How the Actor Behind Leatherface Almost Killed Himself on Set

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Tobe Hooper - 1974

(Credits: Far Out / Miramax)

Saturday 19 October 2024, 11am, UK

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre shocked the world when it was released in 1974 with its horrific depiction of a monstrous family and relentless violence. To this day, the most memorable character is Leatherface, the chainsaw-wielding main monster with a face seemingly covered in leather, and the on-screen horrors weren’t the only ones to plague the production.

Like many horror movie sets, the set was filled with hard-to-see props and unwanted reminders of brutal mortality. Such places are often considered cursed, and there are some cases that would lead you to believe that the only logical reason for all the happenings is some kind of occult occurrence. However, for the cast and crew of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, most of the questions were explained, even if they were a little scary.

This 1970s movie set was definitely a product of the time. Health and safety precautions weren’t what they are now, and many of the methods used by the cast and crew wouldn’t work now, hopefully. One example is 26’s film director Tobe Hooper, who insisted on getting the scary ‘dinner’ scene perfect.

The scene where Sally (Mallyn Burns) is forced to sit at the dinner table with the cannibal family, tied to a corpse while being tortured. Of course, this would be horrible under any circumstances, but it turns out that during this marathon shoot, the temperature rose to over 45 degrees Celsius, and some of the actors hadn’t washed or changed their clothes in five weeks to keep things going.

If that wasn’t enough, Hooper wanted to make the environment as realistic as possible, so they insisted on scattering pieces of dead dogs and cattle along with rotten cheese around the Round Rock set, making the air completely putrid – unsurprisingly, the actors had take regular breaks to vomit and get oxygen outside the barn.

The stories go on forever, reciting true violence in favor of realism, the director fantasizing about chainsaw murder in a shopping mall after witnessing a mass shooting, and even Leatherface’s original choice to lock himself in a hotel room , drunk out of his mind, refusing to play the character.

Things almost ended in bloodshed in real life when the actor playing Leatherface almost met his untimely end. The villain was played by Icelandic-born American actor Gunnar Hansen, whose gigantic appearance made him perfect for this terrifying role. The story goes that Hansen was chasing his co-stars with a real chainsaw during filming. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when he almost died.

One day, he slipped in the mud and sent the chainsaw flying – when he landed, the deadly machine was mere inches from his head, narrowly avoiding leaving the actor with an offensively large hole in his skull. There was clearly a lot going on on the set of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre That wouldn’t happen now, but it all seemed to combine to create the landmark film it was intended to be.