Liv Bridge
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre shocked audiences around the world at the time, but there are even more frightening facts about the making of the movie that are arguably even more terrifying.
The cult classic horror came out in 1974 - and slasher movies haven't been the same since, as it went on to influence generations of motion pictures with masked-up and power-tool clad serial killers.
Yet producer and director Tobe Hooper, who co-wrote the terrifying story with Kim Henkel, struggled to find a distributor to air the movie, not least of all because of the sheer amount of violence, but because it was made on a shoestring budget and featured a cast of then unfamiliar Texas faces.
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Eventually, Bryanston Distributing Company acquired the movie, and it proved insanely profitable at the box office, grossing more than $30 million at the time (equivalent to more than $150 million as of 2019).
Some audiences weren't exactly thrilled by the thriller though, as San Francisco viewers walked out of movie theatres, Canadian cinemas withdrew it from screening, and it was outright banned in countries from Britain to Brazil, while Australia refused to allow it at all for 20 years.
Now, the lengths the cast went to in order to bag some of the infamous gory scenes have been revealed.
Since the movie had a budget of around $60,000, apparently no dime was worth wasting on fancy prosthetics, special effects ,or plastic-looking props.
The purse strings were tight but the team didn't want cheap props messing up the movie, so they found it was far cheaper and better for the realistic ambiance of the movie to just bring in human skeletons.
Speaking to Interview, Hooper said: "Some of the skeletons were real. When he's impaled on the tombstone in the beginning. It's a real human skeleton underneath it.
"That was a practical, budgetary thing," Hooper continued. "It was less expensive to get real human skeletons from India than to buy plastic reproductions."
Art director Robert A. Burns also reportedly searched through the countryside to find real animal corpses, lugging back eight cows, three goats, two dogs, two deer, one chicken, a cat, and an armadillo for the movie.
According to the Daily Star, Burns said: "There were only about 10 plastic bones in the whole set.”
Other mortifying facts from behind the scenes have since come to light, with the dinner scene being even more brutal than it looks.
The cast and crew were locked inside the Texas farmhouse for at least 27 hours during a heatwave, with no air conditioning and all the windows covered to keep the light out. Oh, and the increasing stench of real, rotting meat piled in the corners and blood from a slaughterhouse dripping down the walls, which Hooper said was 'cooked' by the bright camera lights, reportedly caused cast and crew to vomit.
Edwin Neal, who played the hitchhiker, apparently said: "Filming that 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."
That, and some scenes containing blood were also real due to technical difficulties in getting the fake blood to come out of its tube.
Again in the dinner scene, Marilyn Burns, who plays Sally, had to have her index finger cut with a razor.
Yikes!