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When The Texas Chain Saw Massacre hit movie theaters in 1974, it quickly supplanted the previous year's top horror flick, The Exorcist, as the most terrifying movie ever made. Unlike The Exorcist, however, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre eschewed standard production values and modern special effects in favor of a grainy documentary-like approach with decidedly low-tech visual effects. The tale of five young students who unwittingly meet up with a sinister hitchhiker and the mask-wearing maniac Leatherface (whose mask is actually made from dried human skin, not leather), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre turned a lumberjack's tool into the stuff of nightmares and the blood-curdling scream into an art form, in the words of Toronto Star writer Melissa Aronzyk. The 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been touted with the tagline Inspired by a true story, leading many horror fans to wonder whether the grisly film was actually based on real events, or whether the claim is simply another bit of Hollywood promotion intended to attract filmgoers via the extra-chilling lure of a macabre tale not entirely the product of a screenwriter's imagination (a technique successfully used by the Coen brothers to entice viewers into suspending disbelief for 1996's Fargo, their gruesome cinematic depiction of a kidnapping-for-hire scheme gone awry). Actually, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been promoted as being based on a true incident for quite a few years now, as the original videocassette cover includes the following synopsis: So, true story or not? Certainly there was no real family of cannibalistic chainsaw murderers slaughtering people in Texas, nor any actual series of chainsaw-related killings. Writer/director Tobe Hooper said the inspiration for the film came from his spotting a display of chainsaws while standing in the hardware section of a crowded store: Hooper has also said that he based the character of Leatherface on Ed Gein, a Wisconsin farmer who robbed graves (his own mother's supposedly among them), allegedly engaged in necrophilia and cannibalism, and murdered at least two women in the 1950s (one of whose corpses was found hanging naked — decapitated and disembowelled — in Gein's residence). As Gunnar Hansen, the actor who portrayed Leatherface, notes in his Texas Chainsaw Massacre FAQ: Police eventually discovered the remains of 15 different mutilated female bodies in Gein's filthy farmhouse, parts of which (mostly skin and bones) had been fashioned into a variety of bizarre objects (including drums, bowls, masks, bracelets, purses, knife sheaths, leggings, chairs, lampshades, and shirts), as well as a refrigerator full of human organs. Gein later admitted to killing two women, one in 1954 and one in 1957. He was suspected of involvement in the disappearance of four other people in central Wisconsin (two men and two young girls) between 1947 and 1952, but the remains found in his farmhouse all came from adult females, and none of them matched up with any of the four missing persons. (Gein maintained that with the exception of the two women he had admitted killing, all of the body parts in his farmhouse had been taken from corpses he dug up in the local cemetery.) Gein's story inspired (at least in part) the Norman Bates character — a young man who murders women out of a twisted sense of loyalty to his dead mother — in the classic thriller Psycho, and the Buffalo Bill character — a transvestite serial killer who murders women to make use of their skin — in the horror novel Silence of the Lambs. Although the Leatherface character and the events depicted in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre differ in many substantial ways from what is known about the life and activities of Ed Gein (most notably in that Gein was apparently far more a grave robber than a murderer, and he didn't go around slicing up live victims with a chainsaw), there are definite similarities between the film and the Ed Gein story as well (e.g., hanging a murder victim's corpse in the house, making functional use of the skin from dead bodies, elements of cannibalism). Whether these similiarities are sufficiently close to justify the statement that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was based on a true story is up to filmgoers to decide for themselves.
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