Still Life with Chainsaw

"Godzilla didn't scare me. It's people I'm afraid of."
- Tobe Hooper

In a little over one summer month, the horror motion picture genre lost two of its most influential stylists, each a seminal filmmaker in his own right. In July, George A. Romero, the Iron City industrial filmmaker and TV commercial director who reanimated zombie cinema with 1968's "The Night of the Living Dead," succumbed to lung cancer; in August, Tobe Hooper, a Lone Star State-born documentary moviemaker who stripped backroad terror to its bare bones with 1974's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," died from natural causes.

John Landis (center), director of "An American Werewolf in London,"
joins George A. Romero and Tobe Hooper in a 2005 celebration of
the debut of Showtime's "Masters of Horror" anthology series.

By the end of the 1960s, the Summer of Love was over. With Richard Nixon in the White House, advancements in technology allowed humans to set foot on the moon, while the Vietnam War raged on. The winds of American cinema were changing in the wake of 1969's "Easy Rider," as young, revisionist moviemakers challenged Hollywood's old school. And the horror genre was no exception.

The LaBianca-Sharon Tate murders in 1969 by the Manson Family abruptly brought end to any sense of innocence from the decade. "The Night of the Living Dead" and "The Last House on the Left" brought horror home to our backyards. Gone were monsters from European folklore and creatures from outer space.

No longer set in a distant past or a far-off land, terror now arose in your own neighborhood. The real monsters were people.

Take, for example, the rural family of unemployed slaughterhouse workers in Tobe Hooper's magnum opus, "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." The film's story is about two siblings and three of their young friends in a van who encounter a clan of cannibals ("My family's always been in meat," explains one of the peculiar progeny), including a chainsaw-wielding hulk called Leatherface, who wears a mask made from human skin. Hooper once described the story as an updated version of the fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel."

Long before the van-load of luckless flower children cross paths
with the 300-pound Leatherface, they meet the masochistic,
birthmark-streaked Hitchhiker. Houston-born Edwin Neal, who
made his screen debut as the creepy Hitchhiker, went to become
a prolific voice actor in anime, cartoons, and video games.

Writing Tobe Hooper's obituary in The Washington Post, Harrison Smith noted that "while Mr. Hooper's story retained the cannibalistic element of the Brothers Grimm fable, it was far more sinister, replacing a pair of sweet-toothed children with a group of five young hippies, and swapping the witch's oven for a butcher's hook and a sharp-toothed power tool."

The son of Texas hoteliers, Tobe Hooper, in his own words, "grew up watching movies," sometimes "at least three of them a day." Purportedly, his mother went into labor with him in a theater. He developed an interest in filmmaking as a child, borrowing his father's 8mm camera. He shot his first sound film at 16 and later studied film at the University of Texas before dropping out after two years.

His first big break came when he directed a 1970 documentary for PBS television about the iconic folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary titled "The Song Is Love." Prior to the documentary, Hooper cranked out his first feature film, a self-described "hippie movie" called "Eggshells," which saw a modest release to a limited number of university screens.

As a 29-year-old film school dropout, Hooper wanted to create a movie masterpiece worthy of his Italian idols Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. "I wanted to make a sky rocket big enough that I could shoot the damn thing into the air, and they could see me in Los Angeles."

Hooper recalled in the 2014 Montreal Gazette, "The only way to get the attention I wanted was through...horror film. I didn't need stars. All I needed for it to work was to scare people." As a young man, he loved horror movies but was consistently disappointed that the genre had become so boring. "I figured I was paying two bucks a ticket...and I was getting about ten cents' worth of scare." When a friend steered Hooper to a screening of director George A. Romero's 1968 picture "The Night of the Living Dead," he said, "I walked out thinking, 'OK, that's the way to do it.'"

