9 Grisly Details About the Texas Chainsaw Massacre

In honor of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre turning 50 this year, here are nine surprising things you probably didn't know about the 1974 horror classic directed by Tobe Hooper.

But First

For a refresher, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows a group of five young people on the trip of a lifetime: Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), her wheelchair user brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain), Pam (Teri McMinn), Jerry (Alan Danziger), and Kirk (William Vail). The take a drive in a van together to visit a house in central Texas once owned by Sally and Franklin's grandfather.

But when they pick up and quickly kick out a crazed hitchhiker who brandishes a knife at them, they don't realize that he's a member of the Sawyer family of murderous cannibals who reside at the neighboring property. The cannibal family include the iconic villain Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), his hitchhiking brother (Edwin Neal), his dad, Drayton Sawyer (Jim Siedow), and Grandpa Sawyer (John Dugan).

Blindly following the lights of the house in the distance, the teens unknowingly wander towards their doom.

The iconic film was directed by the late Tobe Hooper, who died in 2017 at age 74. While he was alive, he gave several interview explaining the wild on-set conditions that created the incredibly ominous atmosphere that translates so well into the movie.

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The Opening Scene Used a Real Human Skeleton

In an interview with Interview Magazine, Hooper said that the film's iconic opening scene in a graveyard used a real human skeleton.

"Some of the skeletons were real," Hooper (above, in hat) said. "When he’s impaled on the tombstone in the beginning. It’s a real human skeleton underneath it. That was a practical, budgetary thing. It was less expensive to get real human skeletons from India than to buy plastic reproductions."

Tobe Hooper's Doctor Inspired Leatherface's Skin Mask

Leatherface is named that because he wears a mask of human skin. Hooper got the idea for that from a creepy little anecdote often told by his family doctor growing up.

"Our family doctor treated everything from a skull fracture to immunization. He told me that when he was in pre-med school, he skinned a cadaver’s face, cured and dried it, and then wore it to the school’s Halloween party. That image stuck," Hooper told director Barend de Voog at the Offscreen Festival in Brussels, where he presented the 4K restoration of the film.

Ed Gein Was Also an Inspiration

It's also been said that Ed Gein, also known as the Butcher of Plainfield, also inspired the Sawyer family characters. Gein died in 1984 and was convicted of killing Bernice Worden in 1968. However, he's more known for exhuming corpses from graveyards and making keepsakes out of their bones and skin, much like the cannibal family in the movie.

Hooper confirmed that Gein was one of his inspirations in the Offscreen interview.

"I can’t remove that from the equation, because I had relatives from Wisconsin and they would pay us a visit when I was about four or five years old. They told us the story about this man who lived in the next town from them, about twenty seven miles or so, who was digging up graves and using the bones and skin in his house. That was all I knew about it," he said.

"They didn’t mention his name. But to me he was like a real boogeyman. That stayed in my mind. When the doctor told his story, I was a teenager and all that stuff about Wisconsin came back to me."

'Everybody Hated Me,' Hooper Says

There was a lot of tension on set because of Hooper's intense directing style, which involved lots of screaming.

"At the end, everybody hated me. It broke up into camps," Hooper said in the Offscreen interview. "The reason they hated me was because I wasn’t new to this. I had made about sixty documentaries for television. About ninety percent of the time I knew exactly what I wanted. Normally, I’m a really calm guy, but when I’m making a film I really have to assert myself, because if I don’t and things go sideways, it will all come back on me and be my fault.

"So I had to be aggressive. I screamed a lot. That created tension. But the more they hated me for my screaming, the more bad vibes came up, out of the ground and from the air, and that all got into the film somehow."

The Bloodsucking Finger Scene Was Real

In the iconic dinner scene, Grandpa Sawyer (played by 18-year-old John Dugan in prosthetic makeup) sucks blood out of Sally's (Marilyn Burns) cut finger. Turns out, that was actually happening in real life, because Gunnar Hansen, who plays Leatherface, secretly cut Burns without telling anyone.

“The prop knife they used, which contained a tube of fake blood that Hansen was to squeeze onto Burns’ finger, had malfunctioned,” Joseph Lanza writes in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Film That Terrified A Rattled Nation.

“They tried many takes, and finally, Hansen grew so impatient that he surreptitiously sliced her finger for real before exposing her to Dugan’s saliva.”

