Tobe Hooper's haunting 1974 horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not based on a true story, despite what the film's marketing might have you believe. There was no Texas serial killer nicknamed Leaderface, nor was there ever an actual family of backcountry cannibals named the Sawyers. Indeed, even in the mythology of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's hard to keep the facts straight, as the series has been rebooted multiple times. As of this writing, there were nine films in the Texas Chainsaw franchise.and at least four of them are reboots, reimaginings, or prequels.

In short, Texas Chainsaw follows a quintet of teenagers who travel in a van through a remote area of ​​Texas, searching for the grave of the grandfather of two passengers. They pick up a crazy hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) who threatens them with a razor and cuts himself. The quintet flees to a local house where they disturb a dynasty of slaughterhouse workers who have been isolated for so long that they have taken to eating passers-by to stay alive, often making furniture out of the bones of their victims. The rest of the film is a struggle for survival as the audience learns more and more about the painful practices the cannibals were involved in.

As all TCM fans know, however, the events of Hooper's original film were indeed based on fact. Hooper and his co-writer Kim Henkel paid attention to the news and were enthralled by the details surrounding notorious serial killers like Ed Gein and Elmer Wayne Henley. Indeed, many details of the Leatherface murders come from the actual Ed Gein murders (and we'll get into those below). Hooper also commented on the brutal violence that could be seen in the media in 1974. Below are the actual events that inspired the film.

The world's many TCM fans can probably tell you that Ed Gein had a huge influence on the film. Ed Gein, for the uninitiated, was a real life murderer and grave robber who committed a long series of heinous crimes from around 1947 until 1957 when he was arrested. Called Plainfield Gaul (after his base of operations in Plainfield, Wisconsin), Gein was known for raiding local cemeteries, exhuming corpses and using their bones to fashion furniture and other memorabilia.

Gein was arrested after he kidnapped and killed a store owner named Bernice Woden, whose body he also extensively mutilated. When the police raided his home looking for Worden, they found his extensive collection of handicrafts, including some too nasty to list here. Gein did make fashion masks made from the skin of several women's faces, as well as a corset made of women's skin. Gein was rumored to have claimed to be recreating a human skin suit so he could wear it and "resurrect" his mother, but his case has been wildly sensationalized over the years. Gein confessed to kidnapping and killing Woden, as well as a woman named Mary Hogan three years earlier. Gein was committed to a mental hospital and died in 1984 of lung cancer.

The cauldron where he boiled the meat of some of the corpses is exhibited in The Zach Bagan Museum of Haunting in Las Vegas, Nevada. Details of Gane's corpse-collecting habit drew a lot of attention from his morbid appearance, and his home became a tourist attraction.

Some of the Sawyer family crafts seen in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were directly inspired by Gane, including all the human skulls and human skin lampshades, not to mention the woman's skin mask infamously worn by Leatherface. Gein was not a cannibal. His obsession with women's bodies, especially his mother's, also served as inspiration for Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs.

Gein also got his own movie in the 2000 film Ed Gein.

Ed Gein operated out of Wisconsin, so where did Chain Saw's Texas location come from? Lesser known to TCM fans was real-life murderer and sex trafficker Elmer Wayne Henley, a native Texan and a Hooper also cited himself as an inspiration. Henley, along with his partner Dean Corle, kidnapped and/or pushed teenagers for a trafficker named David Brooks who would sell the boys. The couple attacked and killed six boys in the process of their procurement.

No such attack occurs in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was much more focused on Ed Gein's crimes as inspiration. On the commentary track on the Sinerska Pila DVD, co-writer Kim Henkel admitted that he had watched Henley's video confession and was fascinated. He was darkly drawn to Henley's claims that he would take his punishment "like a man" and wavered between humility and moral superiority. Henley's views, Henkel said, were used as the basis of the film's killers. They know that killing and assault are wrong, but only occasionally. And they don't always care. Henkel called it "moral schizophrenia."

Shortly before he was arrested in 1973, Henley shot Corl in the head for taking his murder/sex games too far. Henley himself was caught in 1973 and sentenced to six consecutive 99-year prison terms. Brooks was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2020 due to COVID-19. Henley is still in captivity to this day.

The sensationalized media coverage of Henley's Tobe Hooper trial also marked a change in the way American audiences consumed violence. And that inspired him.

While the violence of Hooper's original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is striking, the film is more often noted for its gritty style. The film is worn and dirty, and the film itself appears to have been stored on a slaughterhouse shelf for a long time, which affects the oily, almost yellowed quality. "Texas Chainsaw" is hard to break into for many audiences because it almost feels like a legitimate snuff movie. It should be noted that Hooper, while a film student at the University of Texas at Austin, worked as a documentary filmmaker.

In an interview on one of the many Texas Chainsaw DVDs, Hooper noted that news coverage in San Antonio had become incredibly violent, with crimes described or even depicted in graphic detail. Remember that 1973 was right in the middle of the Vietnam War, and many of the horrors of that conflict were making their way onto American TV screens and newspapers. 1974 was also after the Watergate scandal and experienced a major oil crisis as well as an economic recession. No one felt they could trust the government anymore, and cynicism was at an all-time high. In the 2004 edition of Rue Morgue magazineHooper told an interviewer that he remembered seeing "brains all the way" on television and came to the conclusion that "the man is the real monster here, just wearing a different face, so I put a literal mask on the monster in my movie."

While the violence in Texas Chainsaw is horrific, Hooper saw it as a logical extension of the evil he saw every day on the news. "Texas Chain Saw" may be a dark, grim, documentary about evil cannibals, but Hooper clearly didn't find it fantastical. People are violent, and the ravages of rural poverty can lead to utter madness.

As we mentioned, there were eight additional Texas Chainsaw films. that followed the original, and they all took a slightly different take on the original 1974 story. Hooper's 1986 follow-up, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 , was a crazier, more cartoonish version of the original, influencing a more striking, cinematic style and featuring more of a revenge action film (featuring Dennis Hopper). 1990's Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III , directed by Jeff Burr, is only notable for being the last film to receive an X rating from the MPAA (before they transformed the rating to NC-17).

Henkel's own 1996 film Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation starred Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger before they were big stars, and it's one of the craziest — and baddest — things you'll ever see. It seems that the Illuminati controlled the cannibal family (!) all along.

In 2003, there was a slick remake directed by Markus Nispel, and he turned the grime of the original into a super-photographed MTV-style. It was a hit and spawned its own prequel. Since it was a remake, it looked back to the real-life crimes of Ed Gein for inspiration.

2013's Texas Chainsaw 3-D was a reboot of the series that ignored all sequels and starred a young Alexandra Daddario. It's a pretty okay movie. The 2017 film Leatherface served as a prequel to the original, while 2022's Texas Chainsaw Massacre was another reboot that ignored sequels, including Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3-D. Yes.

Other than the remake, were any of the sequels and prequels inspired by real crimes? Not really. Some allude to Ed Gein more strongly than others, but aside from Gein and Henley, no new crimes entered the filmmakers' minds to reshape TCM's narrative. All sequels follow their own internal mythologies.