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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.
And this is our episode right before our Halloween episode.
You're on Stuff You Should Know.
Yeah, big COA here, obviously.
Yeah.
I mean, hopefully parents aren't going to click on this if their young children are in the car, because it'll probably be Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something or other in the title.
Yeah, it's not going to be like how ponies work.
Right.
I don't want to trick anybody.
Yeah.
So see a way about that.
Obviously, it's going to have some pretty gruesome material in it.
But also because we're going to be talking a lot about this movie and we're going to go over the plot and everything.
So if it's kind of a spoiler situation where you don't want to hear about it, you haven't seen it somehow.
Then tune out.
Some people like to know what happens before they go into a horror movie, you know.
Yes.
But that's a great spoiler alert.
If you haven't seen it, go watch it.
People use the word masterpiece about this movie a lot.
And not just fans of the film, like sickos.
Like critics, like academics who teach film appreciation, like it is a really, really good movie, whether you like horror movies or not, because the key to this is if you, if you get scared at horror movies.
Mm hmm. approach it like it's a dark comedy.
And it will make sense to use a dark comedy and you will probably laugh out loud in a couple of parts.
So it can be taken both ways, and sometimes in some parts both ways at the same time.
Yeah, see that I've never understood that take because I don't see any dark comedy, that notions about it whatsoever.
I think it's.
I think it's one of the most terrifying movies I've ever seen, if not the most terrifying.
Well, you and Rex Reed feel the same way.
Yeah, every time I see it.
And I just saw it for the first time a few years ago, finally.
And it's just, it's so disturbing and unsettling every single time, even though I know it's coming.
I watched it again last night.
And yeah.
So when it finished, when it cuts at the end and goes to the credits, I literally said out loud that is a great movie.
And Yumi wasn't, I was sitting there by myself watching it.
And I said it out loud.
It just took it out of me.
And I had never watched it as a comedy before either.
I'd never even turned up that anybody considered it a comedy or dark comedy.
But going into it, knowing that I definitely found some spots here or there.
Yeah, I didn't.
Do you know what I said at the end last night out loud by myself?
What?
Jerry's going to have to beep it, but it has that famous, just abrupt ending and cut to black.
Yeah.
And I was curled up on my couch and I just said, this movie.
Like every time it gets me in a place where I'm just like like if there was a camera on my face while I'm watching it.
It's just, my face is just gnarled up the whole time.
Like, oh my God, it's just so disturbing.
I think me and a lot of people would love to watch a reaction video of you watching.
Just that.
Yeah, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
A camera trained in my face for 83 minutes.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It is just 83 minutes.
It's not even an hour and a half of your time.
You just watch it, breeze through it, and say, that was a great movie, or what you said at the end.
And let me ask you this.
Can you think of another horror movie that makes you feel like that whenever you watch it?
Yeah, I mean...
There's quite a few movies that are still disturbing to me, but this one takes the cake for sure.
Wow.
So yeah, if you haven't seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre and you have any kind of curiosity, I strongly urge you to pause this and go watch it and come back.
Whatever.
It doesn't matter.
I think you can still appreciate this episode, don't you?
Because it's not just about the movie itself.
It's about how it was made because it was an independent picture.
It's one of the most successful independent films of all time.
And it was made by students of film, literal students of film, who loved making movies, and they made again.
A masterpiece is what a lot of people call it.
Yeah.
And we're going to get to the plot and go through that, as we said.
But even I just want to say, even the beginning, that first 30 minutes before they even set foot inside the bad house.
That's all just the way it's shot and laid out in the sound.
It's just all disturbs.
It disturbs me to no end.
I know.
And to think like it was shot by a 23-year-old.
I know.
So let's talk about this.
Let's get into the nuts and bolts of how the whole thing came about.
How about that?
Yeah.
And we can only start with director Toby Hooper, who apparently was inspired by a few different things to come up with this movie.
One, pretty obviously, is Ed Gein, who's a serial killer who we have not covered yet.
At some point, we'll probably get into the skin suit making crimes of Ed Gein, right?
We did.
We did an episode on him.
I think it's Gein, isn't it?
We did a whole episode?
We did a whole episode on Mr. Gein, the sicko.
I didn't think we did.
We did.
It wasn't the best, so I can see how you wouldn't remember it.
Oh, I thought we just put him in something else.
Okay, we'll scratch that then.
Yeah, he appeared in some episode, but we ended up making a whole episode about him.
I see it now.
Ed Gein, the serial killer.
Serial killer.
Yes.
That had to be your title.
That's good.
Yeah, I think it was.
But Ed Gein, he wasn't just the inspiration for Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
And the reason why is If you're not familiar with Ed Gein, he wore skin suits.
He was also the influence for the character Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs.
And he inspired the movie Psycho.
Not like Norman Bates bears any resemblance to him whatsoever, aside from the whole...
Cross-dressing thing, I guess, is what inspired it, but more the fact that there was someone out there who was capable of doing these things inspired a movie about Norman Bates, who's capable of doing horrible things too.
Yeah, so that was the first thing.
The second thing was he had a friend, Toby Hooper, did the director, who was a doctor or, I guess, a med student at the time, who said that he had removed the face of a cadaver and wore it as a Halloween mask.
So there's one for your nightmares.
Yeah, even if he hadn't done that, to be telling people that you had done that and be serious about it, that's pretty nuts.
Yeah.
And then the last thing was Toby Hooper was apparently Christmas shopping at a Montgomery Ward store store one time and it was just really, really crowded and he was I get the sense that he was having a bit of a panicky moment trying to get out of there and saw some chainsaws on display and was like that'd be great if I could grab one of those and just cut my way out of here.
Yeah, exactly.
So he put all those things together.
They came together end of 1972, beginning of 1973, into this story.
That just kind of clicked in his head.
I also saw that Hansel and Gretel formed some like loose influence on the whole thing too.
Sure.
But he got together with a friend of his named Kim Henkel.
And he and Henkel wrote the script together.
They met at Toby Hooper's house.
They would map out the story arc on the floor.
And then Kim Henkel would go in and type some pages and come back after a few and read it all to Toby Hooper.
And get a thumbs up or down, and then they'd continue on.
And they wrote the script fairly quickly, from what I understand.
They had some working titles for it that fortunately they did not go with.
Yeah, and you know, one of the reasons it went quickly is because after that first half hour there's not a lot of dialogue aside from, like you know Pam, Pam and then Sally, Sally.
And then the dinner scene.
You're going to get some more, but there's there are long stretches where it's just, you know, a lot of action.
