Friday, October 31, 2014 6:24:10 AM
The Case for the Real Leatherface...and not.
When the police arrived at a secluded farmhouse outside Plainfield, Wisconsin, where Ed Gein lived alone after the passing of his parents and brother, they meant to question him about a local incident. It was a cold November day in 1957 and he'd been seen in the store from which a woman had gone missing, inquiring about antifreeze. Known to be a bit strange, they were aware that the diminutive high school dropout-turned-handyman was capable of some odd behavior, but he'd always seemed fairly benign. His deceased father had been an alcoholic and his mother an antisocial religious fanatic. Brother Henry had mysteriously died in a fire.
It seems that Gein was not at home, so the officers decided to look around. Entering a deteriorating and darkened out-building, they spotted a dressed deer carcass hanging from the rafters. Going closer, they thought there was something odd about this deer. It didn't hang right.
Suddenly, under a flashlight's glare, they realized that the carcass was no deer: it was a human corpse. Hung feet first was the headless nude body of a woman, slit from her genitals to her neck, with her legs splayed apart. The officers wondered if this might be the missing storekeeper, Bernice Worden. Whoever it was, she'd clearly been the victim of a crime, and there was no one around but eccentric Ed Gein. Was he peculiar enough to commit outright murder, they wondered? It certainly seemed possible.
Next, the police entered Gein's house and right away their question was answered. Inside, scattered around, they found all manner of body parts, including skin, a box of preserved female genitalia, a heart in a frying pan, a box of cut-off noses, the sawed-off crania from several skulls, death masks peeled off dead females, a skin vest with female breasts and genitals, and a female scalp with black hair. They wondered just how many women Gein had killed. It appeared that there were parts from at least a dozen victims, possibly more. Then they found Bernice Worden's head in a bag, with nails driven through the ears.
In those days, little was known about the kind of person who might kill repeatedly — although a handful of serial killers were at large around the country — other than that he had to be some sort of monster. It was one thing to kill; it was quite another to remove and preserve body parts to decorate one's home. This wasn't Nazi Germany, after all. In fact, it appeared to the investigators, from items in a frying pan, that perhaps Gein was indulging in a bit of cannibalism as well. They could only wonder how long he'd been doing it and they intended to check their records for more missing women when they returned to town. But first they had to find Gein.
Isolated and Deranged
Once arrested and taken to Madison, Gein freely admitted that he was aware of the body parts and corpses, but he said that he'd stolen most of them from the local cemetery — to the tune of some forty grave robberies. He'd hear about a woman who had recently died, he explained, wait until she was buried, and then go dig her up to take whatever he wanted. Sometimes he took the whole corpses, sometimes just a specific part.
However, Bernice Worden had been alive the last time anyone had seen her. She'd gone missing from the store where she'd been working that day. Gein readily confessed to having killed her, as well as another missing woman, Mary Hogan, who had disappeared three years earlier. They both had been about the size of his dead mother and he'd been unable to wait until they died; he'd needed them to complete his project. So he'd shot them and brought them home. The police listened in horror as he described his grisly pastime.
Gein remained a suspect in the disappearance of four others, but those women he did kill or dig up he'd used to make himself a female "suit." He'd skin them for the various pieces, but he found that dead skin was not very pliable, and he'd heard or read that living women worked better for this purpose. Apparently he missed his dead mother so much that he was trying to become her by dressing in his special female "suit." Sometimes he wore it, he admitted, while he pranced around in the yard during a full moon.
"When I made these masks, you see," he said in his confession, "I stuffed them all out with paper so they would dry." He also had used salt as a preservative. In any event, he was detained and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Eventually, Gein was deemed competent to stand trial for one murder, but then found not guilty by reason of insanity. In 1974, he petitioned for release from the psychiatric institute in which he'd been a patient, but his petition was denied. He died a decade later.
Eddie Gein's Farmhouse
It's true that there's little in TCM that compares to what Gein did, aside from the skin mask that Leatherface wears, but the house where this character resides with his family is similar to Gein's: isolated, cluttered, full of body parts, and generally disgusting. Alone and socially inept, apparently unaware that what he was doing was wrong, Gein had devoured books on human anatomy and Nazi experiments, even sending away for shrunken heads. Although he denied consuming the flesh, some who studied the case believe he did. In any event, regardless of the facts, he certainly has the reputation of being a cannibal, and he was mentally so stunted and dysfunctional that he served as a viable model for the Leatherface character.
Ed Gein's Kitchen
A grave-robber, too, Leatherface wears a mask made of skin and a bloody butcher's apron. Yet he relies on a chainsaw to kill and dismember his victims, and there's no indication that Gein ever used such an implement on people. He did gut and behead his two live victims, which is gruesome enough, but he didn't run around like Leatherface does. So just how did Gein come to inspire Tobe Hooper to create TCM?
On the Special Edition DVD of the original film, Tobe Hooper discusses his experience and inspiration with star Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface). Among the comments they make is that many fans believe the film was based on an actual incident. In fact, some believe they have met Leatherface himself, working at some odd job in Texas, and they're certain that the incident took place where the film is set. However, Hooper notes that such viewers have failed to read the entire crawler or to pay attention to dates: it says the incident occurred in the summer of 1973, which is exactly when they were filming it, so it had to be fictitious.
