sunrise. And then, like you said, it just cuts to black.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that shot of her in the back of that truck with the blood all over her and her madly cackling.

Speaker 2 It's the perfect ending. And the abrupt ending, like, it's so loud with that chainsaw.
Yeah. And then to cut, I can't imagine what it was like in the theater in 1974

Speaker 2 when it cuts to black and it's just dead silent. Like, what the hell did that audience

Speaker 2 do?

Speaker 3 Had I been there, it wouldn't have been dead silence because I would have been like, that is a great movie. Cheering me.

Speaker 2 I would have said,

Speaker 3 what did I just watch? Right.

Speaker 2 By the way, pickup truck driver played by Perry Lorenz, who I think now is an Austin real estate developer.

Speaker 3 Oh, okay, cool. He was also the stunt driver, I think, for the truck.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, you can barely see him, but got to shout out Perry Lorenz.

Speaker 3 So that's the movie.

Speaker 3 I mean, there's not that much more to it, honestly.

Speaker 3 It was very bare bones, which I think, again, makes it that much more believable.

Speaker 3 And we need to take a second break. I say we plug on and make this just one big fat episode.
What do you think?

Speaker 2 Yeah, we got to do it.

Speaker 3 Okay. So we're going to take our second break, and then we're going to come back, and you'll find out the bulk of the show is still to come.

Speaker 3 Junk and Josh.

Speaker 3 Stuff

Speaker 3 you

Speaker 3 should know

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Speaker 2 All right, so we're back. We know what happened in the movie.

Speaker 2 You know, hopefully, if you came back and you didn't want it spoiled, this won't spoil too much of it.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, we're done with the plot.

Speaker 2 But we need to talk about the making of the movie.

Speaker 2 The film was shot in just over, well, right out of month, in 31 days, mid-July to mid-August, in what are now suburbs of Austin and Bass Drop and Round Rock.

Speaker 2 But I imagine then they were a little more rural than they are now. There was, you know, weren't strip malls and stuff everywhere.

Speaker 3 No, they look pretty rural.

Speaker 2 Pretty rural. A little bit around Austin itself, obviously.

Speaker 2 The heat, the conditions were brutal, like

Speaker 2 100 degrees plus

Speaker 2 on the roads and in the streets and fields, and more than that inside the Sawyer house with what little film lighting they had.

Speaker 2 It was a brutal experience.

Speaker 2 They had a Ford van that drove around the gear, had an old camper, which is the hair and makeup trailer, and shot at basically at about six places overall i counted five so i've got the rundown gas station barbecue pit the abandoned house which is the hardesty homestead the neglected cemetery the dirt road and then the sawyer family house then you're in the van too baby oh wow that's great man you just blew my mind yeah so basically six-ish places uh which is a great way to you know write a cheap independent film you know as a just a little tip yeah and they were again they were on a shoestring.

Speaker 3 I suspect that the Ford van they used to carry the film equipment around was the same Ford van that the teenagers drive around in.

Speaker 2 I bet it was. That was my hunch.

Speaker 3 And they also apparently got some guff because the road scenes that they filmed, they did not get a permit for.

Speaker 2 Oh, I'm surprised they got a permit for any of it.

Speaker 3 Right. So unfortunately for the cast and crew, most of the filming was done in the Sawyer house.
And again, like you said, 100 degrees outside, apparently in the house.

Speaker 3 For our friends, except in Liberia, who use the metric system, that's 37.8 degrees Celsius.

Speaker 2 Which seems very cold to me. Right.

Speaker 3 And apparently it got 10 degrees more than that inside the house. And

Speaker 3 because this film was inspired in part by Ed Gein, the production designer Bob Burns used photos that were taken, like crime scene photos taken in Ed Gein's house, as inspiration for the set decoration.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, Toby Hooper himself said that the movie is about meat.
Yeah. And it's a case for veganism.

Speaker 2 Apparently, he became a vegan during filming, and you found out that Guillermo del Toro apparently became a vegan after seeing the movie as well. And I'm sure they're not the only ones.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And if you look out for that, all of the meat eating that's done in the movie is disgusting. Yeah.

Speaker 3 The truck that runs over Nubbins is a cattle truck that is empty, which means it just is returning from having dropped off a bunch of cows at a slaughterhouse they talk a lot about that yeah yeah they talk about a slaughterhouse nearby um yeah it makes a lot of sense and also not to mention that there's that live chicken tons of carcasses hanging everywhere lots of like sausages and stuff all over the house skins um

Speaker 3 bones all that stuff it just it makes sense like because

Speaker 3 If there's one word it screams, it's meat. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, Franklin's chewing on that. looks like a raw sausage.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's pretty gross.

