The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Masterpiece

25:59He's being ridiculous. It's totally over the top. Yeah. It still manages to be more disturbing than 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 just full of disturbing things. He looks like he's got, you know, 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. And then slashes Franklin, I think, with his razor that he has in his boot.

26:45Mm-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 Franklin, 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 heart of sea homestead. And 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.

27:22Because the van's getting awfully low. And they don't know where another gas station is. Yeah, so they go to his 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, you know, 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.

28:09It is. Yeah, that's a hell of a way for the first person to get picked off to go, for sure. 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 No, 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.

29:04And she goes in, there's this classic shot. Oh, yeah. It's a dolly shot from the ground going upward. 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 starts, it goes under the swing, which is a nice little trick.

29:41Her backside is very prominently in frame, so I think at the time, that was their version of selling something slightly sexy. 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, and 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. The chicken room. Yeah. There's a live chicken in a birdcage meant for basically canary. So the chicken's almost stuffed in there. Yeah. There's feathers everywhere. There's bones everywhere. Carcasses hanging everywhere.

30:17The 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, it's like 6 '4 and how much did he weigh? 300 pounds. Yeah. 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.

30:57Yeah, 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.

31:38So he doesn't do anything but make weird sounds. Yeah, he kind of babbles at one point later. Sure, he does. And then also, if you pay attention, there's times where he's clearly talking, but they dub in a hog squealing. Yeah. 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.

32:27All 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, you know, get—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.

33:12Yeah. 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, too. 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.

33:54Yeah. 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 Stew across the Internet because he really does bear a resemblance to him for sure. So 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.

34:38And 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 over land and um 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 um this kind of chase through the woods that leads back to leads her to the Sawyer house, which she's not familiar with.

35:23So 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. Okay, this scene I could see is maybe being kind of funny, the broom attack. 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.

36:03He 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? And 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.

36:37But 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. 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.

37:16And there's one point where she's like, oh, 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.

37:55And 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.

38:32And 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. 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.

39:11And 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. They're like, Grandpa used to be the best at killing people. He could kill them with one hammer blow. Let's 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.

39:55It'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.

40:33That's right. 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.

41:08I 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.

41:46Oh, no way that's a coincidence. But also, doesn't that go to show like 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, 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.

42:25Only 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.

43:01And 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, twirling. You can tell he's just so mad, and this is the only way that he can show it or get it out. 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.

43:44and the abrupt ending, like, it's so loud with that chainsaw. Yeah. And then to cut, 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. That would have said, this f***ing c***s, 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.

44:17Yeah, 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.

44:51Chuck and Josh. Stuff you should know.

45:09New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast. And every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hurricane DeBogh. It's a new year. And on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health.

45:44Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that. We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health. We talk about all the ways to keep your body and mind, inside and out, healthy. We human beings, all we want is connection.

46:23We just want to connect with each other. Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Dr. Jesse Mills, director of the men's clinic at UCLA Health and host of the Mailroom podcast. Each January, guys everywhere make the same resolutions. Get stronger, work harder, fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? To kick off the new year, I sat down with Dr. Steve Poulter, a psychologist with over 30 years experience helping men unpack shame, anxiety, and emotional pain they were never taught to name.

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47:41What? What?

47:49What? What? What?

47:56What? Satisfaction. 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 oh 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 in 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 was you know weren't strip malls and stuff everywhere no they look pretty pretty rural uh pretty rural um a little bit around austin itself obviously uh the heat the conditions were brutal like um you know 100 degrees plus on the 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 uh it was it was a brutal experience uh 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.

49:00I counted five, so I've got the rundown gas station barbecue pit, the abandoned house, which is the hardest-sea 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.

49:36I 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. Oh, I'm surprised I 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 use the metric system, it's 37.8 degrees Celsius. 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.

50:25Yeah. 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 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.

51:04Yeah. 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, 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. Looks like a raw sausage. Yeah, it's pretty gross. For a while. And that one scene where he's trying to get into his old grandparents house. And the implication here is that these, the Dratons 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.

51:44Yeah, that that's what the barbecue that they're selling is made from too, right? Well, that's what I mean, yeah. Oh, okay. So because Bob Burns is hanging actual meat around this house and because it's 110 degrees in the house, 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 yeah 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.

52:28Yeah. 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. 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.

53:05Obviously, they're blacking out the windows because most of it takes place at night in that house, which is, you know, psychologically that's 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 toby 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.

53:49Sure. 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. Yeah. 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 pooling. 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 is also means he's walking around either babbling or not saying anything.