Actor, Gunnar Hansen
Then Hooper discusses the connection with Gein. He says that he had relatives in Wisconsin who lived not far from the Gein farm and they often told gruesome stories to him when he was a kid about how the house had been filled with human remains and dead animals. When he started on the film, he did not recall Gein's name, but the memory nevertheless inspired him to portray an entire family of such miscreants. He invented three brothers (although many people believe that the older character is actually a father figure, since he chases the other two down and issues orders to them) to act as cannibals and grab human prey with ghoulish delight. It was several years after the film was made that Hooper learned the name of the deranged Wisconsin killer, who had in fact not killed or dismembered anyone with a chainsaw.
Another item that comes up during this conversation is that Leatherface wears three different masks, representing the idea that he has no internal personality. Whatever mask he wears at a given time dictates how he will act. The director and actor discuss just what it was like to film on a small budget, with a number of hurdles, and often in terrible heat. Yet they had fun and ended up making a film with more legs (so to speak) than they'd anticipated.
Director, Tobe Hooper
"When it was funny for us," says Hooper, "we knew it was right, although for years people didn't see the humor in it. [But] there's a lot of dark humor in it."
In 1988, TCM: A Family Portrait was released as a documentary about the film, since it had become such a cult classic. Much of the same ground is covered as in the conversation for the special edition DVD, but some new gems are offered as well - notably, the way Gunnar Hansen was cast for the role. Apparently, as he walked into the room, he "filled the doorway," and that was impressive. Hooper was seeking an actor with imposing physical presence and he knew this was the guy. To become Leatherface, Hansen says, he walked around a school for the mentally retarded to take on their mannerisms. He also watched pigs to try to get the squealing right but believed he did not master that particular skill.
The crazy hitchhiker, Leatherface's brother, had heard about the film by chance and had gone to the screening. When asked to read, he took on the persona of his nephew and it went over well enough to secure the part.
Only one chainsaw was used throughout the entire film, and they apparently did not see the phallic symbolism, because in comparison to the sequels, it was just an average size tool. Hansen describes his relief that it always started when he pulled the string.
For the most part, the script was a bare outline, and the actors improvised the story as they went along. It didn't take much to act out their discomfort, as the persistent smell of sweat, the Texas-in-August heat, the unrelenting dust, and the grimy sets provided an aura of reality. Hansen had only one shirt, he says, and he wore it for every scene.
There's another serial killer that sometimes gets mentioned as a source of inspiration, so let's examine the basis for it next.
Other Speculations
Some sources indicate that the original TCM was based on an unsolved series of murders known as the Texarkana Moonlight murders. Since Hooper has never said so, and since those murders bear little relation to the violence in TCM, this seems a bit far-fetched. However, this series did take place in Texas, which gives the movie, as an "actual incident" type of picture, more of an authentic feel.
A full moon was out on February 20, 1946 (some say the 23rd), when two teenagers were attacked in their car, and the girl was raped, but no one died during this incident. The attacker, a tall man wearing a white mask, used his gun to bludgeon the boy, Jimmy Hollis. Apparently an approaching car frightened the attacker away and the police were unable to identify a suspect.
Richard Griffen and Polly Ann Moore
Then a month later and a mile away, also under a full moon, another couple was similarly attacked. It was March 23 when Richard Griffen was in the car with his girlfriend, Polly Ann Moore, and both were shot in the head from behind with a .32. Investigators thought that they had been killed outside the car but then placed back into the seats. The motive for this behavior remained a mystery, as did the perpetrator. The next couple to endure such treatment was treated quite differently.
Betty Jo Booker and Paul Martin
In April, fifteen-year-old Betty Jo Booker and her boyfriend, Paul Martin, were slaughtered, with evidence that Betty Jo had been raped and tortured for hours. The body of her boyfriend, Paul Martin, had been dumped more than a mile away. He, too, had been shot. Since the bullets had come from a .32 revolver, investigators believed that at least the two shootings were related, and possibly the initial lover's lane attack. Tire tread impressions from all three scenes supported this linkage and the press gave the fiend a name, "the Phantom." There was more to come, by some speculations, but this time the victims would be older, attacked in their home.
In May, more than ten miles from Texarkana, an middle-aged couple was shot in their farmhouse, but the wife, Katy Starks, managed to escape and raise an alarm. She survived, and nearby, police found the tire tread impressions again. They also had muddy footprints from inside the house to compare to a suspect, if they ever caught one. Yet if the Phantom had committed this shooting, he had used a different gun, and it seemed at the time more likely that it had been a burglar looking for goods. In the 1940s, police tended to group similar crimes in an area to a single repeat offender, though ultimately, this crime was attributed to the Phantom.
Then the killings stopped and the murderer was never identified, although some believed that a man who had killed himself and incinerated his car—with attention to the tires—had ended the spree himself. There were other suspects as well, but clearly there's no relationship between this brief spree and the incidents in TCM, aside from the hit-and-run nature of the Phantom, which is similar to the Hewitt clan members in some of the sequels, and the white mask. Why it's even suggested as an inspiration seems a real stretch.
In any event, TCM spawned several sequels and a remake.
The first sequel to TCM, released in 1983, does not merit much attention. It was more of a gore-fest, going all out with gruesome special effects in ways that TCM had not. There are various explanations for its deviation from the original, from being nothing more than a spoof to being the hallucinatory rendering of Sally Hardesty as she expired several years after the incident that left her psychotic. In any event, despite its coterie of fans, the movie fared badly, both critically and at the box office.
Tobe Hooper directed TCM2 (and apparently made a cameo appearance in one scene), and it featured Dennis Hopper as Lefty, an determined Texas Ranger — and uncle of Sally and Franklin Hardesty — out to get Leatherface for what he did. It seems that Hooper realized the sexual overtones because now it's really a battle of the phalluses as both Lefty and Leatherface arm themselves with the biggest, baddest chainsaws ever imagined.