Speaker 2 For a while in that one scene where he's trying to get into his old grandparents' house. And the implication here is that these

Speaker 2 Draytons are, this is, you know, human meat that they're grinding up into sausage. It's never explicitly said, but I think that's what you're supposed to believe.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that that's what the barbecue that they're selling is made from, too, right?

Speaker 2 Well, that's what I mean, yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay. So

Speaker 3 because Bob Burns is hanging actual meat around this house and because it's 110 degrees in the house,

Speaker 3 the house started to smell wretchedly. So much so, I saw from multiple sources that they would go outside between takes and throw up sometimes.

Speaker 3 At the very least, they had to get out to get some air because it got gamey in there, terribly nasty just from the meat.

Speaker 3 But then you also throw in what the actors themselves must have smelled like because they had one set of clothing. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And they had to wear it every day for the shoot because this action takes place over just one

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Usually when you shoot a movie, you have multiples of your clothes.
So if something happens to them, obviously you can switch it out or if they get stinky, you can switch them out.

Speaker 2 On a modern movie, they probably have like eight versions of the chainsaw. They had one chainsaw.
So on a budget, you just get one of everything. So they were very stinky.

Speaker 2 They had Bill Parsley,

Speaker 2 one of the early financiers, stopping by.

Speaker 2 almost every day basically saying like when are you going to wrap this picture

Speaker 2 threatening to shut it down uh they shot you know 12 to 18 hours a day one day they went for 26 hours inside that house

Speaker 3 uh obviously they're blacking out the windows to because most of it takes place at night uh in that house uh which is you know psychologically that's uh upsetting to a cast and crew for sure also like this experience of just being treated like this during filming the cast itself like in real life like there was a lot of tension a lot of squabbling and bickering and people just kind of being disgruntled.

Speaker 3 And that came through. I suspect from other stuff I've read that Toby Hooper was making that, like really beefing that kind of tension up to get more just angst out of his actors.

Speaker 2 Yeah, totally. Using that to his advantage,

Speaker 2 as every great manipulating director should. Sure.

Speaker 3 He also isolated Gunner Hansen, who played Leatherface. I read that each of the actors who was dispatched by Leatherface met Gunner Hansen when they filmed their scene for the first time.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So that they couldn't get comfortable with him. And we're, I mean, again, like you said, six foot four, 300 pounds.

Speaker 3 And the chainsaw was a poolin, and apparently it's one of their heavier ones. And he's just swinging this around like it's nothing.
So clearly he was an intimidating person in real life.

Speaker 3 And again, that was something Toby Hooper did to manipulate things.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and he stayed in character, too, which also means he's walking around either babbling or not saying anything.

Speaker 2 I don't imagine they had a recording of a pig squeal that he could just kind of play for fun as he walked around.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but

Speaker 2 it wasn't a pleasant shoot.

Speaker 3 I also read that the guy who played Franklin, Paul Partain,

Speaker 3 stayed in character as well, and everyone hated him.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So there was also physical suffering, too. We talked about how Marilyn Burns was actually hit in the head with the broomstick just to make it more realistic looking.

Speaker 3 She did almost all of her own stunts. From what I could tell, a woman named Mary Church was the only stunt she did was actually jumping out of the windows.

Speaker 2 Yeah, bad wig in that shot.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. But when

Speaker 3 Sally falls down or, you know, whatever, when she's running through mesquite and gets trapped in it, running through cockleburrs,

Speaker 3 like that was actually Marilyn Burns, the actress, having to do that over and over.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and you get that sense too when she's freaking out in that long chase scene through the thicket.

Speaker 2 It's terrifying and it looks like she's not enjoying things at all.

Speaker 2 So it really comes across on film.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because she gets stuck and she's like, ah, and has to pull herself out. And yeah, I think she really did.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then, you know, we mentioned in the plot the scene, again, this is a big spoiler.

Speaker 2 At one point, her finger is cut at the dinner scene and it's put into the mouth of grandpa to suckle her blood.

Speaker 2 Apparently, the blood squib didn't work and they really cut her finger and that 19-year-old grandpa kid in the face mask really drank her blood.

Speaker 3 Yeah, unknowingly, apparently, until after

Speaker 3 so, one of the things that people point to is what made this movie so great was this the inexperience of these novice filmmakers. Yeah.
We said that Daniel Pearl, the cinematographer, was 23.

