On October 11, 1974, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released. In the five decades since, it has been treated as both violent trash and a grind-house masterpiece, a slasher staple and an important piece of American cinema. The story of Leatherface and his macabre home and family has been cemented into our imaginations. And like most effective horror films, it’s been retold, remade, and revamped over and over again, a successful cult film becoming a mainstay horror franchise.
Of course, not all tales of pop culture’s most enduring cannibal have been made equal. Some opt to play it safe with a (frequently confused) sense of nostalgia, while others make wild swings that can be both thrilling and cause us to wonder what is going on (and why). Leatherface has been turned into a weird anti-hero, a satirical figure, a hulking man-beast, and a browbeaten redneck. And it has all amounted to one of the most unstable long-running series in horror. But that instability has made it fascinating, even when it comes to the worst films in the series …
9.
Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013)
Although it serves as a direct sequel to the original, Texas Chainsaw 3D’s only attempt at feeling like a true successor is shallow fan service. Marilyn Burns, the final girl Sally from the original film, is cast as Verna, an elderly woman who apparently keeps Leatherface in her basement. Bill Moseley, the horror staple who starred as Chop-Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, replaces the late Jim Siedow as the original’s Cook. Even Gunnar Hansen, the original’s Leatherface, gets a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo as Boss Sawyer. But these never amount to more than passing references in a film that might be the most misguided take on Leatherface in the series.
Alexandra Daddario’s Heather starts the film as the survivor in a cast of forgettable victims and ends up learning that she is indeed the cousin of Leatherface (“Do your thing, cuz,†she says in an actual piece of dialogue from the film while tossing Leatherface his chain saw). This odd twist turns Leatherface into a kind of anti-hero, slaying the awful people who have a problem with his family … cannibalizing people? Texas Chainsaw 3D is by no means equipped to handle the thematic heavy lifting that it would take to turn the Sawyer clan into simply misunderstood mass killers, and so the end, in which Heather treats Leatherface like a sort of murder pet, inspires little more than a Huh?
8.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)
Although it doesn’t go so far as to turn him into the heroine’s human-skin mask-wearing sidekick, the latest film in the series does toy with the idea of Leatherface as a kind of tragic, geriatric monster. Here, the octogenarian killer is the last resident of an orphanage in a ghost town; when a group of millennials sets upon it to turn it into a trendy hot spot, the orphanage’s owner dies and Leatherface goes bananas. Luckily, this is as cuddly as it gets, and as soon as Leatherface snips his old friend’s face off and begins wearing it, we return to the hulking brute we know and love.
Well, sometimes. Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn’t skimp on the gore and applies it even when it feels unnecessary. Leatherface cutting his way through a bus of “Try anything and you’re canceled, bro!†influencers is neat in its buckets-of-blood excess, but it feels about as far away from the singular madness of the original as possible. Doubly so when it tries to ape the recent success of the new Halloween trilogy and bring back Sally (Irish actress Olwen Fouéré replaces Burns, who died in 2014) to take on Leatherface one last time, Jamie Lee Curtis style. Leatherface might get to trudge home at the end of the film, but the franchise certainly doesn’t.
7.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)
Considering that Leatherface was left with only one arm at the end of the 2003 remake, it makes sense that the 2006 follow-up would be a prequel. It wasn’t an outlier in devising a “why†for a classic horror icon, no matter how unnecessary; the next year, Rob Zombie would install a controversial backstory to his adaptation of Halloween. But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning mostly just uses its answering of any lingering questions (how did the grumpy old guy lose his legs? How did Leatherface get his first skin mask? Where did he get his chain saw?) as an excuse for more brutal mayhem.
If anything, The Beginning was an attempt to lead a bloodletting arms race. Since the 2003 film, exercises in the freshly named “torture porn†subgenre, like Saw, Hostel, and remakes of House of Wax and The Hills Have Eyes, have come out. Darkness Falls director Jonathan Liebesman was an apt choice for these sequences, infusing Chainsaw with some of the heat and disorienting intensity that made the original so revolutionary. That said, The Beginning never really gives you a reason as to why you’d be particularly interested in Leatherface’s origins (the poster says “Witness the birth of fear,†which is, historically, very debatable), but it manages to match the onscreen relentlessness of its peers.
6.
The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1995)
Oft-maligned for its plot twists that involve turning Leatherface’s family into the henchmen of an Illuminati-esque secret society, and for depicting Leatherface as a screeching cross-dresser, The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre has yet to see a mass critical reappraisal. But as written and directed by Kim Henkel, the co-writer of the original, it’s the last film in the series to get close to matching the deranged energy of the first film. And the way it bounces between cacophonic lunacy and self-parody makes it a bit more refreshing than the later installments’ dedication to questionable nostalgia.
On the way to its eventual release, Return (later Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation) was met with a laundry list of legal issues, many of which involving the film’s narrow release and how it may or may not affect the careers of its young stars Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger. But The Return of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is both a filmmaking time capsule and the kind of franchise sequel that we’re likely to never see again. Amid all the hooting and hollering, it has obviously got a few things to say about Chainsaw, Leatherface, and the genre they helped usher in to Hollywood prominence. Sadly, most of us still haven’t listened.
5.
Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)
Serving as both an unspoken total reboot of the franchise and the second sequel in the series (unless it’s stated to be a direct sequel, the Chainsaw franchise’s approach to continuity is a shrug), Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III is a step down from the first two entries but better than it likely should be. Directed by underrated sequel king Jeff Burr, a man who also made Stepfather II and Pumpkinhead II better than they should’ve been, it was the first (and only) Chainsaw to be solely produced by New Line Cinema. New Line, riding high off its profitable Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, offered the Chainsaw series its first taste of gloss.
Plagued with production issues and subjected to a sweeping round of edits to tame the more graphic elements before its release, the theatrical cut of Leatherface is an oddly defanged experience. However, even in its neutered form (an unrated cut has since been released), it’s kept afloat by an array of fun performances, including a ghoulish Viggo Mortensen and Dawn of the Dead favorite Ken Foree. Combine that with one of the best movie teasers in history and you have a California film doing its best impression of Texas chaos. Standout moment? Leatherface tries in vain to use a Speak & Spell, but when presented with an image of a human, all he can think to type is FOOD.
4.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
When Michael Bay first co-founded Platinum Dunes in the early aughts, its mission was clear: remake familiar horror IP with a blockbuster-friendly sheen. The first effort, a Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot, was a gargantuan success and led to things like an actually pretty solid Friday the 13th and a tremendously terrible Nightmare on Elm Street. From the outset, it’s easy to see why audiences latched on to it: The opening, by far the most effective part of the film, presents Leatherface’s crimes in faux-documentary fashion, stretching the “What happened is true†promise from the original’s poster as far as it can.
Much of it can’t hold up to the original, though it did bring the original’s cinematographer, Daniel Pearl, back to provide some frenzied framing. This includes Leatherface’s deranged kin, which, aside from a standout performance by Full Metal Jacket’s R. Lee Ermey (few actors were better at being loud and despicable, and he’s in rare form here), is mostly just a parade of creeps. But for newcomers to the series, those raised on more reserved slasher efforts like I Know What You Did Last Summer, the 2003 remake is an appropriately ferocious experience.
3.
Leatherface (2017)
Although the past 20 years of Chainsaw films have been dedicated to either re-creating the original film or providing some kind of nostalgic coda to it, one film has stood out as an attempt to if not completely break away from tradition, then provide another branch to it. Leatherface adapts the titular killer’s origin story as a bit of a mystery, focusing on a handful of escapees from a mental hospital. Is the man-who-would-be-Leatherface the hulking Bud, the manic Ike, or the frantic and traumatized Jackson? About halfway through, it becomes pretty clear, but just having an alternative to the typical answer of “I don’t know — he was big and sad and hungry†makes for a neat experiment.
Directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, the pair behind the wonderfully nasty French slasher Inside, Leatherface hits some of the familiar notes. We get to see, in bloody detail, how Leatherface got his name, and the film is full of his cackling family members. But the structure of the movie is mostly an extended chase between the escapees and a vengeful Texas Ranger, which helps keep things flowing even when the film has to stop and remember that it is, in fact, a Chainsaw prequel. Overall, though, it’s the only Chainsaw film of the new millennium that feels as risky in its conception as what came before.
2.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)
If the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre exemplified the economic and social paranoia of the final years of the Nixon administration, then its sequel is all Reagan-era excess. So fixated on consumption that we end up literally consuming each other, Part 2 takes the moments of dark comedy from the first film and twists them into broad, gory satire. It’s an intermittently scary film, but much of director Tobe Hooper’s focus is on turning Leatherface’s clan (now named the Sawyers — get it?) into a lunatic symbol of capitalistic hunger.
The weirdness is shared throughout. Dennis Hopper, beamed in from another planet, plays a police lieutenant with an ax (well, a chain saw) to grind. Meanwhile, Bill Moseley enters the franchise as Chop-Top, a new family member who was apparently in Vietnam during the events of the first film and has returned with a metal plate in his head and a penchant for grating sadism. A couple of murdered yuppies, a chili cook-off, a radio DJ forced to wear her boss’s face, a birds-and-the-bees talk with Leatherface, and a chain-saw duel later, you have a film that doesn’t try to emulate the original but rather uses it as a launchpad for blast-off.
1.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre wasn’t so much released as it was unleashed into theaters, and for the past 50 years, no film has ever really come close to matching it. It turned America’s heartland into a potential rabbit hole so deep, evil, and unknowable that it’s downright cosmic. Far away from the suburban arenas of its slasher brethren, Chainsaw’s sun-blistered lands, raving inhabitants, and corpse-filled house are a Wonderland, and each of the five unfortunate youths plays Alice.
Directed and co-written by Hooper, at that point still a rising talent in Texas filmmaking, Chainsaw sticks with you. Many of the moments have been turned into American horror iconography: Leatherface in the sliding metal door with the hammer, Pam shrieking on the meat hook, the gaggle of brothers at the dinner table leering at their “armâ€-chair bound victim and then, almost mercifully, trying to cajole their borderline comatose grandfather into slaughtering her. But it’s in the way they’re all put together, and in how the film refuses to answer any pressing questions that the audience might have, that leaves you breathless.
It’s the not knowing that might be Chainsaw’s greatest asset — there is no “Norman Bates is his mother,†no “Michael Myers in my brother,†no “Fred Krueger was killed by the parents of Elm Street.†Whatever clues you can garner are scattered among the bones and meat, and by the end you’re left like Sally Hardesty, hysterically laughing in the back of a fleeing truck. Meanwhile, Leatherface swings his chain saw in a mad ballet, bidding you adieu not as you escape but rather as you’re spit up from hell.