The star, as usual, is female, but this time she's a disc jockey, "Stretch" Brock. She's privy to the murder of two free-wheeling adolescents out on the highway, which she believes was the work of the killer who'd become legend in that area: after fourteen years, he's resurfaced. She learns about Lefty and joins forces with him to hunt down the killers. This brings out "Chop Top," who is supposed to be the twin of the demented (and deceased) hitchhiker from TCM. Part of the Sawyer family, he drags Stretch's co-worker to an abandoned tunnel on a carnival ground, and she follows. Lefty arrives as well, with his super-duper chainsaw, and he wields it mightily, to great and gory effect. He even duels with Leatherface.
But then Stretch falls into the hands of the cannibals and she must endure an unappetizing dinner scene. Lefty saves her but apparently dies in the process. It seems that Leatherface (and Grandpa) does as well, but not really. He's resurrected for the next sequel.
In 1990, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III was released. A short film, less than an hour and a half, it was revised considerably, with ten minutes cut, to get an R rating. In 2003, the unrated version became available on DVD, with a few more features. And there were new characters. Back in 1990, Viggo Mortenson, known to many today as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, was apparently willing to be identified in film as a bad guy. He's part of this new cannibal family, insisting that the others call him 'Tex,' and there's a mother (or grandmother) as well, with grotesquely veined legs and a speaker box for a voice. Grandpa, too, is back, waiting to drink up the gore, as is Leatherface and another brother. There's even a young sister (or daughter) now to complete this Addams Family portrait.
Actor, Viggo Mortensen
This time the hapless victims are a girl, Michelle, and her boyfriend, Ryan, traveling across Texas to deliver a car to her father in Florida. They're redirected at the Last Chance gas station after getting a glimpse of a gruesome exhumation project along the way. Dozens of bodies have been found buried in a bog, raising past tales about Leatherface and his chainsaw. The film reminds you that the only survivor of that original massacre (Sally) died four years later in a mental institution. It's a set-up to the treatment this new couple can expect and when a supposed hitchhiker is shot, they flee down the "shortcut" to which Tex had directed them.
Jeff Burr directed this version and, like TCM2, it lacks a documentary feel; TCM has become a simple gorefest with the most superficial plots. As the couple struggle to stay alive after being attacked on the open road by a man in a truck, as well as a chainsaw-wielding monster, they encounter Benny, a survivalist on his way to a weekend training session. He crashes, losing the use of his SUV, and now he, too, must ward off the blows.
Michelle and Ryan make their way to a lone house, which is, of course, the home of the cannibal family. Tex shows up here, nailing Michelle to a chair while they string up Ryan, who'd been caught outside in a trap. Many of the scenes are familiar, but Michelle manages to get free, reunite with Benny, and drive away, leaving a pursuing Leatherface behind on the road with his saw.
While some critics believe this was a fine sequel, and several countries banned or edited it just as vigorously as they had with TCM, there's nothing remarkable about it. One might think it would have died from lack of creativity, but in fact, the next installment was on the Texas horizon.
It took only four years to decide to try it again, with Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. First released in 1994 (then edited and released again three years later), it was presented as a remake of the original. Several actors who are now stars were part of the new line-up, including Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey.
Actors: Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey
We now know Leatherface as Bubba Sawyer, a mentally slow maniac. He's gone from the original subhuman concept to a simple-minded, violence-prone member of a dysfunctional family. TCM:TNG, directed by TCM co-writer Kim Henkel, features a group of kids stranded by a car accident. They meet a woman in an office who sends her husband to assist, and he, of course, takes them to the house of horrors. Now the family is part of a larger spiritual order, with supposed ties to ancient conspiracies, and Leatherface has been updated with sex identity issues and a penchant for transvestism. The violence is unmotivated and gratuitous, and the film achieves little if anything. Zellweger and McConaughey were fortunate to recover their careers.
Another remake in 2003 fared better. Once again, it's August 1973 in Texas and five college-age kids are driving from Mexico when they get waylaid on the road. They pick up a female hitchhiker this time, who is just as demented as TCM hitchhiker — maybe more. When she shoots herself, the kids stop at a gas station, then go looking for the sheriff. That search takes two of them to a secluded house infested with violent whackos. One by one, the members of this doomed entourage are maimed or killed, usually by Leatherface, who is shown to have a disfigured face, sans a nose. That's the reason for the mask.
Only one girl survives, and in the process, she manages to seriously maim Leatherface by chopping off his chainsaw arm. The film stays true to the original vision, but updates the victimology. Yet in an age where people are growing more interested in just how bad guys like Leatherface develop into serial killers, a prequel was in order. (One critic couldn't wait for "Leatherface meets Freddy and Jason").
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning hit theaters in 2006, and it probably won't be the last one. It's set in 1969, four years before the events in TCM (the 2003 remake), as four teenagers (two couples) cross Texas to have some fun before the two young men go to Vietnam. Three of them wind up captured by a cop and taken to the Hewitt farm, where Thomas Hewitt is growing up to become Leatherface. Directed by John Liebseman, the new film recognizes scenes from the original that were cut. It also explains just how the chainsaw wielding maniac got his start.
A woman named Luda Mae Hewitt found a baby abandoned in a dumpster after his mother died during the birth process. She adopts him and grows to hate other children when she sees the torment inflicted on her developing son, Thomas, facially disfigured from a skin disease. To shield himself, he donned a mask.