Speaker 3 Toby Hooper apparently was the oldest at 29. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And they had like documentary backgrounds. Daniel Pearl was,

Speaker 3 he apparently caught Toby Hooper's eye from a Texas Department of Public Safety

Speaker 3 PSA, right?

Speaker 2 It was like blood spills red on the highway kind of thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah, basically, except this was about a drug bust. And Toby Hooper noticed, like, wow, that was shot really interestingly.
And who did that? That's how they came together.

Speaker 3 They made their own dollies out of wood, their own crane out of wood, too, I believe.

Speaker 3 And then the editing too gets a lot of credit for making the movie what it was.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, like we said, it's a trim 83 minutes.

Speaker 2 You can thank Larry Carroll and Sally Richardson as the editors for just, you know, like I kept mentioning like the speed at which the kills happen and the abruptness in which they end and what the movie ends.

Speaker 2 Like those are all just great editing decisions to like,

Speaker 2 you know, it's tough because, you know, they call it like losing your babies.

Speaker 2 You don't want to lose stuff you shot or the great line, but a good editor knows, like, no, tighter is better, shorter is better, and it helps create a lot of the unsettling feeling, I think, by how quickly they cut away to stuff.

Speaker 3 For sure.

Speaker 3 So, they finally got it done. I think I said 300 grand is the highest I saw as an estimate for what they actually, what the budget actually was.
They got it down to 83 minutes. They had the final cut.

Speaker 3 They have investors like breathing down their neck because, remember, they initially got 80 grand. The budget ended up being 300 grand.

Speaker 3 So Toby Hooper and Kim Henkel kept having to go back and find new people to give them money. And over time, a lot of different investors, including the cast and crew, owned that movie.

Speaker 3 They owned portions of it. And as true indie filmmakers,

Speaker 3 Kim Henkel and Toby Hooper watered down their own share to get the money to get the movie completed. And they ended up just with a 7.5%

Speaker 3 cut each. These are the guys who thought of and made the movie.
They ended up with 15% between them.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I mean, we'll see it made a ton of money, but how those things pay out, it just, it never pays out like you think it would,

Speaker 2 even though it was cheap to make and made a ton of money. The creative accounting, and in this case,

Speaker 2 sort of mob accounting. Right.

Speaker 2 Because well, I guess we should say first, it did get picked up. The commissioner Warren Skarin that we were talking about, the film commissioner of Texas, shopped it around.

Speaker 2 There weren't a ton of big movies being shot in Texas at the time. So it was sort of a, you know, it was before Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklader put Austin on the map.

Speaker 2 Toby Hooper was first, so it wasn't like a big film scene.

Speaker 2 So it took the film commissioner to really champion it for distribution. Almost got bought by Columbia.

Speaker 2 Eventually it was bought by the distribution company who put out Deep Throat, the famous porn.

Speaker 2 And their name was Bryanston Distributing Company. Yes.

Speaker 3 And their whole business model was basically just generate as much publicity as you can,

Speaker 3 negative publicity is just as good as positive.

Speaker 3 And then they would just promote the heck out of it, publicize all of this outrage and everything that the movie was getting.

Speaker 3 And the reason why is because they couldn't afford traditional marketing as it worked out. It was basically a showgame house of cards.
And like you said, it was a mobbed-up movie distribution company.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so Bryanston was owned by the

Speaker 2 Colombo crime family, or members of that family, specifically Big Tony Pareno.

Speaker 2 He also helped finance

Speaker 2 part of this film and other of their films.

Speaker 2 And yeah, I think they distributed Dark Star from John Carpenter, which is a sci-fi cult classic.

Speaker 2 But because it was mob connected, it was kind of one of those things where they knew that no one was going to see the money they were probably owed.

Speaker 2 And I think, you know, some of them made a little bit of money, but the total pot, even though it made,

Speaker 2 well, we'll talk about the grosses, but I think a little over a quarter of a million bucks or a little under a quarter of a million bucks to dole out to everybody.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and the cast and crew was left with $8,100 to split between them. So.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it's not terrible.

Speaker 3 No, it's not great either. I mean, divide that by about 20.

Speaker 2 Oh, I don't think those extras got much, if anything.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 Still, so divide it by 10? Because the crew was involved, too.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying they got paid a lot, but they did. But in today's dollars, if that cast walked away with like five grand, then, I mean, that's not terrible for an indie movie.
Sure.