One day during the busy holiday shopping season, Hooper found himself hemmed in by the throng in a Sears or Montgomery Ward store. "I was kind of freaking, just wanted to get out of there, get out of the crowd. And so I found myself in front of a chainsaw display in the hardware department, and that's where the idea came from...'Well, if I pick this damn thing up and start it, they'll part like the Red Sea and I can get out of here.'"

In a scene reminiscent of Tobe Hooper's experience in a department
store, Dennis Hopper examines a display of chainsaws in Hooper's
"Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2."

In a 2004 interview for Texas Monthly, Hooper recalled, after seeing the chainsaws, "I went home, sat down, all the channels just tuned in, the zeitgeist blew through, and the whole damn story came to me in what seemed like about 30 seconds."

Hooper and co-writer, co-producer Kim Henkel based the film's story in part on notorious real-life ghoul Ed Gein of Plainfield, Wisconsin. In the 1950s, Gein exhumed bodies from local cemeteries near his hometown and fashioned keepsakes, furnishings, even clothing from their bones and skin. He confessed to killing two women. One of the victims was discovered hanging upside down in a shed, headless and dressed out like a deer. Ultimately, Gein (pictured below) was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was remanded to psychiatric institutions. He spent the rest of his life in a Madison, Wisconsin mental health hospital.

News of Ed Gein's gruesome pastime may have influenced author Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho, which in turn, was adapted by screenwriter Joseph Stefano for Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic film, starring Anthony Perkins as mama's boy Norman Bates (pictured below).

In 1974, the same year as the release of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," Alan Ormsby, the screenwriter of the cult classic zombie comedy "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things," wrote the script for "Deranged," starring venerable character actor Roberts Blossom as an Ed Gein-type grave robber (pictured below).

"Deranged" was the sole leading role for Roberts Blossom, who became a familiar face in films from the 1970s into the 1990s, including parts as the friendly farmer waiting to greet the visitors in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Doc Dalton, the painting convict in "Escape from Alcatraz," Doc Watson in  "The Quick and the Dead," and Old Man Marley in "Home Alone" (pictured below).

Ed Gein, in part, inspired the character of Jame Gumb, aka "Buffalo Bill," who skins his female victims so he can fashion a "woman suit" for himself  in "The Silence of the Lambs."

Ted Levine, who portrayed sexually frustrated Buffalo Bill in "The Silence of the Lambs" (pictured above) successfully overcame the stigma of typecasting with such roles as Mare Winningham's husband in "Georgia," Detective Mike Bosko in "Heat," astronaut Alan Shepard in "From the Earth to the Moon," and Sgt. Tanner in "The Fast and the Furious."

Steve Railsback, who burst upon the scene with a chilling portrait of Charles Manson in the 1972 miniseries "Helter Skelter," was cast as the star of the turgid 2000 low-budget "Ed Gein" (pictured below), featuring Carrie Snodgress as his domineering mother.

Standing over 6' 2", burly stuntman Kane Hodder played a hefty Ed Gein in 2007's "Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield" (pictured below). Nicknamed "Cement Head," Hodder is best known for his portrayal of Jason Voorhees in four "Friday the 13th" films.

Hodder also doubled for pro wrestler-turned-actor R.A. Mihailoff's stunts in "Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III."

Despite the depiction of the bludgeoning deaths of two of the van occupants with a slaughterhouse mallet, the (implied) impaling of a female victim on a meat hook, and the (offscreen) gutting of the wheelchair-bound Franklin with a chainsaw, Tobe Hooper's Leatherface in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" remains, at heart, an oversized child, fearful of his domineering family members, who kills as a self-defense action because he feels threatened by the interloping youths. Hooper likened Leatherface to the 1950s animated duck Baby Huey (pictured below), since both characters were stuck in permanent childhood.

Gunnar Hansen, an Austin, Texas theater actor and bar bouncer, heard that a new horror film was being shot in the Austin area and auditioned for the role of Leatherface. Born in Reykjavik, Iceland, Hansen emigrated to America with his family when he was five. They lived in Maine for a couple of years before moving to Austin.