Thomas went to work in the local meat processing plant (seen in TCM, with graphic descriptions from Franklin), but when it closed and the boss tried to force Thomas to leave, he killed the man. He found a chainsaw in the plant, which he later used for murder, and this is how he became the maniac of TCM.
Leatherface, as he came to be called, removed the skin from different people to create different masks for different moods or purposes. One was a pretty woman, another an elderly woman. He also had a "killing mask." Bullying and isolation, along with his bizarre family environment, became the forces that molded him into a killer.
John Wayne Gacy
Given how many bodies were collected at the Hewitt home, we might also say that John Wayne Gacy, a Chicago-based serial killer from the 1970s, provided some inspiration. He lured boys to his home, assaulting and killing them, and then burying their bodies in the crawl space beneath the house. He lived there with his family who, while not participants, also did not notice that for several years their home was an expanding graveyard. Yet Gacy, too, was not a chainsaw-wielding killer. Nevertheless, chainsaws have certainly figured into violent incidents, from murder to desecration of corpses to suicide.
What About Chainsaws?
While TCM was initially inspired by a killer who did not use a chainsaw, it pays to examine the history of crime to see if anyone did in fact kill with this weapon. It's happened, though not by a serial killer or a compulsive maniac.
Vernon Geberth
Vernon Geberth records the chainsaw murder of two men involved in drug sales, in the fourth edition of his book, Practical Homicide Investigation. Two men, associates in the drug trade, had been tortured with a chainsaw, then killed and cut up. Their parts were dumped in a remote area. Both, it turned out, had been enforcers for a drug lord and had decided to keep the money from a recent transaction rather than deliver it to the boss. Geberth offers no names or dates, but the morgue photo is sufficient to show what a chainsaw can really do.
Bobby Pollard
Several crimes feature dismemberment by chainsaw. A husband and wife, Bobby and Louise Pollard, pled guilty to killing and dismembering two people in 1997. After killing them, the couple used a chainsaw to cut them into parts and place them in a freezer, which they buried on their farm.
Louise Pollard
In 1997 Nicola Grogan was tried in Britain for the murder of her ex-lover and for cutting up his body with a chainsaw. She was found guilty of manslaughter. Also in Britain in 2001, the nude body of a middle-aged man was found in a field, clearly dismembered by a power tool before being set on fire.
Daphne Wright
In a supposed lesbian love triangle, Daphne Wright, a deaf woman, is going on trial for killing Darlene VanderGeisen in February 2006. The victim's body parts were found scattered in a landfill and bone fragments and tissue that matched her turned up in Wright's basement. She had been bludgeoned and then cut apart with a chainsaw. Wright claims to be innocent.
Darlene Vandergeisen
Recently a former fertility nurse went on trial for murdering her husband and dismembering him. Melanie McGuire allegedly shot and killed her husband in 2004, then used a chainsaw to chop his body into five parts for disposal. Investigators surmised that she packed each piece into a trash bag, put them into her luggage, and tossed the suitcases into the Chesapeake Bay. They had just closed on a house when he disappeared, but within days the suitcases containing his remains washed up in Virginia Beach and on an island. The motive offered at trial was that McGuire was having an affair. She had purchased a gun a few days before her husband vanished and her computer yielded suspicious searches for such things as "murder and suicide."
Melanie McGuire
Even more bizarre, chainsaws have been used in suicides. In France, a woman constructed an elaborate guillotine contraption with a chainsaw, got beneath it face-down, and let it do its bloody work. A man in Prague apparently tried something similar, but the tool missed his jugular vein and lodged in his spine. He survived but probably wished he hadn't. Prior to this, he had tried hanging himself, but the tree branch broke under his weight. When he fell to the ground, he broke both of his legs. He was only 32, facing a divorce.
In California in 1993, a man who used chainsaws to trim trees became the first U.S. victim of suicide-by-chainsaw. Richard Possehl, 27, pressed the running saw against his neck, nearly removing his head. He was found near a cemetery. Not sure this could be a suicide, authorities re-enacted the incident with a mannequin to ensure that he could have killed himself in this manner, and it proved to be possible. Possehl's fingerprints were the only ones on the saw.
In March 2007, two men in Atlanta, Georgia, tried to commit mutual suicide together with a circular saw. They left a note behind with their apartment manager, saying their business was failing and they'd been diagnosed with AIDS, then began the process. They managed to remove three of their four arms, cutting six inches above the wrist, before police arrived to stop them. The manager had read the note and called 911. Both men, in their early forties, were taken to the ER and placed in intensive care, where they were stabilized.
Whether it's in a movie or a real crime, a chainsaw is one of the most intimidating weapons to ever be turned against a person. As a horror device, it's obviously here to stay.
Sources
All of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies.
Frasier, David. Murder Cases of the Twentieth Century. McFarland, 1996.
Geberth, Vernon. Practical Homicide Investigation, Fourth edition. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2006.
IMDB.com.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait, documentary, 1988.
"Plea Agreement in Johnston Murder case," abclocal.go.com, Feb. 19, 2007.
Wikipedia, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
Ramsland, K. The Human Predator: A History of Serial Murder and Forensic Investigation. Berkley, 2005.
Ryan, Harriet. "New Jersey fertility nurse tried for husband's murder." Court TV.com, March 6, 2007.
Strakian, Lara and Natasha Singh, "Should the Deaf Get Death?" ABC News.com, March 9, 2007.
"Czech attempts Suicide with Chainsaw," Czech Republic, January 6, 2005.
"2 Georgia Men Survive Suicide Attempt After Cutting Own Arms Off With Saw," FoxNews.com, March 9, 2007.