But yeah, you mentioned the alternate titles.
Head cheese was one. which does make an appearance in the movie and the dinner scene, I believe.
And then Leatherface was one of the titles that would go on to be the title of the 2017 prequel.
Yeah.
I think it was just called Leatherface, which I haven't seen any of those, by the way.
Neither have I. I've only seen the first one, and I saw the second one.
I don't think I care to see any of the rest of them.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're into the first one, it might not make sense to see the second one because it's such a departure.
But yeah, it's still.
If you take that as an actual comedy, which it is it's, it's kind of fun on its own.
I might see that one, but I definitely am not interested in the prequels and the reboots and the remakes and stuff like that.
Well, so A24 just announced last month that they're rebooting Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Would you see those?
Well, they're almost across the finish line.
Apparently, they're in the pole position to win the bid as of like a couple of weeks ago.
Oh, okay.
You'd be interested to know that one of the other bidders was Oz Perkins and some other people.
Oh, yeah.
Your guy.
And then Taylor Sheridan, oddly.
Put in a bit on the film and TV rights, but it looks like a 24 is in the pole position and they're talking about a TV series.
So I would I would watch that.
I OK, I would, too, for sure.
Yeah.
So they came up with the script and it was they never actually came up with the title themselves.
There was a guy named Warren Scarron who came up with the title Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
One of the great titles of all time.
Oh, yeah.
And it's four words if you want to be pedantic about it.
Chainsaw, they have it as two words for some reason.
And Warren Skern would play a bunch of really important roles over the course of getting this movie made.
And he was in a position to because he was Texas's first film commissioner.
He also apparently, was an investor in the film too, and he was a mutual friend between him and Kim Henkel, who would go on to become the production manager for the movie, Ron Bozeman.
And Skarin also scared up the first investor, who was a former Texas legislator, state legislator named Bill Parsley, who also apparently fancied himself a movie producer.
Yeah.
And technically it's five words if you count the word the, because the first one was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
So you out-pedanticed my own pedanticness.
Well, because I knew we'd hear from somebody.
Okay.
So who was the last person you named?
Ron Bozeman?
Bill Parsley.
Or Bill Parsley, yeah.
So he, you know, they came up with a few different names. budgets.
The first one, you know, it was like, Hey, what can we get?
What can we make it for?
And what could we really make it for if we just, you know, kind of didn't have much and still had to do it?
And that was 60 grand was like, Hey, that'd be awesome.
It's about 388 grand today.
Uh, 40 grand was the mid level uh, And 20 grand was the small budget that they still thought they could make it with, even though it would have to be black and white.
I could see this in black and white like A Night of the Living Dead, but there are so many great color shots.
In this movie, like those green eyes of Sally that are so key in the third act and the sunrise shot.
At the end you know you'd lose all that.
Oh, speaking of third acts, I watched 30 Days of Night again, that vampire movie.
Have you ever seen it?
Josh Hartnett?
I don't think I saw that one.
It's not bad, but I thought of you because they show like this metal crushing like trash compactor.
In the first like 10 minutes.
And I thought, show a metal crushing trash compactor in act one.
You're going to use it in act three.
And sure enough, they did.
Yeah, that's classic.
Classic move.
So, they actually got their pie in the sky high-end budget of $60,000.
Most of it came from Bill Parsley, but there were a couple of other investors that got cobbled together.
And ultimately, by the time the thing had its final cut, it was up to $300,000.
But even that was a paltry amount of money, even in the mid-70s.
Like this is peanuts as far as making a movie is concerned.
Yeah.
I mean, not too bad.
I'll take issue with Peanuts.
I mean, Rocky was made for 1.1 million and the average was 4 million even back then.
But I guess I've known friends who have made movies these days for a lot less than that.
So it's I know people that would be very happy with 300 grand.
Yeah, but they're not using film stock, and I'll bet that eats up a ton of budget.
Yeah.
Well, how about this?
Can we agree on Brazil nuts?
Yeah.
Brazil nut sounds good.
Okay.
So one of the ways that they cut costs Chuck, was to hire no-name actors like inexperienced actors, and ultimately, the way it would wash out, that would make the whole thing that much more realistic, which is great.
These were people who might have been drama students taking film classes at UT Austin.
Some of them were just Austin locals.
And the other way that they cut costs was to get these casts, or this cast of no-name actors who were already being paid Brazil nuts at best.
Peanuts probably, maybe even just the pea part of peanuts.
Yeah.
To defer even that amount, most of it, until after the film got made.
And they agreed to it and they put together a cast of 10 plus a few extras.
And the only one who had any experience whatsoever was a guy named Jim Siedow.
Siedow or Siedow?
Yeah, he played the cook and one of the three brothers in the Sawyer family.
Marilyn Byrne to Sally, she had also been in a couple of things.
She was in Robert Altman's Brewster's McCloud.
She was actually cast as a lead in a movie called Love and Molly.
That would have been before this, but she was replaced by Susan Sarandon.
Yeah.
And she ended up being the body double for Sarandon in that one, I think.
Yeah.
It was a bitter pill, I'm sure.
For sure.
So Jim Seidel, his experience was radio soap opera actor.
So that was the experience he had.
And from what I could tell, he was the only SAG member there.
And then there's a non-on-screen.
I guess off-screen is how you put it if you have brains.
Appearance by a guy named John Larroquette.
Yeah.
If you're a Night Court fan, and even if you're not, you're probably still familiar with John Larroquette.
Yeah, I didn't know this was John Larroquette.
My first two viewings of this, I had no idea until you've sent this along.
So I don't know.
I guess I didn't stay through the credits because I was always, you know, cowering in a corner or something.
Turn it off, turn it off.
Yeah, did not know that was John Larroquette.
That was the first thing he ever did in the film business.
Yeah, I didn't know that either.
I ran across it.
I also ran across that he was friends with Tobey Hooper and he did it as a favor.
Apparently, it took an hour of his time to record it.
And Tobey Hooper paid him in pot.
And John Larroquette apparently confirmed that to none other than Parade Magazine years later.
I love it.
So you want to talk about the plot and then get into how they made this thing after that?
Yeah.
Should we take a break first or should we do the plot first?
No, that's a good idea.
Let's do a break.
All right, well, everyone brace yourselves.
Go, you know, chill out, do some yoga meditate, and then we'll tell you the plot of Texas Chainsaw Massacre right after this.
Chuck and Josh.
Stop.
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White, victim, female, pretty. wealthy, black defendant.
Chicago, a white woman's murder, a black man behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.
