(Welcome to Tales from the Box Office, our column that examines box office miracles, disasters, and everything in between, as well as what we can learn from them.)
“I remember the screams in the theater. People walked out. But the audience that stayed was hooked.” Those are the words of Gunnar Hansen, the man behind Leatherface, writing in his book “Chain Saw Confidential” about how audiences reacted to director Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” in 1974. Hooper, for his part, had become bored with the horror genre and ” set out as a fan of the genre to do something that gave you […] your money’s worth,” as he put it in an interview with NPR in 2017. Safe to say, mission accomplished.
50 years later, Hooper’s feature directorial debut is one of the most celebrated horror films in cinema history. It’s also one of the movies that indie filmmakers look to as a guiding light when they tell themselves “it can be done.” Hooper made his all-time slasher classic with minimal resources in punishing conditions. Maybe the cast and crew hated him by the end of it. Maybe they all left with injuries. But they left greatness in their wake, and that means something.
In this week’s Tales from the Box Office, we’re looking back at “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” in honor of its 50th anniversary. We’ll go over how it came to be, the unforgivably harsh conditions the film was made under, what happened when it hit theaters, what happened in the years that followed, and what lessons we can learn from it five decades later. Let’s dig in, shall we?