Sources — The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Case It's Based On — Crime Library
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/texas_chainsaw_massa/biblio.html
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When the police arrived at a secluded farmhouse outside Plainfield, Wisconsin, where Ed Gein lived alone after the passing of his parents and brother, they meant to question him about a local incident. It was a cold November day in 1957 and he'd been seen in the store from which a woman had gone missing, inquiring about antifreeze. Known to be a bit strange, they were aware that the diminutive high school dropout-turned-handyman was capable of some odd behavior, but he'd always seemed fairly benign. His deceased father had been an alcoholic and his mother an antisocial religious fanatic. Brother Henry had mysteriously died in a fire.
It seems that Gein was not at home, so the officers decided to look around. Entering a deteriorating and darkened out-building, they spotted a dressed deer carcass hanging from the rafters. Going closer, they thought there was something odd about this deer. It didn't hang right.
Suddenly, under a flashlight's glare, they realized that the carcass was no deer: it was a human corpse. Hung feet first was the headless nude body of a woman, slit from her genitals to her neck, with her legs splayed apart. The officers wondered if this might be the missing storekeeper, Bernice Worden. Whoever it was, she'd clearly been the victim of a crime, and there was no one around but eccentric Ed Gein. Was he peculiar enough to commit outright murder, they wondered? It certainly seemed possible.
Next, the police entered Gein's house and right away their question was answered. Inside, scattered around, they found all manner of body parts, including skin, a box of preserved female genitalia, a heart in a frying pan, a box of cut-off noses, the sawed-off crania from several skulls, death masks peeled off dead females, a skin vest with female breasts and genitals, and a female scalp with black hair. They wondered just how many women Gein had killed. It appeared that there were parts from at least a dozen victims, possibly more. Then they found Bernice Worden's head in a bag, with nails driven through the ears.
In those days, little was known about the kind of person who might kill repeatedly — although a handful of serial killers were at large around the country — other than that he had to be some sort of monster. It was one thing to kill; it was quite another to remove and preserve body parts to decorate one's home. This wasn't Nazi Germany, after all. In fact, it appeared to the investigators, from items in a frying pan, that perhaps Gein was indulging in a bit of cannibalism as well. They could only wonder how long he'd been doing it and they intended to check their records for more missing women when they returned to town. But first they had to find Gein.
Isolated and Deranged
Once arrested and taken to Madison, Gein freely admitted that he was aware of the body parts and corpses, but he said that he'd stolen most of them from the local cemetery — to the tune of some forty grave robberies. He'd hear about a woman who had recently died, he explained, wait until she was buried, and then go dig her up to take whatever he wanted. Sometimes he took the whole corpses, sometimes just a specific part.
However, Bernice Worden had been alive the last time anyone had seen her. She'd gone missing from the store where she'd been working that day. Gein readily confessed to having killed her, as well as another missing woman, Mary Hogan, who had disappeared three years earlier. They both had been about the size of his dead mother and he'd been unable to wait until they died; he'd needed them to complete his project. So he'd shot them and brought them home. The police listened in horror as he described his grisly pastime.
Gein remained a suspect in the disappearance of four others, but those women he did kill or dig up he'd used to make himself a female "suit." He'd skin them for the various pieces, but he found that dead skin was not very pliable, and he'd heard or read that living women worked better for this purpose. Apparently he missed his dead mother so much that he was trying to become her by dressing in his special female "suit." Sometimes he wore it, he admitted, while he pranced around in the yard during a full moon.
"When I made these masks, you see," he said in his confession, "I stuffed them all out with paper so they would dry." He also had used salt as a preservative. In any event, he was detained and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Eventually, Gein was deemed competent to stand trial for one murder, but then found not guilty by reason of insanity. In 1974, he petitioned for release from the psychiatric institute in which he'd been a patient, but his petition was denied. He died a decade later.
Eddie Gein's Farmhouse
It's true that there's little in TCM that compares to what Gein did, aside from the skin mask that Leatherface wears, but the house where this character resides with his family is similar to Gein's: isolated, cluttered, full of body parts, and generally disgusting. Alone and socially inept, apparently unaware that what he was doing was wrong, Gein had devoured books on human anatomy and Nazi experiments, even sending away for shrunken heads. Although he denied consuming the flesh, some who studied the case believe he did. In any event, regardless of the facts, he certainly has the reputation of being a cannibal, and he was mentally so stunted and dysfunctional that he served as a viable model for the Leatherface character.
Ed Gein's Kitchen
A grave-robber, too, Leatherface wears a mask made of skin and a bloody butcher's apron. Yet he relies on a chainsaw to kill and dismember his victims, and there's no indication that Gein ever used such an implement on people. He did gut and behead his two live victims, which is gruesome enough, but he didn't run around like Leatherface does. So just how did Gein come to inspire Tobe Hooper to create TCM?
On the Special Edition DVD of the original film, Tobe Hooper discusses his experience and inspiration with star Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface). Among the comments they make is that many fans believe the film was based on an actual incident. In fact, some believe they have met Leatherface himself, working at some odd job in Texas, and they're certain that the incident took place where the film is set. However, Hooper notes that such viewers have failed to read the entire crawler or to pay attention to dates: it says the incident occurred in the summer of 1973, which is exactly when they were filming it, so it had to be fictitious.
Actor, Gunnar Hansen
Then Hooper discusses the connection with Gein. He says that he had relatives in Wisconsin who lived not far from the Gein farm and they often told gruesome stories to him when he was a kid about how the house had been filled with human remains and dead animals. When he started on the film, he did not recall Gein's name, but the memory nevertheless inspired him to portray an entire family of such miscreants. He invented three brothers (although many people believe that the older character is actually a father figure, since he chases the other two down and issues orders to them) to act as cannibals and grab human prey with ghoulish delight. It was several years after the film was made that Hooper learned the name of the deranged Wisconsin killer, who had in fact not killed or dismembered anyone with a chainsaw.