Speaker 3 The investors sued Bryanston, and there was a judge who ruled, like, yeah, you need to give them more money than that. And Bryanston said, we would if we could, but we're bankrupt now.

Speaker 3 So see you guys later. Finally, New Line picked it up in 1983 and some real money started to flow in, but still not much trickled down to the people who actually made the movie.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 One of the most startling facts of this whole podcast to me is that Toby Hooper was trying for a PG rating. Yeah.
It was pre-PG 13.

Speaker 2 The board, the MPA basically said that that meat hook scene, like you, you can't have that in your movie at all and get a PG 13, get a PG rating.

Speaker 2 Cause he's like, how could I cut that scene in a way that gets it a PG? And they're like, They're incompatible, my friend.

Speaker 3 Right. And he responded with, Yeah, come on.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he got an X rating instead.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he did. He managed to lobby it down to an R because this is the time when you got an X rating.
Like, you can kiss any success for your movie goodbye. Unless, of course, Bryanston owns it.

Speaker 3 Because we should say,

Speaker 3 being distributed by Bryanston wasn't a total like scam or a bust. They actually did do some good stuff.
Like we said, they generated some really negative publicity and then publicized that.

Speaker 3 They also managed to get this film the year it came out into the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection. You can believe they publicized that.
They also got it shown at Cannes. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Which is, I mean, we could say like, that's actually some, a couple of good things that they did for sure for the movie, which certainly, remember, this, when it came out, it was going to be a drive-in, B-movie, slasher film, and and before anyone knew what a slasher film really was.

Speaker 3 And then it would probably be gone in a month or two at best. And these things started to help make it like, okay, maybe we should pay a little more attention to this.

Speaker 3 Because at first, the critics panned it.

Speaker 3 And then they started to see like, okay, actually, there's some really good cinematic stuff in here that we're overlooking.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it grossed more than The Great Gatsby that year, Chinatown, Deathwish. It took in, that year's dollars about 26 million bucks in change,

Speaker 2 eventually went on to gross $150 million in present-day dollars. So it was a, at one point it was known as the most successful independent film of all time, money-wise.
Right.

Speaker 3 I think Rocky knocked it out a couple years later, from what I understand, but it was definitely huge.

Speaker 2 Rocky knocked it out.

Speaker 3 You sure it wasn't the TKM? Wow. I didn't even mean to do that.
The spirit of Jonathan Strickland just flowed through me.

Speaker 2 That's right. But yeah, you mentioned the critics.
They, you know, they kind of got on board a little bit. Like Rex Reed said it was, you know, the most terrifying, like me, film he'd ever seen.

Speaker 2 Ebert said it was some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement. I can't imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this.
And yet it's well-made, well-acted, and all too effective.

Speaker 3 Right. But they still ultimately said they panned it, right?

Speaker 3 Although I don't think Rex Reed did. I think he might have given it a thumbs up, however, he did that.

Speaker 3 But they would invariably say that it was blood-soaked, that it was gory.

Speaker 3 And those, that's just not true. Because if you watch the movie, there is very little blood, very little gore, and a lot of the violence is just implied.
It's not actually shown.

Speaker 3 Certainly, you don't see the meat hook go into Pam,

Speaker 3 but you see her dangling from a meat hook, and that confused people at first. So people walked away thinking they'd just seen a ton of gore and blood, and they hadn't.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's a good point. The hammer blows are kind of shot from far away and very fast.
And, you know, you don't see blood spatter everywhere.

Speaker 2 There's just an overall, like the NPA should just say, hey, man, I don't care if we don't see one drop of blood. This gets an X for disturbing factor.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I could see that too. And it's a credit to Toby Hooper that he managed to get it.
reduced to an R.

Speaker 3 But yeah, you can imagine his disappointment making the film based on the idea that he was making it a PG movie. I mean, that's just as naive as it gets, really, for a filmmaker.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. And it really, you know, like I said in our Act One, that really set a standard for films to come.
Slasher films, teenagers,

Speaker 2 kind of driving through the woods and coming upon an abandoned, seemingly abandoned place. This was the first movie to do that stuff, really.

Speaker 2 Like horror movies before this, a lot of them were the hammer movies, like the gothic, like, vampire in a castle kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 The final girl trope was either birth with this or

Speaker 2 which one? Black Christmas?

Speaker 3 Yeah, those two usually are the rivals for the first one.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and the final girl is obviously the trope where there's one girl left alive at the end,

Speaker 2 you know, the last either victim or one who survives. And those movies were both released in the same year and clearly didn't know about one another.
So I give them the co-lead.