Gunnar played football in high school and worked as a computer operator before becoming interested in theater work in college, where he majored in English and mathematics as an undergraduate. He went to graduate school for Scandinavian studies.

Apparently, the first actor cast as Leatherface got drunk and had to be replaced. To prepare for his role, Hansen visited a school for the mentally handicapped to observe how they moved and listened to how they talked. He strove to make his portrayal as non-offensive as he could.

There were two noteworthy sidelights of Gunnar Hansen's iconic portrayal of Leatherface. Even though he wore three-inch lifts in his shoes to enhance his imposing presence, he could still outrun Marilyn Burns (who played cinema's benchmark lone-surviving female character in the film) as he pursued her through tangled brush and trees, so he came up with little bits of business like randomly swiping at branches and twigs with his chainsaw to give her the lead.

Secondly, Hansen recalled that he didn't get along well off-camera with Paul A. Partain, the actor who played Marilyn Burns' invalid brother, the incessantly whining Franklin. As a matter of fact, Partain was ostracized offscreen by his van-load of costars, which turned to be intentional. Partain, a Method actor, remained in his annoying character when not filming because he was afraid he wouldn't be able to turn the character back on again. As it turned out, Hansen and Partain became good friends afterward.

Years after shish-kabobbing Paul A. Partain in "The Texas Chain
Saw Massacre," Gunnar Hansen shares a smoke and a drink with
his victim. Partain succumbed to cancer in 2005, age 58.

In the wake of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," Gunnar Hansen shied away from acting in favor of writing while residing in Maine. He returned to the screen in the 1988 low-budget B-movie comedy "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers," starring scream queens Linnea Quigley and Michelle Bauer (pictured below).

Not at all coincidentally, Hansen portrayed a bank robber who confronts an onslaught of alien-mutated skeeters with a handy chainsaw in 1995's "Mosquito" (pictured below).

Speaking of Gunnar's chainsaw (which was, incidentally, a Poulan 245A in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre"), Marilyn Burns, who, as alluded to, played Sally, the much put-upon heroine of the mayhem (crashing through a plate glass window not once but twice), remembered a conversation with Hansen, saying, "What were we thinking? We were kids, and you were chasing me with a chainsaw, and once you tripped and it went up in the air, and that could have been it!"

Proving herself one of the screen's most formidable screamers, Marilyn Burns, born in Erie, Pennsylvania, raised in Houston, made her first film appearance in director Robert Altman's curious fantasy "Brewster McCloud" in 1970. She repeated her role as Sally in cameos in the sequel "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation" and in "Texas Chainsaw 3D."

Burns did volunteer work for the Texas Film Commission in Austin, seeking movie companies that were coming to the area and auditioning locals for roles. She had a small role in 1975's "The Great Waldo Pepper," for which she also cast some of the picture's extras, and portrayed Linda Kasabian, the former Manson "Family" member-turned-state's-witness in the 1976 miniseries "Helter Skelter."

No doubt, the success of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" made it difficult for Burns to land parts in mainstream films. "It hurt me. They'd call me in for parts and complain about 'Chain Saw.'" On the other hand, decades later, she reflected, "Never in my wildest dreams did I think that almost 40 years later, I would be talking about it."

Real animal parts were used in scenes inside the grisly farmhouse.
In a 1974 interview, Marilyn Burns told the Los Angeles Times,
"After many long hours outside of the refrigerator,
each had its own distinct odor."

Sadly, Marilyn Burns died in her sleep from an apparent heart attack in August of 2014 at the age of 65. As for her onscreen tormentor, Gunnar Hansen, who never reprised his role as Leatherface in any of the ensuing sequels or remakes (although his last part was a cameo in "Texas Chainsaw 3D" as Boss Sawyer), succumbed to pancreatic cancer at his Maine home in November of 2015, age 68.

Gunnar Hansen shows Dan Yeager the ropes - er, at least the
starter cord, for his role as Leatherface in "Texas Chainsaw 3D."
Screen newcomer Yeager was a onetime cabinet shop manager.