I got 90 years for killing somebody I have never seen.
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And if you're with me, you're golden.
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You stuck with me for life.
Listen to The Crying Wolf Podcast starting on October 22nd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Here we go.
Hey, I'm Cal Penn.
And on my new podcast, Here We Go Again.
We'll take today's trends and headlines and ask why does history keep repeating itself?
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When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially go really wrong.
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Satisfaction.
Okay, so we're back and we're talking about the plot.
And again, you already gave a spoiler alert, but it's worth saying again.
If you haven't seen the movie and you want to go in fresh, don't listen to this part, okay?
Yeah.
And maybe we'll shout we're done with the plot after we're done with it, so that everybody can put their headphones back on.
Yeah, I think maybe we should read that narration since it's so short.
Okay, go ahead.
Yeah, because it gets the point across.
So it's sort of framed as a docudrama shot in a lot of moments, very documentary style.
And they set it up as if it's a real thing.
So here's John Larroquette.
Well, me as John Larroquette.
The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother Franklin.
It is all the more tragic in that they were young, but had they lived very, very long lives.
They could not have expected, nor would they have wished to see as much mad and macabre as they were to see.
That day, For them, an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare.
The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Pretty great.
That was a good John Larroquette, too, by the way.
Thanks.
And it indicates that they all die too, which was a nice little sleight of hand, because it makes the ending a little more surprising and suspenseful, I think.
Exactly.
And so you said it like this is presented as a docudrama.
So people are going into it not thinking it's a documentary, that they're actually seeing real things, but that it's depicting an actual event that happened.
Specifically on October 18th, 1973, it says that's the date that this all happens.
It just happens over a one-day period.
So that in and of itself kind of was totally new, as we'll see as far as horror movies went.
It was almost prefiguring the found footage genre like Blair Witch and stuff like that.
And then the whole action starts.
Everything's prompted by news that a cemetery in the middle of rural Texas, central Texas, there have been grave robbings going on.
And not only grave robbings, where they're just removing specific parts of bodies.
They're also taking some of the bodies and basically making them into these really gruesome statues.
Yeah, and it's a great way to open the movie.
The opening shot and everything is just very disturbing to kind of get that ball rolling.
And they are in a van traveling.
They have space cleared out for the wheelchair for Franklin.
And, you know, it's like it sort of set the standard.
But we've seen this so many times since then, like teenagers off you know, having a good time going on a trip, maybe going camping or something like that.
But they were sort of the first movie to do that kind of thing.
It set that standard.
Yeah.
And they were the reason they were.
There was their Franklin and Sally's grandfather was buried at the cemetery.
So they're going to check to see if his grave had been dug up and they find that it's not.
But while they're there, they say, hey, why don't we go check out grandfather's old homestead?
We used to spend summers there once in a while.
So the whole gang agrees to do that.
But first they need gas.
And they go to a gas station, a rundown gas station slash barbecue pit.
That's owned by a man known as The Cook, who also would turn out to be Drayton Sawyer, like who you mentioned before, one of the three brothers of this scary family.
And it turns out they don't have any gas, which I've read was a big commentary on the gas shortages going on at the time.
But the kids decide to head on to the what it turns out to be the abandoned Hardesty homestead.
Anyway, just look around.
Yeah.
Did you catch the name of the gas station?
Yeah.
W.E.
Slaughter Barbecue.
Well, that was the restaurant.
It was the last last chance gas station.
I did see that, yes.
I totally forgot.
So I immediately thought of my Last Chance Garage hat that I wore for many, many years.
Do you still have that thing?
I have like four or five of them because I lost the original one in Austin, Texas.
Oh, wow.
And at South by one year and then I got a patch maker here in Atlanta to make me patches.
And so I made like three or four of them, but I just haven't worn those in a long time.
I remember that very kind patchmaker replacing it.
And since you lost it in Austin, I'm now convinced that there is no way it wasn't a Texas Chainsaw Massacre fan who stole that.
Yeah, I mean there's Last Chance Garage, which was his own brand, but I thought Last Chance Gas was kind of fun.
Now that I think about it, I've seen on Etsy vials of skin scrapings that say that they're your skin scraping.
So I wonder if it came from that hat.
Probably so.
It does ship out of Texas, it says.
All right.
There you have it.
So anyway, this gas station's out of gas and they head on to the abandoned house and just start exploring it.
But before they get there they pick up a hitchhiker, and he turns out to be one of the Sawyers too, but he plays this character, so nuts.
Yeah.
He dances right along the edge of this is ridiculous.
He's being ridiculous.
It's totally over the top, but it still manages to be more disturbing than like, come on, you know?
Oh, yeah.
It's, again, completely unsettling.
His name, by the way, they do have names.
His name is Nubbins Sawyer.
But he's kind of mainly known as the hitchhiker.
And his very short ride is... is just full of disturbing things.
He looks like he's got blood on his face.
He's kind of rambling incoherently.
He grabs Franklin's sort of whittling pocket knife at one point and cuts his own hand in front of everyone's faces, which is terrifying right, uh?
And then slashes franklin, i think, with his razor that he has in his boot, mm-hmm Yeah.
And he's real squirrely, too.
So he's moving around a lot and he's like just doing all sorts of weird stuff.
But once he slashes, like they're really put off by this guy.
But once he slashes Franklin, they don't even fully stop.
They just slow down and basically push him out of the van.
Yeah.
And take off.
So they go to the Hardesty homestead.
Franklin tells them that there's a swimming hole nearby.
And this couple, Pam and Kirk, go off to find it.
But they find that it's dried up.
And they're just kind of hanging out and Kirk spies a house nearby and he thinks hey, maybe they have some gas that we can get, because the van's getting awfully low and they don't know where another gas station is.
Yeah, so they go to this house.
Kirk stupidly enters the house.
He's kind of knocking on the door, and the door just opens from him knocking.
And he's the first to be killed.
And it happens in such a brutally fast way when he goes down the straight hallway into this.
It looks like another hallway off the entryway where they have animal skins and skulls and things on the wall.
And he gets clubbed by a hammer very quickly.
And the speed at which that happens, the speed at which you see Leatherface for the first time whose name is Bubba, by the way And then the ferocity and speed that he slammed shut that metal sliding door, is just terrifying.
It is.
Yeah, that's a hell of a way for the first person to get picked off to go.
It's very fast and just all of a sudden you're already disturbed because everything before it was so.
Even Franklin, like every word out of his mouth, is annoying and upsetting.
Yeah, we should say Franklin.