Another item that comes up during this conversation is that Leatherface wears three different masks, representing the idea that he has no internal personality. Whatever mask he wears at a given time dictates how he will act. The director and actor discuss just what it was like to film on a small budget, with a number of hurdles, and often in terrible heat. Yet they had fun and ended up making a film with more legs (so to speak) than they'd anticipated.
Director, Tobe Hooper
"When it was funny for us," says Hooper, "we knew it was right, although for years people didn't see the humor in it. [But] there's a lot of dark humor in it."
In 1988, TCM: A Family Portrait was released as a documentary about the film, since it had become such a cult classic. Much of the same ground is covered as in the conversation for the special edition DVD, but some new gems are offered as well - notably, the way Gunnar Hansen was cast for the role. Apparently, as he walked into the room, he "filled the doorway," and that was impressive. Hooper was seeking an actor with imposing physical presence and he knew this was the guy. To become Leatherface, Hansen says, he walked around a school for the mentally retarded to take on their mannerisms. He also watched pigs to try to get the squealing right but believed he did not master that particular skill.
The crazy hitchhiker, Leatherface's brother, had heard about the film by chance and had gone to the screening. When asked to read, he took on the persona of his nephew and it went over well enough to secure the part.
Only one chainsaw was used throughout the entire film, and they apparently did not see the phallic symbolism, because in comparison to the sequels, it was just an average size tool. Hansen describes his relief that it always started when he pulled the string.
For the most part, the script was a bare outline, and the actors improvised the story as they went along. It didn't take much to act out their discomfort, as the persistent smell of sweat, the Texas-in-August heat, the unrelenting dust, and the grimy sets provided an aura of reality. Hansen had only one shirt, he says, and he wore it for every scene.
There's another serial killer that sometimes gets mentioned as a source of inspiration, so let's examine the basis for it next.
Other Speculations
Some sources indicate that the original TCM was based on an unsolved series of murders known as the Texarkana Moonlight murders. Since Hooper has never said so, and since those murders bear little relation to the violence in TCM, this seems a bit far-fetched. However, this series did take place in Texas, which gives the movie, as an "actual incident" type of picture, more of an authentic feel.
A full moon was out on February 20, 1946 (some say the 23rd), when two teenagers were attacked in their car, and the girl was raped, but no one died during this incident. The attacker, a tall man wearing a white mask, used his gun to bludgeon the boy, Jimmy Hollis. Apparently an approaching car frightened the attacker away and the police were unable to identify a suspect.
Richard Griffen and Polly Ann Moore
Then a month later and a mile away, also under a full moon, another couple was similarly attacked. It was March 23 when Richard Griffen was in the car with his girlfriend, Polly Ann Moore, and both were shot in the head from behind with a .32. Investigators thought that they had been killed outside the car but then placed back into the seats. The motive for this behavior remained a mystery, as did the perpetrator. The next couple to endure such treatment was treated quite differently.
Betty Jo Booker and Paul Martin
In April, fifteen-year-old Betty Jo Booker and her boyfriend, Paul Martin, were slaughtered, with evidence that Betty Jo had been raped and tortured for hours. The body of her boyfriend, Paul Martin, had been dumped more than a mile away. He, too, had been shot. Since the bullets had come from a .32 revolver, investigators believed that at least the two shootings were related, and possibly the initial lover's lane attack. Tire tread impressions from all three scenes supported this linkage and the press gave the fiend a name, "the Phantom." There was more to come, by some speculations, but this time the victims would be older, attacked in their home.
In May, more than ten miles from Texarkana, an middle-aged couple was shot in their farmhouse, but the wife, Katy Starks, managed to escape and raise an alarm. She survived, and nearby, police found the tire tread impressions again. They also had muddy footprints from inside the house to compare to a suspect, if they ever caught one. Yet if the Phantom had committed this shooting, he had used a different gun, and it seemed at the time more likely that it had been a burglar looking for goods. In the 1940s, police tended to group similar crimes in an area to a single repeat offender, though ultimately, this crime was attributed to the Phantom.
Then the killings stopped and the murderer was never identified, although some believed that a man who had killed himself and incinerated his car—with attention to the tires—had ended the spree himself. There were other suspects as well, but clearly there's no relationship between this brief spree and the incidents in TCM, aside from the hit-and-run nature of the Phantom, which is similar to the Hewitt clan members in some of the sequels, and the white mask. Why it's even suggested as an inspiration seems a real stretch.
In any event, TCM spawned several sequels and a remake.
The first sequel to TCM, released in 1983, does not merit much attention. It was more of a gore-fest, going all out with gruesome special effects in ways that TCM had not. There are various explanations for its deviation from the original, from being nothing more than a spoof to being the hallucinatory rendering of Sally Hardesty as she expired several years after the incident that left her psychotic. In any event, despite its coterie of fans, the movie fared badly, both critically and at the box office.
Tobe Hooper directed TCM2 (and apparently made a cameo appearance in one scene), and it featured Dennis Hopper as Lefty, an determined Texas Ranger — and uncle of Sally and Franklin Hardesty — out to get Leatherface for what he did. It seems that Hooper realized the sexual overtones because now it's really a battle of the phalluses as both Lefty and Leatherface arm themselves with the biggest, baddest chainsaws ever imagined.