Tobe Hooper and his crew of friends and cast of unknowns - drawn mainly from central Texas - toiled seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day (including one grueling marathon shoot over 20 hours), for four weeks, enduring daytime temperatures over 100 degrees and nights of 80.

"The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" was banned outright in several countries. An official from the British Board of Film Classification, which for years declined to certify the movie, described it as trafficking in "the pornography of terror." Roger Ebert complained that the film was "without any apparent purpose unless the creation of disgust and fright is a purpose." Numerous theaters nationwide refused to screen the picture in response to audience complaints about its violence, which is somewhat bemusing, considering that it is comparatively bloodless.

As a matter of fact, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is one of the least bloody horror films of the modern era. Tobe Hooper, who always maintained the movie wasn't as gory as many audiences claimed, kept the mayhem at a minimum and left most of the horrific bloodletting implied off-camera, including the infamous slaughterhouse scene, when Leatherface impales Pam (played by actress Teri McMinn) on a meat hook.

After refusing to do a nude scene, McMinn felt she was tricked by director Hooper when he convinced her to wear red short shorts with a halter top for a shot on a front yard swing. Years later, the actress recalled, "The camera was set about 15 inches from where my butt was going to be...I was very worried about my cheeks in those little red shorts, and I freaked out. Tobe was a nice enough guy to me, but he wasn't the best communicator with actors. He never explained what he was trying to achieve with the shot. He and I argued for a long time...Finally, frustrated, Tobe made me a promise...'Aw, goddamn it, Teri, we'll shoot around it!' I eventually acquiesced and did the shot. They did shoot around it...all around my ass!"

"It's called many things," Teri McMinn noted, "the 'butt shot,' the 'famous dolly shot,' 'the red shorts shot'...It's a beautiful scene, beautifully shot by the talented Daniel Pearl. I've admitted it to Tobe and the world that I love that scene. I just wish my ass looked as good today!"

Tobe Hooper frequently contacted the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood's rating police, in an effort to ensure a PG rating. He remembered one conversation concerning Teri McMinn's deadly encounter with Gunnar Hansen: " 'I have this scene where a girl gets hung on a meat hook.' Long silence. 'What could I do?' Long silence." Hooper suggested, "'I guess it would help me if there was no penetration shot.' 'That would be correct.' 'And no blood?' 'That would help.'"

A hands-on director, Tobe Hooper assists Gunnar Hansen with
hoisting Teri McMinn in her chastity belt-pantyhose-steel rings-
parachute harness-foam padded rigging for the meat hook scene. 

Nonetheless, despite Hooper's strategic sidestepping - including the subliminal inclusion of a shot of the dry tin basin at the base of the meat hook - the picture was rated R.

"The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" became a cult hit, playing for eight years without interruption at drive-ins and theaters. From a budget that ended up around $140,000, the movie ultimately grossed over $30 million, It established horror conventions that are still widely used, among them the masked killer, the aforementioned sole-surviving female, and menacing power tools. Aside from sequels and reboots of "Massacre," chainsaws became standard equipment in such horror pictures as "Motel Hell," "Evil Dead II," "Phantasm II," and "American Psycho."

Reggie Banister girds for battle with the Tall Man in "Phantasm II."

The movie influenced countless other directors. John Carpenter, the director of 1978's "Halloween," called "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" "a seminal work in horror cinema" that "pacified my soul." William Friedkin, who befriended Tobe Hooper and brought him to Los Angeles, recalled the moviemaker as "a kind, warm-hearted man who made the most terrifying film ever." Guillermo del Toro, the writer-director of "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Crimson Peak," stated his reaction to the picture thus: "I didn't eat meat. I became a total vegetarian."

"The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" became part of the permanent collection in New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Meat hook victim Teri McMinn once gloated, "I have to smile...I'm in the Museum of Modern Art for goodness sake!"