Among film appreciators and horror fans, he's almost universally despised.
Yeah, poor Franklin.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it is because I was I went into it again thinking how much everybody hates Franklin.
I was like, he's not that bad.
He's pretty bad.
But there's still there's some redeeming qualities to him.
But I don't want to just be contrarian.
You know, I'm with you.
So Pam, who was with Kirk but is waiting outside on a swinging bench, starts deciding that Kirk's been gone too long and goes in after him.
And she goes in.
There's this classic shot.
Oh, yeah.
And it follows her going up to the house.
And it's just this amazing shot.
Like anybody who knows anything about cinema is like.
This is one of the best dolly shots of all time.
Again, a 23-year-old did this.
And the reason they did it is because the house just grows bigger and bigger, almost like it's going to swallow Pam up.
And I would never think about that if I hadn't read someone describing it, but that's exactly what it does.
Yeah, it's very creepy.
It goes under the swing, which is a nice little trick.
Her backside is very prominently in frame, so I think at the time that was their version of selling something slightly sexy.
Sure.
But it's so foreboding and you get that blue blue sky and the clouds and that up angle shot of the house, like you said.
It's just it's a great, great shot.
It is.
So Pam goes in there and her fate is not met quite as quickly as Kirk.
She stumbles into this room where...
Yeah.
There's a live chicken in a birdcage meant for basically canaries.
So the chicken's almost stuffed in there.
Yeah.
There's feathers everywhere.
There's bones everywhere.
Carcasses hanging everywhere.
The couches and the chairs are all basically upholstered with bones and these weird but kind of, in a strange way, beautiful designs.
And you can just tell it's so nasty in there that she starts to gag and tries to get out.
And as she's trying to get out, she meets Leatherface and it just, it goes downhill from there.
Yeah, and this is equally as brutal.
I mean, Leatherface is, I don't think we said, is like 6'4", and how much did he weigh?
300 pounds.
Yeah, very large dude, sort of looks like a professional wrestler, but he's wearing a skin mask with other hair.
You know that's not his.
Yeah, like almost a curly wig.
That makes it so much worse, too.
Yeah, so everything he does is just, you know, brutal.
I mean clearly, as the movie goes on, we realize that he has, you know, some pretty severe cognitive issues.
Like, I'm not going to diagnose Bubba Leatherface.
Sure.
But at any rate, he's terrifying.
And the way he moves is just very sort of herky-jerky.
And the way he's so big and the way he grabs her and brings her into that room is just it's all again.
It's terrifying.
Yeah, one of the other things that's terrifying that also gets across the fact that cognitively he seems to be challenged, at least to some degree, they took away all of the dialogue that he had written for him in the script.
So he doesn't do anything but make weird sounds.
Yeah, he kind of babbles at one point later.
He does.
And then also, if you pay attention, there's times where he's clearly talking, but they dub in a hog squealing.
And it's not supposed to be him making a hog call.
It's just like that's what came out of his mouth, weirdly.
And it happens so fast and they don't make any kind of point to point it out that when you notice it you're like what the heck just happened?
But it makes him, especially if you don't notice it, even creepier.
I mean, the fact that he's wearing a mask made of a dead person's face is bad enough.
But all the extra little details they put into it the apron that he's wearing, which clearly demonstrates he's a butcher with that chainsaw.
All of the details they put together just make him one of the great horror film villains of all time.
Oh, yeah.
And set the mold for the sort of nonverbal mask wearing dudes to come, like Michael Myers and certainly Jason Voorhees.
For sure.
So what happens to Pam?
Yeah, Pam gets meat hooked immediately.
She gets taken into this butcher room, impaled on a meat hook, but still living, and gets to watch.
We finally see the chainsaw fire up here for the first time.
We get to see her boyfriend die. you know, it doesn't show it.
And we'll talk about that later.
But you see the, you know, Leatherface fire that thing up and kind of start to get to work on him.
Yeah so, like you said, Pam's still alive and she's impaled on that meat hook.
Just a few feet from where Kirk's body is on this table, that Leatherface is now dismembering with the chainsaw.
So as she's dying, she gets to watch that.
And then I think it goes back to the homestead where Franklin and Sally and Jerry, who's Sally's boyfriend, are still hanging out.
And Jerry decides to go look for them, drawn into the same trap that Kirk and Pam fell for by looking for them.
And he gets picked off to his.
His death happened so quickly that I actually thought for a second that he was going to come back, because I hadn't seen it in a while.
Yeah.
And then I realized like, no, he just he got taken out with one one hammer swing.
Yeah.
And that all makes it pretty scary too, because there's not this big tense buildup like a lot of modern horror.
People are dispatched up just very kind of quickly and without regard.
Which makes it seem like that's probably how it would be in that situation.
It makes it more realistic, I think.
Yeah, totally.
And, by the way, I've seen Jerry referred to as Disco Stu across the internet, because he really does bear a resemblance to him for sure.
So he, before he gets dispatched though, he does open the freezer in the butcher room and sees that Pam is in there and sort of barely alive and kind of comes up.
And that's right when he gets taken out.
For sure.
So Jerry's gone.
Kirk and Pam are gone.
There's just Franklin and Sally left.
And they wait until nightfall until they just can't not look for their friends anymore.
So they go chomping through the woods, and this is where Hansel and Gretel really kind of becomes clear.
Yeah.
Sally's pushing Franklin in his wheelchair, basically overland.
And as they're wandering kind of aimlessly through the woods, they come upon Leatherface who just starts chopping Franklin up in his wheelchair.
And Sally, realizing there's nothing she can do for her brother, takes off.
And this kind of chase through the woods that leads back to leads her to the Sawyer house, which she's not familiar with.
So she goes in there looking for help, realizes this is not the place to find help, has to jump out a second story window goes back to running through the woods and then makes it to that original gas station slash barbecue pit, thinking she's found safety.
And it turns out that's not the case at all.
Yeah, because that's when it all comes together that Drayton is in on it.
He's one of the family members.
He kidnaps her in a this.
OK, this scene I could see is maybe being kind of funny.
The broom attack.
Hey, when he's smacking her with the broom.
Yeah, especially if you know the little behind-the-scenes trivia that Jim Cedow did not want to do that.
He was basically forced to, and goaded on to, actually hit Marilyn Burns with the broomstick to make it look real.
And if you know that the first few hits are kind of tentative and he's almost looking like, can I get away with this?
Right.
They clearly cut and then say, like, dude, you need to actually hit her.
And he does.
