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Fifty years after the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: How the most terrifying film ever made was inspired by the crimes of real serial killers
Not many horror films are as appallingly gruesome to make as they are to watch. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which opened 50 years ago this month, is a notable exception.
It is one of the most controversial yet enduringly influential horror movies in cinematic history, which despite its starkly unsubtle title was described in the New York Times as ‘a formally exquisite art film, packed full of gorgeously nightmarish images as poetic as they are deranged’. Yet it was shot at the height of an oppressively hot Texan summer in such ‘intolerably putrid’ conditions that the Icelandic-born actor Gunnar Hansen, who played the story’s depraved villain ‘Leatherface’, later claimed he wasn’t sure whether the cast would get out alive. Moreover, just nine months before Manson’s acolytes slaughtered actress Sharon Tate and six others, a former odd-job man called Ed Gein – known as the Plainfield Butcher – went on trial for numerous crimes including murder and body-snatching.
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