It took Tobe Hooper 12 years to get around to directing the sequel to his masterpiece, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2," from a script by L.M. Kit Carson, who co-wrote the award-winning screenplay for Wim Wenders' 1984 road movie "Paris, Texas." Everything about the follow-up, from the onscreen bloodshed to attempts at cracker-barrel humor - including Jim Siedow's hammy reprise of his original role as the cannibalistic family's patriarch, now a toothy chili cook-off champion - smacked of over-the-top excess.

A good road sign of where we're being taken in the 1986 sequel is
telegraphed in the poster that parodies the previous year's posing
of the Brat Pack in the promotion for "The Breakfast Club."

Tobe Hooper and original co-writer Kim Henkel initially envisioned a sequel about an entire village of cannibals, titled "Beyond the Valley of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre." What they ended up with was Dennis Hopper as Lefty, a vengeful former Texas Ranger who happens to be the uncle of the siblings from a dozen years earlier, played by Marilyn Burns and Paul A. Partain. Hopper would deem this the worst movie he'd ever been in, until he played the humanoid T-Rex, King Koopa, in "Super Mario Bros."

Another damsel-in-distress in a Tobe Hooper film, another actress in short shorts: This time it's Caroline Williams, portraying Stretch, a disc jockey targeted as a victim by the cannibalistic clan.

The "butt shot," '80s-style, is modeled by Caroline Williams.

In this outing, Leatherface, now cutely dubbed "Bubba" by his family members, develops something of a crush on Stretch. Leatherface was portrayed by Bill Johnson, a 6' 3" Austin resident whose previous credits included "Future-Kill," with original "Massacre" stars Marilyn Burns and Edwin Neal, and "Confessions of a Serial Killer."

Speaking of Edwin Neal, whereas his tightly wound character, the Hitchhiker, was splattered all over a dusty country road by an 18-wheeler in the first go-around, he is replaced as the bull goose loony in "Part 2" by his supposed twin brother, Chop-Top, with a facial birthmark that mirrors his brother's on the opposite side of his face and a head wound from a "lucky" Viet Cong with a machete in the Vietnam War.

Chop-Top was portrayed by Bill Moseley, a staple of slasher cinema thanks to his role as sociopathic serial killer Otis Driftwood in Rob Zombie's "House of 1000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects."

Comprising a triumvirate of sociopathic bloodshed in "The Devil's
Rejects" are Sheri Moon Zombie, Sid Haig, and Bill Moseley.

The climax in "Massacre Pat 2" boils down to a final chainsaw duel between Chop-Top and lone-surviving female Stretch, capped off with an abandoned, feral power tool dance by Stretch that goofs on Gunnar Hansen's deliriously improvised roadside reel in the sunrise of the original movie.

"I loved the responsibility of playing a leading role for the first time," Caroline Williams later remarked. "And the athleticism of the role was wonderful! All action all the time. It was a Texas-style summer, we were dirty and sticky and bloody and smelly, and I loved every minute of it."

Williams said, "As for my favorite scene, I will always cherish the scene on the radio station stairs with Dennis. It's one of my better, and cleaner moments."

Leatherface and Stretch enjoy a tender moment off-camera.

She reprised her role as Stretch in a passing cameo in 1990's "Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III," which did not involve either Tobe Hooper or Kim Henkel. New Line Cinema, the production company behind the juggernaut of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" films, had acquired the rights to the "Chainsaw" franchise with the hope of marketing Leatherface as their new "Freddy Krueger" in a series of movies. The filmmakers wanted Gunnar Hansen to reprise his role as Leatherface but couldn't come to an agreement financially. Instead, the part went to a former professional wrestler named R.A. Mihailoff. The cast featured Ken Foree (best known for his role as SWAT officer Peter Washington in George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead") and a pre-"Lord of the Rings" Viggo Mortensen.

Tex (Viggo Mortensen) presents his brother, Junior (R.A. Mihailoff)
with a golden chainsaw in "Leatherface."