And it's, I mean, I think, the fact that he didn't want to do it and then had to do it.
There had to be some sort of transformation in his character, that that you can't quite put your finger on there.
Yeah.
And I guess I could see how that scene could come across as funny a little bit.
But again it's so terrifying because the way she screams and the brutality of it all, despite the weird broom thing.
Yeah.
Like I couldn't come back to a place of laughing.
There's just no way.
No, so I'm glad you mentioned her screaming because, like you said, there's not a lot of dialogue in the second and third acts.
But I can't imagine how many times they wrote Sally screams.
Yeah.
She screamed maybe more than any other horror film victim in history.
But fortunately for us, her scream almost has like a pleasing quality to it.
And she has a huge range.
It's not the same scream over and over again.
There's one point where she's like...
Right.
Like it's like it's a bunch of different screams and she screams a lot.
So she was very rightly and still is called a scream queen.
She's one of the scream queens.
But she screams a lot in this movie.
But it it it doesn't get annoying.
It's not grating.
And it just makes the whole thing that much more terrifying.
Yeah, I wouldn't say annoying, but I kept wanting it to stop because it's so relentless, you know?
Sure, it is.
It is relentless for sure.
It's very upsetting.
So she gets taken, you know, after the little broom fracas.
She gets, you know, bagged and taken back to the house.
And this is where...
I mean, in a movie of disturbing scenes, maybe the most disturbing scene is the dinner scene.
For sure.
With the whole family, which is, we don't really learn this here.
I think we just sort of learn later in other movies the relations.
But it's three brothers.
It's Bubba, Nubbins, and Drayton. and then Grandpa.
What I wondered is about the parents.
I guess that's explained maybe in prequels and stuff.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, I have no idea because I haven't seen those.
But there's a grandpa who it turns out was played by a 19-year-old in a face mask.
Also, the grandpa doesn't speak.
And it's just this macabre dinner scene where it just shows how this family of cannibals is so like.
They're all just so disturbed.
It's just disgusting.
Yeah.
At one point Leatherface grabs Sally's finger and cuts it with a knife and then puts her finger in grandpa's mouth so grandpa can partake drinking her blood.
Right.
And then so she's being tormented this whole time.
This is a 10 minute long scene, at least depending on when you say it starts.
Where she's just being tormented and terrorized and mocked.
Nubbins, the hitchhiker, is just mocking her like, please, please let me go.
Which makes it so much worse.
And then just the terror on her face.
She sells it so well.
But anyway, Grandpa there, who's essentially immobile and just a couple degrees away from catatonic.
Yeah, they're like, Grandpa used to be the best at killing people.
He could kill him with one hammer blow.
Let's let her let him kill her.
So they actually drag her over to like a metal tub, lean her over it, her head over it, so that she doesn't get blood everywhere and give Grandpa the hammer.
But he's so aged and so just withered, he can't hold the hammer.
So he keeps dropping it out of his hand and it lands like in the tub next to Sally's head, over and over again.
Which, oh my God, dude.
It's way scarier than if he had just hauled off and hit her with all of his strength.
Way, because it goes on for a minute or so, right?
Yeah, it's really disturbing.
Finally, she gets away.
She goes through another window, and then we reach the end of the movie.
Yeah, just real quick.
We should mention that Leatherface has changed his attire for dinner and is wearing a dress and a new.
I guess woman's skin mask, because it's all made up with this heavy, like you know, clown makeup almost.
And that just makes it even more disturbing.
Well, don't forget his lovely cravat too that he was wearing.
So Sally's getting away.
She runs out of the house.
It's now sunrise, daylight, which is a good sign for Sally at this point.
Also the fact that she's the last person and she's still alive.
You can start to think like maybe Sally's going to get away, but she's running down the driveway and Nubbins catches up with her.
But unfortunately for Nubbins, he doesn't really take her escape seriously and continues to mock her while he's chasing her.
Well, he's slashing her back with that razor the whole time, too.
Oh, I didn't notice that.
Is that what it is?
Yeah, that's why she ends up such a bloody mess.
I mean, besides everything else that happened to her.
Gotcha.
But she makes it to the end of the driveway to the main road with Nubbins right at her heels.
And they run out into the street, just as a Mack truck a tractor trailer essentially is barreling down the street and runs right over Nubbins.
Yeah.
So Nubbins is gone.
A little bit of trivia.
The name on the side of the truck is Black Maria.
I looked up to see if there was any significance and I didn't verify this, but there's no way.
It's a coincidence that Black Maria was the name of Thomas Edison's very first motion picture studio that he built.
Oh, no way that's a coincidence.
But also, doesn't that go to show what students of film these filmmakers were?
That they knew that?
Totally.
Yeah, that had to be the case, though.
Yeah.
And that they made an homage to Thomas Edison's first movie studio?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's pretty great.
All right, so back to the movie.
Nubbins has been run over.
The truck driver obviously stops.
Truck driver is played by Ed, G-U-I-N-N, I guess Gwen, but very close to Ed Gein.
Oh, yeah.
By coincidence, I'm sure.
And the truck driver is one of the weird heroes of this movie.
He has no lines.
He's in it for a couple of minutes.
Only African-American character in here.
And in a spin on that trope that they're the first ones to die.
He's actually the only guy that inflicts any damage on this family at all.
Because he runs over a nubbin and he gets a big pipe wrench when he's getting out of the truck and throws it at Leatherface, which causes Leatherface to fall down with the chainsaw and the chainsaw cuts into his own thigh.
Which is probably the most brutal thing that they show in the entire movie.
It's gross.
Like you can see the fat in his leg come out, like bubble out of the wound.
Oh, God.
Leg fat.
So Sally is still running around in the middle of the road here and luckily a pickup truck comes by and she manages to jump in the back, and now she's finally gotten away.
But she's clearly lost her mind.
The way that she's reacting to it, sinking in that she's gotten away.
And Leatherface is not happy about this.
He's very frustrated.
And he shows it by swinging the chainsaw around wildly.
You can tell he's just so mad.
And this is the only way that he can show it or get it out.
Yeah.
And he's swinging and swinging against the sunrise.
And then, like you said, it just cuts to black.
Yeah, and that shot of her in the back of that truck with the blood all over her and her madly cackling it's the perfect ending.
And the abrupt ending, it's so loud with that chainsaw.
Yeah.
I can't imagine what it was like in a theater in 1974.
Yeah, when it cuts to black and it's just dead silent, like what the hell did that audience like do?
Had I been there, it wouldn't have been Dead Silence, because I would have been like that is a great movie.
