The Science of Monsters

For the shaping of Psycho, Robert Bloch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Anthony Perkins worked to mold Norman Bates from the proverbial clump of Ed Gein clay. They focused on the duality of Gein’s life and his fixation on his dead mother. Psycho, while groundbreaking, was a film of its era. In the 1960s, Hitchcock and his film contemporaries simply could not delve any deeper into the truly horrific reality of Ed Gein’s crimes, but fourteen years after the iconic film’s release, American moviegoers were becoming more conditioned to watch and discuss violence due to the brutality of the Vietnam War being splashed across the nightly news. Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) premiered to the children of those who had watched Psycho in the theater, providing this next generation with a cinematic yet starkly authentic look at what had been discovered in that farmhouse in Wisconsin in 1957.

It was on the chilly November evening when Bernice Worden, proprietor of the local hardware store, went missing. Bernice’s son, Frank, discovered Worden’s Hardware store unattended. A telltale streak of blood on the linoleum spoke of a violent end. In mere hours an unlikely suspect formed in the minds of the Plainfield police. Witnesses had seen local bachelor, Ed Gein, nervously enter and reenter the hardware store more than once that day. Intrigued by this peculiar behavior, Frank, a deputy sheriff, had Gein rounded up by fellow police. Gein had been enjoying supper with another local family when the cops came calling.

What followed, the subsequent investigation of Gein’s house, lives on as one of America’s most macabre true legends. “Police found the headless, gutted body of [Bernice Worden] at Gein’s farmhouse.” The unfortunate woman had been treated like a deer. Gein had used his hunting expertise to “dress” her body. “Upon further investigation, authorities discovered a collection of human skulls along with furniture and clothing, including a suit, made from human body parts and skin. Gein told police he had dug up the graves of recently buried women who reminded him of his mother.”¹ The search of the house of horrors continued to unnerve the seasoned investigators “yield[ing] more shocking discoveries, including organs in jars and skulls used as soup bowls.”² While several of these body parts were found to be that of another missing local, Mary Hogan, most had been stolen from the nearby Plainfield Cemetery.

While we watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the full knowledge of Ed Gein’s influence on the birth of Leatherface, it was easy to see the comparison of that house in Wisconsin with the film’s fictional lair. When Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) bears witness to the haunting rooms full of both human and animal parts, it harkens back to how Gein’s house must have appeared to those sifting through the horrific finds.

“[Hooper] had heard of Ed Gein, the man in Plainfield, Wisconsin, who was arrested in the late 1950s for killing his neighbor and on whom the movie Psycho was based. So when they set out to write this movie, they decided to have a family of killers who had some of the characteristics of Gein: the skin masks, the furniture made from bones, the possibility of cannibalism.”³ Gunnar Hansen, the actor who donned the mask of Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, explained that the late Hooper had indeed taken facts from the Gein case to develop the frightening family who kills and tortures the innocent teens.

Despite the fact that several countries banned the movie because of its overt violence, and some American theaters quit showings after complaints, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre generated over $30 million domestically. This success led to Tobe Hooper’s rise as one of the film industry’s most well-known horror directors. He went on to direct hits like Salem’s Lot (1979) and Poltergeist (1982).

Over the decades, the film has been regularly recognized as a bastion in the horror movie canon. Like many horror franchises that came later, (think Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is less about the screaming teens and more about the monster. “Leatherface seems to be a palpable somebody, a poignantly confused and overwrought monster who can express himself only in a squealing caterwaul.”⁴ And much like Freddy and his counterparts, Leatherface and his ragtag group of horrifyingly hickish family members have continued to terrorize.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a busy and profitable franchise. There were three sequels from 1986 to 1994, as well as a 2003 remake starring Jessica Biel, another reboot in 2013, as well as two prequels (2006 and 2017). The allure of Leatherface lives on, confronting new generations with the brutal reality of true monsters.