The star, as usual, is female, but this time she's a disc jockey, "Stretch" Brock. She's privy to the murder of two free-wheeling adolescents out on the highway, which she believes was the work of the killer who'd become legend in that area: after fourteen years, he's resurfaced. She learns about Lefty and joins forces with him to hunt down the killers. This brings out "Chop Top," who is supposed to be the twin of the demented (and deceased) hitchhiker from TCM. Part of the Sawyer family, he drags Stretch's co-worker to an abandoned tunnel on a carnival ground, and she follows. Lefty arrives as well, with his super-duper chainsaw, and he wields it mightily, to great and gory effect. He even duels with Leatherface.
But then Stretch falls into the hands of the cannibals and she must endure an unappetizing dinner scene. Lefty saves her but apparently dies in the process. It seems that Leatherface (and Grandpa) does as well, but not really. He's resurrected for the next sequel.
In 1990, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III was released. A short film, less than an hour and a half, it was revised considerably, with ten minutes cut, to get an R rating. In 2003, the unrated version became available on DVD, with a few more features. And there were new characters. Back in 1990, Viggo Mortenson, known to many today as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, was apparently willing to be identified in film as a bad guy. He's part of this new cannibal family, insisting that the others call him 'Tex,' and there's a mother (or grandmother) as well, with grotesquely veined legs and a speaker box for a voice. Grandpa, too, is back, waiting to drink up the gore, as is Leatherface and another brother. There's even a young sister (or daughter) now to complete this Addams Family portrait.
Actor, Viggo Mortensen
This time the hapless victims are a girl, Michelle, and her boyfriend, Ryan, traveling across Texas to deliver a car to her father in Florida. They're redirected at the Last Chance gas station after getting a glimpse of a gruesome exhumation project along the way. Dozens of bodies have been found buried in a bog, raising past tales about Leatherface and his chainsaw. The film reminds you that the only survivor of that original massacre (Sally) died four years later in a mental institution. It's a set-up to the treatment this new couple can expect and when a supposed hitchhiker is shot, they flee down the "shortcut" to which Tex had directed them.
Jeff Burr directed this version and, like TCM2, it lacks a documentary feel; TCM has become a simple gorefest with the most superficial plots. As the couple struggle to stay alive after being attacked on the open road by a man in a truck, as well as a chainsaw-wielding monster, they encounter Benny, a survivalist on his way to a weekend training session. He crashes, losing the use of his SUV, and now he, too, must ward off the blows.
Michelle and Ryan make their way to a lone house, which is, of course, the home of the cannibal family. Tex shows up here, nailing Michelle to a chair while they string up Ryan, who'd been caught outside in a trap. Many of the scenes are familiar, but Michelle manages to get free, reunite with Benny, and drive away, leaving a pursuing Leatherface behind on the road with his saw.
While some critics believe this was a fine sequel, and several countries banned or edited it just as vigorously as they had with TCM, there's nothing remarkable about it. One might think it would have died from lack of creativity, but in fact, the next installment was on the Texas horizon.
It took only four years to decide to try it again, with Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. First released in 1994 (then edited and released again three years later), it was presented as a remake of the original. Several actors who are now stars were part of the new line-up, including Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey.
Actors: Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey
We now know Leatherface as Bubba Sawyer, a mentally slow maniac. He's gone from the original subhuman concept to a simple-minded, violence-prone member of a dysfunctional family. TCM:TNG, directed by TCM co-writer Kim Henkel, features a group of kids stranded by a car accident. They meet a woman in an office who sends her husband to assist, and he, of course, takes them to the house of horrors. Now the family is part of a larger spiritual order, with supposed ties to ancient conspiracies, and Leatherface has been updated with sex identity issues and a penchant for transvestism. The violence is unmotivated and gratuitous, and the film achieves little if anything. Zellweger and McConaughey were fortunate to recover their careers.
Another remake in 2003 fared better. Once again, it's August 1973 in Texas and five college-age kids are driving from Mexico when they get waylaid on the road. They pick up a female hitchhiker this time, who is just as demented as TCM hitchhiker — maybe more. When she shoots herself, the kids stop at a gas station, then go looking for the sheriff. That search takes two of them to a secluded house infested with violent whackos. One by one, the members of this doomed entourage are maimed or killed, usually by Leatherface, who is shown to have a disfigured face, sans a nose. That's the reason for the mask.
Only one girl survives, and in the process, she manages to seriously maim Leatherface by chopping off his chainsaw arm. The film stays true to the original vision, but updates the victimology. Yet in an age where people are growing more interested in just how bad guys like Leatherface develop into serial killers, a prequel was in order. (One critic couldn't wait for "Leatherface meets Freddy and Jason").
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning hit theaters in 2006, and it probably won't be the last one. It's set in 1969, four years before the events in TCM (the 2003 remake), as four teenagers (two couples) cross Texas to have some fun before the two young men go to Vietnam. Three of them wind up captured by a cop and taken to the Hewitt farm, where Thomas Hewitt is growing up to become Leatherface. Directed by John Liebseman, the new film recognizes scenes from the original that were cut. It also explains just how the chainsaw wielding maniac got his start.
A woman named Luda Mae Hewitt found a baby abandoned in a dumpster after his mother died during the birth process. She adopts him and grows to hate other children when she sees the torment inflicted on her developing son, Thomas, facially disfigured from a skin disease. To shield himself, he donned a mask.
Thomas went to work in the local meat processing plant (seen in TCM, with graphic descriptions from Franklin), but when it closed and the boss tried to force Thomas to leave, he killed the man. He found a chainsaw in the plant, which he later used for murder, and this is how he became the maniac of TCM.