I would have said, what did I just watch?
Right.
By the way, pickup truck driver played by Perry Lorenz who I think now is an Austin real estate developer.
Oh, okay, cool.
He was also the stunt driver, I think, for the truck.
Yeah, I mean, you can barely see him, but got to shout out Perry Lorenz.
So that's the movie.
I mean, there's not that much more to it, honestly.
It was very bare bones, which I think, again, makes it that much more believable.
And we need to take a second break.
I say we plug on and make this just one big fat episode.
What do you think?
Yeah, we got to do it.
Okay.
So we're going to take our second break and then we're going to come back and you'll find out.
The bulk of the show is still to come.
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All right.
So we're back.
We know what happened in the movie.
You know hopefully, if you came back and you didn't want it spoiled, this won't spoil too much of it.
But yeah, we're done with the plot.
But we need to talk about the making of the movie.
The film was shot in just over well right at a month and 31 days, mid-July to mid-August, in what are now suburbs of Austin and Bastrop and Round Rock.
But I imagine then they were a little more rural than they are now.
There weren't strip malls and stuff everywhere.
No, they look pretty rural.
Pretty rural.
A little bit around Austin itself, obviously.
The heat.
The conditions were brutal, like you know 100 degrees plus on the roads and in the streets and fields, and more than that inside the Sawyer house, with what little film lighting they had.
And it was a brutal experience.
They had a Ford van that drove around the gear had an old camper, which is the hair and makeup trailer, and shot basically at about six places overall.
I counted five.
So I've got the rundown gas station, barbecue pit, the abandoned house, which is the hardest-to-see homestead, the neglected cemetery, the dirt road, and then the Sawyer family house.
Then you're in the van too, baby.
Oh, wow.
That's great, man.
You just blew my mind.
Yeah, so basically six-ish places, which is a great way to you know, write a cheap independent film, you know, as just a little tip.
Yeah.
And they were, again, they were on a shoestring.
I suspect that the Ford van they used to carry the film equipment around was the same Ford van that the teenagers drive around in.
I bet it was.
That was my hunch.
And they also apparently got some guff because the road scenes that they filmed they did not get a permit for it.
Oh, I'm surprised they got a permit for any of it.
Right.
So, unfortunately for the cast and crew, most of the filming was done in the Sawyer house.
And again, like you said, 100 degrees outside, apparently in the house.
For our friends, except in Liberia, who used the metric system, it's 378 degrees Celsius outside, which seems very cold to me.
Right.
And apparently it got 10 degrees more than that inside the house.
And because this film was inspired in part by Ed Gein, The production designer, Bob Burns, used photos that were taken like crime scene photos taken in Ed Gein's house as inspiration for the set decoration.
Yeah.
I mean, Toby Hooper himself said that the movie is about meat.
Yeah.
It's a case for veganism.
Apparently he became a vegan during filming.
And you found out that Guillermo del Toro apparently became a vegan after seeing the movie as well.
And I'm sure they're not the only ones.
Yeah, and if you look out for that, all of the meat eating that's done in the movie is disgusting.
Yeah.
The truck that runs over Nubbins is a cattle truck that is empty, which means it just is returning from having dropped off a bunch of cows at a slaughterhouse.
They talk a lot about that, yeah.
Yeah, they talk about a slaughterhouse nearby.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
And also not to mention that there's that live chicken, tons of carcasses hanging everywhere, lots of like sausages and stuff all over the house, skins everywhere bones, all that stuff.
It just, it makes sense.
Like, because if there's one word it screams, it's meat.
Yeah.
Well, Franklin's chewing on that.
It looks like a raw sausage.
Yeah, it's pretty gross.
For a while in that one scene where he's trying to get into his old grandparents house.
And the implication here is that these the Drayton's are, this is, you know, human meat that they're grinding up into sausage.
It's never explicitly said, but I think that's what you're supposed to believe.
Yeah, that's what the barbecue that they're selling is made from too, right?
Well, that's what I mean, yeah.
Oh, okay.
The house started to smell wretchedly, so much so I saw from multiple sources that they would go outside between takes and throw up sometimes.
At the very least they had to get out to get some air, because it got gamey in there terribly nasty just from the meat.
But then you also throw in what the actors themselves must have smelled like, because they had one set of clothing.
Yeah.
And they had to wear it every day for the shoot because this action takes place over just one day.
Yeah, yeah.
Usually when you shoot a movie, you have multiples of your clothes.
So if something happens to them, obviously you can switch it out.
Or if they get stinky, you can switch them out.
Mm-hmm.
On a modern movie, they probably have like eight versions of the chainsaw.
They had one chainsaw.
So on a budget, you just get one of everything.
So they were very stinky.
They had Bill Parsley, one of the early financiers, stopping by almost every day basically saying like when are you going to wrap this picture?
Threatening to shut it down.
They shot, you know, 12 to 18 hours a day.
One day they went for 26 hours inside that house.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously they're blacking out the windows because most of it takes place at night in that house, which is psychologically upsetting to a cast and crew.
For sure.
Also like this experience of just being treated like this during filming the cast itself, like in real life, like there was a lot of tension, a lot of squabbling and bickering and people just kind of being disgruntled.
And that came through.
I suspect from other stuff I've read that Tobey Hooper was making that like really beefing that kind of tension up to get more just angst out of his actors.
Yeah, totally.
Using that to his advantage, as every great manipulating director should.
Sure.
He also isolated Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface.
I read that each of the actors who was dispatched by Leatherface met Gunnar Hansen when they filmed their scene for the first time.
So that they couldn't get comfortable with him.
And we're, I mean, again, like you said, six foot four, 300 pounds.
And the chainsaw was a Poulin.
And apparently it's one of their heavier ones.
And he's just swinging this around like it's nothing.
So clearly he was an intimidating person in real life.
And again, that was something Toby Hooper did to manipulate things.
Yeah, and he stayed in character too, which also means he's walking around either babbling or not saying anything.
I don't imagine they had a recording of a pig squeal that he could just kind of play for fun as he walked around.
Yeah, but it wasn't a pleasant shoot.
I also read that the guy who played Franklin, Paul Partain, stayed in character as well, and everyone hated him.
Yeah.
So there was also physical suffering, too.
We talked about how Marilyn Burns was actually hit in the head with the broomstick, just to make it more realistic looking.
She did almost all of her own stunts.
From what I could tell a woman named Mary Church, the only stunt she did was actually jumping out of the windows.
Yeah, bad wig in that shot.
Yeah, for sure.