"Leatherface" was directed by Jeff Burr, a Hollywood ham-and-egger whose workmanlike output included the sequels "Stepfather II," "Pumpkinhead II," "Puppet Master 4," and "Puppet Master 5." The film received, by and large, negative reviews, with Time Out magazine calling it "a relentlessly sadistic and worryingly amusing movie, which will entertain and offend in equal measure," killing off any hopes New Line Cinema had of creating a new horror franchise.

In 1994, Kim Henkel, co-writer and co-producer of the original "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," wrote, produced, and directed what was originally titled "The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre." The Virginia-born Henkel, who grew up in small towns in Texas, was first introduced by a mutual friend to Tobe Hooper in the 1960s. Henkel acted in Hooper's first feature film, 1969's "Eggshells."

The picture was shelved by Columbia Pictures. Three years later, it was re-edited and released with the title "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation," capitalizing on the presence of cast members Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey, following their star-making performances in, respectively, "Jerry Maguire" and "A Time to Kill." Original "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" stars Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, and John Dugan (who played Grandfather) had cameo roles.

Matthew McConaughey terrorizes Renêe Zellweger in "The Next
Generation." And yes, McConaughey manages to squeeze in his
catchphrase: "All right, all right, all right!"

Renée Zellweger later recalled the production as "a little bit dangerous." She noted, "I don't know if any of it was legal - running from a guy with a live chainsaw is excellent motivation. It was a lot of fun. It was my first role, really. I couldn't believe that somebody was going to trust me with that...I was really grateful. I have no shame about that."

This was the only film directed by Kim Henkel, who joked, "You trot a bunch of these teenagers out, you get them isolated off somewhere, and then you knock them off one by one - it seems to be basically how all of them work." Henkel's Leatherface, portrayed by Robert Jacks, was depicted as being peculiarly in touch with his feminine side (pictured below). Jacks' brief acting career was cut short when he died from an abdominal aortic aneurism a day before his 42nd birthday.

Henkel and Tobe Hooper reunited as two of the several producers of the 2003 remake, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," as well as the remake's prequel, 2006's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning." The 2003 film was directed by Marcus Nispel, who made the reboots of "Friday the 13th" and "Conan the Barbarian," while the prequel was made by Jonathan Liebesman, best known for directing "Battle: Los Angeles" and the 2014 reboot of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

Leatherface was played in both pictures by former bodybuilder Andrew Bryniarski, who, at nearly six-and-a-half feet tall, put himself on a diet of beef brisket and white bread to reach a weight of 300 pounds, added to which was a "fat suit," which increased his weight to 420 pounds. Dolph Lundgren (of "The Expendables" movie series) was initially considered for the role, but backed out to spend time with his family.

Although not pictured here, Andrew Bryniarski's portrayal
offered the first glimpse of Leatherface without one of his masks.

Years before his motion picture appearances in "Stripes" and "Cat People" and his breakout TV role in the sitcom "Night Court," John Larroquette provided the documentary-like narration that introduced the original "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" in 1974, a job for which he recalled receiving the compensation of one marijuana joint. Three decades later, Larroquette obligingly reprised his function as the opening narrator of the 2003 remake and the 2006 prequel. Likewise, original photographer Daniel Pearl served as the remake's director of cinematography.

What every young lady should wear on her way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd
show before meeting an in-bred family of down-sized slaughterhouse
working stiffs: a cowboy hat, knotted tank top, hip-hugging boot-cut
jeans and boots...Jessica Biel in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

Ely, Minnesota native Jessica Biel served as the 2003 film's sole-surviving female. She also contributed to the 21st-century version of the obligatory "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" butt-shot. Tobe Hooper remarked about the remake, "Its effective in its own way, in particular the scene where the group of friends approach the house and all you see is Jessica Biel's ass. I loved that."

Jessica Biel walks the walk for the "butt shot," 2000s-style.

Spoiler Alert: Jordana Brewster (pictured below) is the sole-almost-surviving female character in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning."