What's even worse is that neither Burns nor Dugan realized the blood was real until years later. “I didn’t find out until years later I was actually sucking on her blood, which is kind of erotic really," Dugan later said, according to Lanza.

A Truckload of Dead Animals Was Dumped Onto the Set

In the film, the Sawyer family home is littered with the skeletons of both humans and animals. In an attempt to find enough animal corpses to use as props, a truckload of dead animals was dumped into the backyard of the house where they shot the movie in Texas.

"We needed stuffed animals to decorate the set. You know, domestic animals that the family members would have been working on. So I asked [art director] Bob Burns to find some, but he couldn’t find any stuffed domestic animals. I said to Bob: Just figure this out, please. So on the day of shooting the dinner scene, a big dump truck pulls up at the house," Hooper said in the Offscreen interview.

"It had one of these hydraulic beds and they dump all of these animal cadavers at the back of the house. A hundred at least. Dogs, cats, everything. They came from the city pound and had just been euthanized. It totally freaked everyone out, including me. Well, the truck drove away. So Dottie Pearl, who did make up, was shooting formaldehyde into these dead animals. She had a dead dog laying in her lap and she shot the dog with the needle, but the needle went through the dog’s leg and into her leg. She shot herself with formaldehyde."

To get rid of the dead animals, one of the crew members ended up lighting them on fire with gasoline, creating huge flames, billowing smoke, and an awful stench.

The Broomstick Prodding Scene Was Also Real

In the scene when Drayton prods Sally with a broom stick while she's bound and covered in a burlap sack, he was actually injuring her — with her permission.

“Marilyn said, ‘Hit me, don’t worry about it,’ ” Siedow said in the 2000 documentary The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: A Family Portrait.

“And every time we’d try it, she’d come up with a few more bruises. Finally, I got with it and started having fun doing it and started really slugging her, and we kept that up — we did eight shots — and then they finally said, ‘That’s a take.’ She just fainted dead away. The poor girl was beaten up pretty badly.”

In his Offscreen interview, Hooper explained that he had chosen to use a fake broomstick instead of a real one, thinking it wouldn't hurt Burns as much. But he realized too late that the fake broomstick was actually worse.

"The broomstick that Jim Siedow uses to poke Marilyn Burns, that was fake also. I told [art director] Bob Burns to make a fake one, so as not to hurt Marilyn. When Jim was whacking her with it, I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t know that it was a rubber stick with a steel rod inside it. It was safer to use a real broom handle! But Marilyn gave her all to that movie. She would really do almost anything to project the energy that we needed toward the end of the film," Hooper said.

'People Were Running to the Windows and Throwing Up'

In order to create real tension on set, Hooper separated the actors into two camps during lunch and dinner: the teenagers and the Sawyer family. He also asked some of them not to take showers so they would smell extra bad, which was exacerbated by the extremely hot temperatures in the house.

"I kept them apart at lunch and dinner. I asked them not to bathe, so it became difficult to be around each other with all the odors. It was already over a hundred degrees in that house, but we had to shoot some of the dinner scene in daylight," he said in the Offscreen interview.

"So we put a big black tent over the house. With the tent it would get up to a hundred and seventeen degrees. And all the bones and skeletons in the house started cooking and putting out these noxious odors. People were running to the windows and throwing up."

In an interview with Interview Magazine, Hooper added: "We wouldn’t let Franklin [Paul A. Partain] have lunch with the other actors, and we wouldn’t let him bathe. There were all these little techniques and devices that I found to create some kind of sensory impulse to help get the truth."

The Chainsaw Was Inspired by a Crowded Department Store

Hooper also told Interview Magazine that the idea to have a chainsaw be Leatherface's weapon of choice came to him while he was at a crowded department store.

"I was in a department store around the holidays, thinking, 'I just can’t wait to get out of this department store.' This must have been in 1972 or 1973. There were thousands of people in there, and I was weaving through them to get out, and I found myself in the hardware department.

"I looked down and there was a rack of chain saws in front of me for sale. I said, 'If I start the saw, those people would just part. They would get out of my way.' That birthed the idea of the chain saw. Obviously I didn’t do that at the time," he said.

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Main image: A still from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Bryanston Distributing Company, New Line Cinema