But when Sally falls down, you know whatever.
When she's running through Mesquite and gets trapped in it, running through cockleburs, like that was actually Marilyn Burns, the actress, having to do that over and over.
Yeah.
And you get that sense, too, when she's freaking out in that long chase scene through the thicket.
It's terrifying and it looks like she's not enjoying things at all as you know.
So it comes really comes across on film.
Yeah.
Because she gets stuck and she's like and has to pull herself out.
And yeah, I think she really did.
Yeah, and then you know, we mentioned in the plot the scene again.
This is a big spoiler.
At one point her finger is cut at the dinner scene and it's put into the mouth of Grandpa to suckle her blood.
Apparently the blood squib didn't work and they really cut her finger and that 19-year-old grandpa kid in the face mask really drank her blood.
Yeah.
Unknowingly, apparently, until afterward.
Good God.
So one of the things that people point to is what made this movie so great was just the inexperience of these novice filmmakers.
Yeah.
We said that Daniel Pearl, the cinematographer, was 23.
Tobey Hooper apparently was the oldest at 29.
Yeah.
And they had like documentary backgrounds.
Daniel Pearl was he apparently caught Tobey Hooper's eye from a Texas Department of Public Safety camera.
PSA, right?
Like blood spills right on the highway kind of thing?
Yeah, basically, except this is about a drug bust.
And Toby Hooper noticed like, wow, that was shot really interestingly.
And who did that?
That's how they came together.
They made their own dollies out of wood.
Their own crane out of wood, too, I believe.
And then the editing, too, gets a lot of credit for making the movie what it was.
Yeah, I mean, like we said, it's a trim, 83 minutes.
You can thank Larry Carroll and Sally Richardson as the editors, for just you know, like I kept mentioning, like the speed at which the kills happen and the abruptness in which they end, and what the movie ends like.
Those are all just great editing decisions to like.
You know it's tough because you know they call it like losing your babies.
You don't want to lose stuff you shot or the great line.
But a good editor knows like, no, tighter is better, shorter is better.
And it helps create a lot of the unsettling feeling, I think, by how quickly they cut away to stuff.
For sure.
Sure.
So they they finally got it done.
I think I said 300 grand is the highest I saw as an estimate for what they actually, what the budget actually was.
They got it done to 83 minutes.
They had the final cut.
They have investors like breathing down their neck because remember, they initially got 80 grand.
The budget ended up being 300 grand.
So Toby Hooper and Kim Henkel kept having to go back and find new people to give them money.
And over time, a lot of different investors, including the cast and crew, owned that movie.
They owned portions of it.
And, as true indie filmmakers, Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper watered down their own share to get the money to get the movie completed.
And they ended up just with a 7.5% cut each.
These are the guys who thought of and made the movie.
They ended up with 15% between them.
Yeah.
So you know, I mean we'll see it made a ton of money, but how those things pay out, it just it never pays out like you think it would, even though it was cheap to make and made a ton of money that creative accounting.
And in this case, sort of mob accounting.
Right.
Because, well, I guess we should say first, it did get picked up.
The commissioner, Warren Skarn, that we were talking about the film commissioner of Texas shopped it around.
You know, there weren't a ton of big movies being shot in Texas at the time.
So it was sort of a... It was before...
Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater put Austin on the map.
Toby Hooper was first, so it wasn't like a big film scene.
So it took the film commissioner to really champion it for distribution.
Almost got bought by Columbia.
Eventually was bought by the distribution company who put out Deep Throat, the famous porn.
And their name was Bryanston Distributing Company.
Yes.
And their whole business model was basically just generate as much publicity as you can.
Negative publicity is just as good as positive.
And then they would just promote the heck out of it.
Publicize all of this outrage and everything that the movie was getting.
And the reason why is because...
They couldn't afford traditional marketing as it worked out.
It was basically a shell game house of cards.
And like you said, it was a mobbed up movie distribution company.
Yeah, so Bryanston was owned by the Columbo crime family, or you know members of that family, specifically Big Tony Pereno.
He also helped finance part of this film and other of their films.
And yeah, I think they distributed Dark Star from John Carpenter, which is a sci-fi cult classic.
But because it was mob-connected, It was kind of one of those things where they knew that no one was going to see the money they were probably owed.
And I think you know some of them made a little bit of money but the total pot, Even though it made well we'll talk about the grosses but I think a little over a quarter of a million bucks or a little under a quarter of a million bucks to dole out to everybody.
Yeah, and the cast and crew was left with $8,100 to split between them.
Yeah, I mean, it's not terrible.
No, it's not great either.
I mean, divide that by about 20.
Oh, I don't think those extras got much, if anything.
Okay.
Still, so divide it by 10?
Because the crew was involved, too.
Yeah.
I'm not saying they got paid a lot, but in today dollars, if that cast walked away with like five grand, then I mean that's not terrible for an indie movie.
Sure.
The invest Chester sued Bryanston and there was a judge who ruled like yeah, you need to give them more money than that.
And Bryanston said, we would if we could, but we're bankrupt now.
So see you guys later.
Finally, New Line picked it up in 1983 and some real money started to flow in.
Still not much trickled down to the people who actually made the movie.
Yeah, for sure.
One of the most startling facts of this whole podcast to me is that Tobey Hooper was trying for a PG rating.
Yeah.
That was pre-PG-13.
Yeah.
Uh, the the board, the MPAA, basically said that that meat hook scene.
Like you, you can't have that in your movie at all.
And get a PG.
I get a PG rating.
Cause he was like, how could I cut that scene in a way that gets it a PG?
And they're like, they're incompatible, my friend.
And he responded with, yeah, come on.
Yeah.
He got an X rating instead.
Yeah, he did.
He managed to lobby it down to an R, because this is the time when you got an X rating.
Like you can kiss any success for your movie goodbye.
Unless, of course, Bryanston owns it.
Because we should say being distributed by Bryanston wasn't a total scam or a bust.
They actually did do some good stuff.
Like we said, they generated some really negative publicity and then publicized that.
They also managed to get this film, the year it came out, into the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection.
You can believe they publicized that.
They also got it shown at Cannes.
Yeah.
Which is, I mean we could say like that's actually a couple of good things that they did for sure for the movie.
Which certainly remember.
When it came out it was going to be a drive-in B-movie slasher film, before anyone knew what a slasher film really was.
And then it would probably be gone in a month or two at best.
And these things started to help make it like okay, maybe we should pay a little more attention to this.
Because at first the critics panned it.
And then they started to see like okay, actually there's some really good cinematic stuff in here that we're overlooking.
