10 Most Bad-ass Chainsaw Users In Film

Which stars have the power to pull off horror's most formidable weapon?

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers
Camp Motion

When Canada's James Shand patented and developed the world's first portable chainsaw in 1918, developing on the earlier work of San Francisco's Samuel J Bens (thank you, Wikipedia), could he ever have envisaged the cultural impact of this handheld power tool designed specifically for felling trees?

There's nothing quite like a chainsaw. The enormous blade, the unmistakable roar: they're inherently terrifying, patently absurd, and yet strangely alluring. This popular fascination naturally lends itself to psychoanalysis, and perhaps unsurprisingly many have suggested the chainsaw is almost never just a chainsaw. Draw your own conclusions there.

Given how easily the tool lends itself to horrendous bloodshed, it's hardly surprising that it's long since become a staple of horror cinema. Naturally, it's been utilised in some of the most extreme gore ever put on film, but in many other instances, it has served to give an adrenaline boost to confrontations which might otherwise have been a little pedestrian. Chainsaws immediately raise the stakes and boost the intensity of any given action scene or chase sequence.

Still, as prominent as the chainsaw may be in the popular consciousness, there are only so many actors who have really made the most of the formidable device - and, unsurprisingly, not one of them played a lumberjack or gardener. However, most of them did wreak bloody havoc.

10. Christian Bale - American Psycho

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers
Lionsgate Films

When director Mary Harron's big screen take on Bret Easton Ellis' hugely controversial 1991 novel arrived in 2000, it was a considerable surprise that the end result was not, as anticipated, one of the most horrifically violent films ever made.

Even so, while the adaptation saw fit to expunge much of the book's more excessive cruelty and viscera (partially over concerns that this might overshadow the satirical elements, but surely also because of censorship fears), it still wound up one of the most memorable serial killer movies of the past twenty years.

The enduring cult status of American Psycho is in large part down to the casting of Christian Bale as the titular psychotic American himself, Patrick Bateman. This was Bale's first adult leading role of note, and - as we might now expect from an actor known for his intense method approach - he really goes all out.

And it's never more all-out there than the scene in which a raging Bateman, covered in blood and fully nude except for a pair of immaculately white trainers, chases a prostitute through his apartment complex with a roaring chainsaw in hand. He runs after her into a stairwell where, just as she seems about to escape, he finishes her off by dropping the saw directly onto her head from several storeys up.

Contributor
Contributor

Ben Bussey hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.