54:30I don't imagine they had a recording of a pig squeal that he 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 was she did almost all of her own stunts. From what I could tell, a woman named Mary Church was the only stunt she did was actually jumping out of the windows.

55:11Yeah. Bad wig in that shot. Yeah, for sure. But when when Sally falls down, you know, whatever she's running through Mesquite and gets trapped in it, running through cockleburrs. 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. So it really comes across on film. Yeah, because she gets stuck, and she's like, and has to pull herself out. Yeah, I think she really did. Yeah, and then we mentioned in the plot the scene.

55:48Again, 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 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.

56:29Daniel Pearl was, he apparently caught Toby Hooper's eye from a Texas Department of Public Safety PSA, right? Like blood spills red 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 with 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.

57:36For sure. So they finally got it done. I think I said 300 grand is the highest I saw as an estimate for what the budget actually was. They got it down 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 ,000. So Tobey Hooper and Kim Hankel 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 Hankel and Tobey Hooper watered down their own share to get the money to get the movie completed.

58:22and 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, the creative accounting, and in this case, sort of mob accounting. Right. Because, well, I guess we should say first, it did get picked up. that Commissioner Warren Skarn that we were talking about, the film commissioner of Texas, shopped it around. There weren't a ton of movies being shot in Texas at the time, so it was before Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater put Austin on the map.

59:09Tobey 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 Brinston 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.

59:51It was basically a show game house of cards. And like you said, it was a mobbed up movie distribution company. Yeah. So Brianston was owned by the Columbo crime family or, you know, members of that family, specifically Big Tony Perrano. 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 everybody.

1:00:43Yeah, 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. No, they did. 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 investors sued Bryan Stinn and there was a judge who ruled like, yeah, you need to give them more money than that. And Bryan Stinn said, we would if we could, but we're bankrupt now.

1:01:24So see you guys later. Finally, New Line picked it up in 1983 and some real money started to flow in, but 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 Toby Hooper was trying for a PG rating. Yeah. That was pre-PG-13. The board, the MPAA basically said that that meat hook scene, like you can't have that in your movie at all and get a PG rating. Because he's like, how could I cut that scene in a way that gets it a PG? And they're like, they're incompatible, my friend. Right. And he responded with, yeah, come on.

1:02:04Yeah. 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, Brianston owns it. Because we should say being distributed by Brianston wasn't a total like 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.

1:02:44Yeah. 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 this, when it came out, it was going to be a drive-in B-movie slasher film. And 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.

1:03:20Yeah, I mean, it grossed more than The Great Gatsby that year, Chinatown, Death Wish. It took in, 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 sure it wasn't a TKO? 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.

1:04:00They, you know, they kind of got on board a little bit. Like Rex Reed said it was, you know, 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.

1:04:40And a lot of the violence is just implied. It's not actually shown. Certainly, you don't see the meat hook go into Pam. No. But you see her dangling from a meat hook and that confused people at first. So people walked away thinking they just seen a ton of gore and blood and they hadn't. Yeah. I mean, that's a good point. The hammer blows are kind of shot from far away and very fast. And, you know, you don't see blood spatter everywhere. There's just an overall like the MPA should 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.

1:05:18And 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. Like horror movies before this, a lot of them were the Hammer movies, like the gothic, like vampire in a castle kind of stuff.

1:06:01The final girl trope was either birthed with this or which one? Black Christmas? Yeah, those two usually 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.

1:06:48Like, people, apparently Stanley Kubrick owned a 35mm 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, However, 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.

1:07:29You 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. 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. You don't know what you don't know. This movie is very much the same thing. They've tried. there have been countless sequels and remakes. I think there have been like nine or ten of them now. If you want to count them, yeah.

1:08:06Yeah, 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 1 ,000 Corpses in Spirit, which 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.

1:08:49X, Pearl, and Maxine, the first one. Yeah, yeah. I saw 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. Okay. 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. Kits it across. Yeah, that's a pretty sick burn. Wow, you got anything else? I got nothing else. I try to watch this every Halloween. I mean, 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.

1:09:34It 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 watched 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.

1:10:03This 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 for 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.

1:10:37Thank 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 Taquarius McMurray. Nice. Thanks, Taquarius. 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 Taquarius, we love that kind of stuff. You can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

1:11:17Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

1:11:32Hey, it's Joel. And Matt from HowToMoney. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back. Prices, they're still high, and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right. Each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement.

1:12:09the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight. You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story. John has never been anything but gay, but he really tried hard not to be. Listen to Atonement, the John Palk story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Dr. Jesse Mills, host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, men promise to get stronger, work harder, and fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? I sat down with psychologist Dr.

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