It was Inspired by a Christmas Shopping Crowd

The inspirations for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are surprisingly diverse, ranging from director and co-writer Tobe Hooper’s attempt to make a modern retelling of Hansel and Gretel to real-life Wisconsin murderer and corpse defiler Ed Gein. According to Hooper, though, the light bulb moment that really ignited the film came at a department store during the Christmas 1972 shopping rush.

"There were these big Christmas crowds, I was frustrated, and I found myself near a display rack of chainsaws. I just kind of zoned in on it,” Hooper told Texas Monthly. “I did a rack focus to the saws, and I thought, ‘I know a way I could get through this crowd really quickly.’ 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. The hitchhiker, the older brother at the gas station, the girl escaping twice, the dinner sequence, people out in the country out of gas.”

“I got this call from Tobe,” says Chainsaw’s co-writer Kim Henkel, “and he said he wanted to get together. I started going over to his house every evening and figuring out the story structure. Mainly we were working out a feel.” They kept the original idea of an updated Hansel and Gretel story, “only instead of being lured to a gingerbread cottage with gumdrops, it was a little more sinister.” To create the modern version of a witch who likes to cook and eat children, they studied the then-scant literature on real-life cannibals and serial killers.

‍The Terrifying Truth Behind a Horror Legend

Leatherface, the chainsaw-wielding maniac who would go down in history as one of horror cinema’s greatest villains, shows obvious Ed Gein influence thanks to his mask crafted from human skin, but Gein was not the character’s only precursor. The idea of a mask made of human skin actually came to Hooper far more directly, and creepily.

“Before I came up with the chainsaw,” Hooper said, “the story had trolls under a bridge. We changed that to the character who eventually became Leatherface. The idea actually came from a doctor I knew. I remembered that he’d once told me this story about how, when he was a pre-med student, the class was studying cadavers. And he went into the morgue and skinned a cadaver and made a mask for Halloween. We decided Leatherface would have a different human-skin mask to fit each of his moods.”

‍From 'Head Cheese' to 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre”

After inspiration struck, Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel hammered out a script over several weeks and gave it the eerie title Head Cheese (named for the scene in which the hitchhiker details the process of how that particular pork product is made). Then it was changed to the menacing working title of Leatherface. It wasn’t until a week before shooting was set to begin that the eventual title arrived, suggested to Hooper and Henkel by Warren Skaaren, then head of the Texas Film Commission, who’d helped the project get financing.

Myth vs. Reality: The True Story

Though the real crimes of Ed Gein did influence Hooper and Henkel in their writing, the idea that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is itself based on a true story is something that grew out of the marketing of the film. The opening narration, which promised that “The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths,” certainly helped that along, as did the original poster and its promise that “what happened is true!” Despite this clever aura, the tale of Leatherface and his deranged family is still a work of fiction, despite continued protestations from fans even decades later.

“I’ve had people say, ‘I knew the original Leatherface,’” Gunnar Hansen, who played the killer character, recalled.

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To read more about Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,

https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/they-came-they-sawed/

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/501843/20-terrifying-facts-about-texas-chainsaw-massacre

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