Yeah, I mean, it grossed more than the Great Gatsby that year, Chinatown, Death Wish.
It took in that year's dollars about $26 million and change.
Eventually went on to gross $150 million in present-day dollars.
So at one point it was known as the most successful independent film of all time, money-wise.
Right.
I think Rocky knocked it out a couple years later, from what I understand, but it was definitely a huge deal.
Rocky knocked it out?
You're sure it wasn't the TKO?
Oh, wow.
I didn't even mean to do that.
The spirit of Jonathan Strickland just flowed through me.
That's right.
But yeah, you mentioned the critics.
They kind of got on board a little bit.
Rex Reed said it was the most terrifying, like me, film he'd ever seen.
Ebert said...
It was some kind of weird off-the-wall achievement.
I can't imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it's well-made, well-acted and all too effective.
Right.
But they still ultimately said they panned it.
Right.
Although I don't think Rex Reed did.
I think he might have given it a thumbs up.
However, he did that.
But they would invariably say that it was blood soaked, that it was gory.
And that's just not true.
Because if you watch the movie, there is very little blood, very little gore and a lot of the violence is just implied.
It's not actually shown.
Certainly, you don't see the meat hook go into Pam.
But you see her dangling from a meat hook.
And that confused people at first.
So people walked away thinking they'd just seen a ton of gore and blood and they hadn't.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a good point that the hammer blows are kind of shot from far away and very fast.
And, you know, you don't see blood spatter everywhere.
It's there's just an overall like the MPA.
So just say, hey, man, I don't care if we don't see one drop of blood.
This gets an X for disturbing factor.
Yeah, I mean, I could see that too.
And it's a credit to Tobey Hooper that he managed to get it reduced to an R.
But yeah, you can imagine his disappointment making the film based on the idea that he was making it a PG movie.
I mean, that's just as naive as it gets, really, for a filmmaker.
Yeah, for sure.
And it really, you know, like I said in our act one, that really set a standard for films to come.
Slasher films, teenagers kind of driving through the woods and coming upon an abandoned seemingly abandoned place.
This was the first movie to do that stuff, really.
Uh, like horror movies.
Before this a lot of them were the hammer movies like the Gothic, like vampire in a castle, kind of stuff.
Um, the final girl trope was either birth with this or, um, which one black Christmas.
Yeah.
Those two usually, um, are the rivals for the first one.
Yeah.
And the final girl is obviously the trope where there's one girl left alive at the end.
You know, the last either victim or one who survives.
And those movies were both released in the same year and clearly didn't know about one another.
So I give them the co-lead.
And, like I said, over time people started to especially film appreciators, started to see this as like a cinematic treasure, a masterpiece.
Quentin Tarantino apparently listed it among six perfect movies, among the likes of Jaws Exorcist Young, Frankenstein and Back to the Future, and Annie Hall.
Like people, apparently Stanley Kubrick owned a 35 millimeter print of it himself.
That's kind of all you need to say right there.
Yeah.
But maybe in spite of that, or because of that or whatever, everyone agrees that you could never remake the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and capture the spirit of the original because of the way that it was hamstrung, all the different ways it was hamstrung, and the inexperience and naivety of the filmmakers, which also freed them up to take chances that an experienced filmmaker wouldn't take like dubbing in a hog squeal instead of a voice for Leatherface at some point.
You put all that together, you just can't recapture that.
No, you can't.
Sometimes there's just a way you shoot a movie.
You capture lightning in a bottle.
I read The Dazed and Confused Oral History recently.
That's a great book.
That was sort of a similar movie, like...
And that's why that was maybe the best movie about teenagers in high school of all time, because of the way they did it and the inexperience and like you don't know what you don't know.
And this movie is very much the same thing like they've tried.
There have been countless sequels and remakes.
I think there have been like nine or 10 of them now.
If you want to count them, yeah.
Yeah, and none of them hold a candle to this.
Most of them are not very good.
For my money, the thing that comes closest is Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses in spirit, which was, you know, this was a very big influence on that movie obviously, but I don't think anything.
And again, I haven't seen these, but I've seen enough of them and read enough about them, where it seems like none of them come close.
I also see Wolf Creek and X as given high marks for being inspired by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and managing to do something worthwhile too.
Wolf Creek is great.
I don't think I know X.
X, it's part of the Maxine trilogy.
X, Pearl, and Maxine, the first one.
Yeah, yeah, I saw all those.
Okay, I forgot it was called X. Yeah, those are all good, too.
I've only seen X. Are the other two worth watching, too?
I think so.
OK.
And then?
So I think John Landis put it how impossible it would be to remake or capture that same spirit from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre when he described the remake in 2003 like a shampoo commercial.
Yeah.
Kitsety Cross.
Yeah, that's a pretty sick burn.
Wow, you got anything else?
I got nothing else.
I try to watch this every Halloween.
I don't know why it took me so long to see it.
Because I had gotten into horror movies in the past, like...
20 years more and more.
It was just kind of hanging out there until a few years ago.
And I was like, wait a minute.
I've never seen the granddaddy of them all.
Yeah.
And when you watch it, you said, wow, this is a great movie.
No, no.
You know what I said.
We got to watch it together.
I want to just watch you watch it.
All right.
We'll do it.
Okay well, since Chuck agreed to let me watch him while he watches the Texas Chainsaw Massacre as it was predicted in 2008 by Chuck Stradamus himself, I just triggered listener mail.
This is from Taquarius.
Hey guys, 19 years ago, when I was just 13, I was allowed to visit our local skating rink along with my uncle.
It was an experience that stood out from my previous visits, because that night was full of black culture.
It left a lasting impact on me, and I would often jokingly think to myself it must have been Black Night or something.
After listening to your roller skating episode, I was astonished to learn that such events were actually a thing after the Civil Rights Movement.
I'm uncertain whether that night was a tradition that dated back to that time, but I like to think that it was and that I was a part of the experience.
Thank you for helping me, a black man, make connections that I was completely unaware of.
And he attached a photograph from that night that he took with his uncle and his friends.
That was pretty sweet in a time capsule.
And he said, have a great day, guys.
And that is from Taquerius McMurray.
Nice.
Thanks, Taquerius.
That's a great one.
I love that episode in part for that because I had no idea about that either.
Yeah, same.
That's awesome.
If you have recently listened to an old episode and want to tell us what you think about it.
Like Taquerious, we love that kind of stuff.
You can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm Not Afraid of a Scary Story Week on the OK Storytime podcast.
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