Leatherface, as he came to be called, removed the skin from different people to create different masks for different moods or purposes. One was a pretty woman, another an elderly woman. He also had a "killing mask." Bullying and isolation, along with his bizarre family environment, became the forces that molded him into a killer.
John Wayne Gacy
Given how many bodies were collected at the Hewitt home, we might also say that John Wayne Gacy, a Chicago-based serial killer from the 1970s, provided some inspiration. He lured boys to his home, assaulting and killing them, and then burying their bodies in the crawl space beneath the house. He lived there with his family who, while not participants, also did not notice that for several years their home was an expanding graveyard. Yet Gacy, too, was not a chainsaw-wielding killer. Nevertheless, chainsaws have certainly figured into violent incidents, from murder to desecration of corpses to suicide.
What About Chainsaws?
While TCM was initially inspired by a killer who did not use a chainsaw, it pays to examine the history of crime to see if anyone did in fact kill with this weapon. It's happened, though not by a serial killer or a compulsive maniac.
Vernon Geberth
Vernon Geberth records the chainsaw murder of two men involved in drug sales, in the fourth edition of his book, Practical Homicide Investigation. Two men, associates in the drug trade, had been tortured with a chainsaw, then killed and cut up. Their parts were dumped in a remote area. Both, it turned out, had been enforcers for a drug lord and had decided to keep the money from a recent transaction rather than deliver it to the boss. Geberth offers no names or dates, but the morgue photo is sufficient to show what a chainsaw can really do.
Bobby Pollard
Several crimes feature dismemberment by chainsaw. A husband and wife, Bobby and Louise Pollard, pled guilty to killing and dismembering two people in 1997. After killing them, the couple used a chainsaw to cut them into parts and place them in a freezer, which they buried on their farm.
Louise Pollard
In 1997 Nicola Grogan was tried in Britain for the murder of her ex-lover and for cutting up his body with a chainsaw. She was found guilty of manslaughter. Also in Britain in 2001, the nude body of a middle-aged man was found in a field, clearly dismembered by a power tool before being set on fire.
Daphne Wright
In a supposed lesbian love triangle, Daphne Wright, a deaf woman, is going on trial for killing Darlene VanderGeisen in February 2006. The victim's body parts were found scattered in a landfill and bone fragments and tissue that matched her turned up in Wright's basement. She had been bludgeoned and then cut apart with a chainsaw. Wright claims to be innocent.
Darlene Vandergeisen
Recently a former fertility nurse went on trial for murdering her husband and dismembering him. Melanie McGuire allegedly shot and killed her husband in 2004, then used a chainsaw to chop his body into five parts for disposal. Investigators surmised that she packed each piece into a trash bag, put them into her luggage, and tossed the suitcases into the Chesapeake Bay. They had just closed on a house when he disappeared, but within days the suitcases containing his remains washed up in Virginia Beach and on an island. The motive offered at trial was that McGuire was having an affair. She had purchased a gun a few days before her husband vanished and her computer yielded suspicious searches for such things as "murder and suicide."
Melanie McGuire
Even more bizarre, chainsaws have been used in suicides. In France, a woman constructed an elaborate guillotine contraption with a chainsaw, got beneath it face-down, and let it do its bloody work. A man in Prague apparently tried something similar, but the tool missed his jugular vein and lodged in his spine. He survived but probably wished he hadn't. Prior to this, he had tried hanging himself, but the tree branch broke under his weight. When he fell to the ground, he broke both of his legs. He was only 32, facing a divorce.
In California in 1993, a man who used chainsaws to trim trees became the first U.S. victim of suicide-by-chainsaw. Richard Possehl, 27, pressed the running saw against his neck, nearly removing his head. He was found near a cemetery. Not sure this could be a suicide, authorities re-enacted the incident with a mannequin to ensure that he could have killed himself in this manner, and it proved to be possible. Possehl's fingerprints were the only ones on the saw.
In March 2007, two men in Atlanta, Georgia, tried to commit mutual suicide together with a circular saw. They left a note behind with their apartment manager, saying their business was failing and they'd been diagnosed with AIDS, then began the process. They managed to remove three of their four arms, cutting six inches above the wrist, before police arrived to stop them. The manager had read the note and called 911. Both men, in their early forties, were taken to the ER and placed in intensive care, where they were stabilized.
Whether it's in a movie or a real crime, a chainsaw is one of the most intimidating weapons to ever be turned against a person. As a horror device, it's obviously here to stay.
Sources
All of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies.
Frasier, David. Murder Cases of the Twentieth Century. McFarland, 1996.
Geberth, Vernon. Practical Homicide Investigation, Fourth edition. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2006.
IMDB.com.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait, documentary, 1988.
"Plea Agreement in Johnston Murder case," abclocal.go.com, Feb. 19, 2007.
Wikipedia, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
Ramsland, K. The Human Predator: A History of Serial Murder and Forensic Investigation. Berkley, 2005.
Ryan, Harriet. "New Jersey fertility nurse tried for husband's murder." Court TV.com, March 6, 2007.
Strakian, Lara and Natasha Singh, "Should the Deaf Get Death?" ABC News.com, March 9, 2007.
"Czech attempts Suicide with Chainsaw," Czech Republic, January 6, 2005.
"2 Georgia Men Survive Suicide Attempt After Cutting Own Arms Off With Saw," FoxNews.com, March 9, 2007.
Sources — The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Case It's Based On — Crime Library
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/texas_chainsaw_massa/biblio.html
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