Speaker 3 And like I said, over time, people started to, especially film appreciators, started to see this as like a cinematic treasure, a masterpiece.

Speaker 3 Quentin Tarantino apparently listed it among six perfect movies among the likes of Jaws, Exorcist, Young Frankenstein, and Back to the Future, and Annie Hall.

Speaker 3 Like people, apparently Stanley Kubrick owned a 35 millimeter print of it himself. That's kind of all you need to say right there.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 maybe in spite of that, or because of that, or whatever, everyone agrees that you could never remake the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and capture the spirit of the original because of the way that it was hamstrung, all the different ways it was hamstrung, and the inexperience and naivety of the filmmakers, which also freed them up to take chances that an experienced filmmaker wouldn't take, like dubbing in a hog squeal instead of a voice for Leatherface at some point.

Speaker 3 You put all that together, you just can't recapture that. No, you can't.

Speaker 2 Sometimes there's just a way you shoot a movie. You capture lightning in a bottle.

Speaker 2 I read The Dazed and Confused oral History recently. That's a great book.
That was sort of a similar movie. Like,

Speaker 2 that's why that was maybe the best movie about teenagers in high school of all time because of the way they did it and the inexperience. And like, you don't know what you don't know.

Speaker 2 And this movie is very much the same thing. Like, they've tried there have been uh countless uh sequels and remakes i think there have been like nine or ten of them now if you want to count them yeah

Speaker 2 yeah and you know none of them hold a candle to this most of them are not very good uh for my money the thing that comes closest is rob zombie's house of 1000 corpses in spirit

Speaker 2 uh but and which was you know this was a very big influence on that movie obviously but i don't think anything um and again i haven't seen these but i've I've seen enough of them and read enough about them where it seems like none of them come close.

Speaker 3 I also see Wolf Creek and X as given high marks for being inspired by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and managing to do something worthwhile, too.

Speaker 2 Wolf Creek is great. I don't think I know X.

Speaker 3 X,

Speaker 3 it's part of the Maxine trilogy. X, Pearl, and Maxine, the first one.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, I saw all those. Okay, I forgot it was called X.

Speaker 3 Yeah, those are all good, too. I've only seen X.
Are the other two worth watching, too?

Speaker 2 I think so.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 And then, so I think John Landis put it how impossible it would be to remake or capture that same spirit from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre when he described the remake in 2003 like a shampoo commercial.

Speaker 3 Kids at a cross.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a pretty sick burn.

Speaker 3 Wow, you got anything else?

Speaker 2 I got nothing else.

Speaker 2 I try to watch this every Halloween. I don't know why it took me so long to see it, because I had gotten into horror movies in the past like 20 years more and more.

Speaker 2 It was just kind of hanging out there until a few years ago. And I was like, wait a minute.
I've never seen The Granddaddy of Them All.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And when you watched it, you said, wow, this is a great movie.

Speaker 2 No, no, you know what I said.

Speaker 3 We got to watch it together. I want to just watch you watch it.
All right. We'll do it.
Okay.

Speaker 3 Well, since Chuck agreed to let me watch him while he watches the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as it was predicted in 2008 by Chuck Stradamas himself.

Speaker 3 I just triggered listener mail.

Speaker 2 This is from Tequarius. Hey guys, 19 years ago, when I was just 13, I was allowed to visit our local skating rink along with my uncle.

Speaker 2 It was an experience that stood out from my previous visits because that night was full of black culture.

Speaker 2 It left a lasting impact on me and I would often jokingly think to myself, it must have been Black Night or something.

Speaker 2 After listening to your roller skating episode, I was astonished to learn that such events were actually a thing thing after the civil rights movement.

Speaker 2 I'm uncertain whether that night was a tradition that dated back to that time, but I like to think that it was and that I was a part of the experience.

Speaker 2 Thank you for helping me, a black man, make connections that I was completely unaware of. And he attached a photograph from that night that he took with his uncle and his friends.

Speaker 2 That was pretty sweet in a time capsule. And he said, have a great day, guys.
And that is from Tequarius McMurray.

Speaker 3 Nice. Thanks, Tequarius.
That's a great one. I love that episode in part for that because I had no idea about that either.

Speaker 2 Yeah, same.

Speaker 3 That's awesome. If you have recently listened to an old episode and want to tell us what you think about it, like Tiquarius, we love that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 You can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

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