Infamous Texas Chain Saw Massacre scene described as 'worse than Vietnam' by cast who had to keep running outside to vomit
Conditions during a brutal 27-hour-long shoot filming one of the most famous scenes in 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre have been described as ‘intolerably putrid'.
The notorious horror movie, which was effectively banned for 24 years by the British Board of Film Classification, features teenagers impaled on meat hooks, chairs made of human body parts and masks made of skin. It’s partly inspired by the horrific crimes of Ed Gein.
If you think it’s hard to watch, it was even worse for the cast and crew. Made on a shoestring budget of $140,000, it’s safe to assume everyone didn’t have the creature comforts you’d expect on a Hollywood blockbuster.
Temperatures while shooting in the brutal Texas heat rose to 46C, and the vast majority of the macabre body parts you see on screen were real human and animal remains.
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Quoted in Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen’s book Chain Saw Confidential, art director Rob Burns says they ‘used parts of eight cows… a cat, two deer, three goats, two real human skeletons, one chicken’.
As you might expect in blistering heat, it absolutely stank.
Hansen said: “The bones and hides and animal parts were letting off a rich mix of fumes.”
Things came to a head when filming the infamous dinner scene, where final girl Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) is strapped to a chair as Leatherface and his cannibal family prepare to kill and eat her.
John Dugan, the 20-year-old who played the corpse-like Grandpa Sawyer, refused to undergo the 10-hour makeup process more than once.
That meant the team were forced to shoot all of his scenes in one go, including the climactic dinner scene.
Filming stretched on for 27 hours. As well as sleep deprivation, the cast had to contend with the stench of the carcasses… and each other.
The tiny budget meant actors only had a single set of clothes. Hansen, forced to wear a wool suit and latex mask as Leatherface, admitted to being ‘soaking wet’ underneath his costume.
Joseph Lanza writes in his 2019 book The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Film That Terrified a Rattled Nation: “The conditions on that long night that bled into the following day were intolerably putrid.
“The heat and humidity outside and inside were so high… [that the cast] had to run outside for oxygen and periodic vomit breaks.”
Edwin Neal, who plays the Hitchhiker, was quoted by Yahoo Movies as saying that if he ever saw director Tobe Hooper again he might kill him.
He said filming the dinner scene ‘was the worst time of my life… and I had been in Vietnam, with people trying to kill me, so I guess that shows how bad it was’.
Hooper told Esquire he was aware on-set that ‘everyone hated me’, adding: “My memory of shooting this film is that it was miserable and hot and very hard work.”
While Hansen said: “The whole dinner scene is burned in my memory, I think just because of the misery of it.
"At that point we were really just on the verge of mental collapse. And Marilyn told me about how awful it was for her, because she was terrified... Just being tied to a chair and then having these men looming over her constantly, she said it was really unnerving.
“I think that whole scene was certainly the most intense part of the movie and I think all of us were slightly insane by then."
So if you’re sticking on Texas Chain Saw Massacre this Halloween, the reason everyone looks so unhinged in that dinner scene might be because they were actually all losing their minds in real life.
And spare a thought for what it must have smelled like.
Topics: Halloween
Simon Fearn