My friends and I were discussing the great horror movies when someone claimed that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was based on a true story. I went to the video store, and sure enough on the back of the box it said the movie was based on real events. I rented it, and after my friends and I watched it we got to wondering just how true this story is. Cecil, help us out here. How loosely is the movie based on the real story? What are the facts?
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If you’re looking for me to tell you there really was a family of backwoods weirdos, including a goon in a mask called Leatherface, and that a kid really went into their house and got hit with a hammer, and then his girlfriend went looking for him, and Leatherface impaled her on a meat hook while he butchered the boyfriend with a chain saw, and then a second guy went looking for the first two and got hammered too, and then Leatherface sawed up yet another guy in a wheelchair, and then one last woman got away and found refuge in a barbecue shop, only it turned out the barbecue was really human flesh, and the shop’s proprietor was Leatherface’s cousin or something, and they were really all cannibals…um, sorry, but this isn’t a 100 percent accurate reenactment of actual events. The real Leatherface didn’t use a hammer. Also the chain saw was a whimsical creative touch. The original also lacked the cheesy sound track and 70s hairstyles.
One day Bernice Worden, proprietor of the town hardware store, vanished under suspicious circumstances. Clues pointed to Gein, who’d been hanging around the previous few days. The sheriff drove out to Gein’s farmhouse and found Worden’s headless corpse hanging by the feet in the kitchen, “eviscerated and dressed out like a deer,” according to one press account. The head was in a cardboard box, the heart in a plastic bag on the stove. Elsewhere in the cluttered home authorities found ten skins from human heads, bracelets and chair seats made from human skin, a box of noses, the skin from a woman’s chest rolled up on the floor, and more.