Jordana Brewster is best known for her role as Mia Torreto
in the "Fast & Furious" films.

The most satisfying aspect of the reboots has to be the addition in both pictures of the character Sheriff Hoyt, or the man who murdered the real Sheriff Hoyt and assumed his identity and who turns out to be the foster brother of Leatherface, played with gristly gusto by a scenery-chewing R. Lee Ermey. Ermey, a former U.S. Marine Corps staff sergeant and drill instructor, found unexpected movie fame with a string of military roles, including "The Boys in Company C," "Apocalypse Now," and "Full Metal Jacket" (pictured below).

On a lighter note, R. Lee Ermey (pictured above as Sheriff Hoyt)
provided the voice of Sarge, the leader of the little green Army men
in the "Toy Story" movies, and played a gay high school football
coach in "Saving Silverman."

Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel were among the army of executive producers, regular producers, associate producers, and line producers of the 2013 film "Texas Chainsaw 3D," which set itself up as a direct sequel to the original 1974 production, ignoring the plots and characters of "Part 2," "Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III," and "The Next Generation."

Sole-surviving female Alexandra Daddario (who played Dwayne
Johnson's daughter in the disaster flick "San Andreas") has stipulated
that she would only do a nude scene if she was well-paid. Evidently,
filmmakers met her halfway for her role in "Texas Chainsaw 3D."

Director John Luessenhop ("Takers") chose 6' 6" Dan Yeager to portray Leatherface because he sensed a feeling of "menace" from the former cabinet maker's "brooding brow" and "farm boy arms." Gunnar Hansen finally returned to the "Chainsaw" franchise - enticed by a salary that finally met his demands - as a family relative. Another star from the first film, Marilyn Burns, had a small role in "Texas Chainsaw 3D," while John Dugan reprised his role as the decrepit Grandfather (Dugan was only 21 when he first appeared as the nearly mummified character).

Marilyn Burns and Gunnar Hansen share an off-camera reunion
on the set of "Texas Chainsaw 3D," which would sadly be the last
screen appearance by Hansen and one of Burns' final film roles.

Bill Moseley, Chop-Top in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2," was cast as the family patriarch originally played by Jim Siedow, who had passed away in 2003. The supporting cast included Clint Eastwood's lookalike son, Scott Eastwood, as a duplicitous sheriff's deputy.

Not to worry: Leatherface develops a soft spot in his leather-heart for
Alexandra's character when he discovers that she is really his cousin.

When "Texas Chainsaw 3D" turned out to be a box-office success for Lionsgate Films, the entertainment company green-lit what would be a prequel to the original "Chainsaw" picture, titled "Leatherface," depicting an origin story centered on how the titular character became a mentally challenged killer. The film, planned for an October 2017 release, will be the last screen credit for the late Tobe Hooper, listed as one of the film's executive producers.

Directed by French horror film pioneers Julian Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, who proclaim Dario Argento, Roman Polanski, Clive Barker, and John Carpenter as their major influences, "Leatherface" features Stephen Dorff as a deranged Texas Ranger and the wondrous, multi-Emmy Award-nominated Lili Taylor as family matriarch Verna (pictured below).

A tireless working actress since the mid-1980s, Lili Taylor has forged a chain of underrated, treasured performances, in such pictures as "Mystic Pizza" (opposite a young Vincent D'Onofrio), "Say Anything," "Dogfight," "Rudy," "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" (as author Edna Ferber), "I Shot Andy Warhol," and "The Notorious Bettie Page," as well as the TV series "Six Feet Under" and "American Crime."


Parting Glance...

In a cramped van belonging to sound recordist and future director of "Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys" (starring Corey Feldman) Ted Nicolau, with the mercury outside the vehicle surpassing 100 degrees, 31-year-old director Tobe Hooper, with a whole world of frenzied filmmaking ahead of him, focuses on the screen's original scream queen, Marilyn Burns, in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."