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2. People Almost Became Homicidal On Set - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Filming all day in the Texas heat is no easy feat, especially when you’re caked in makeup and costume and god-knows what else. You can’t blame the actors and crew for being driven a little mad by the conditions, but at times ‘a little madness’ started approaching dangerous territory.
The famous dinner scene was filmed on a boiling 110 degree day (that’s 43 degrees celsius for us Brits), with the production lights bumping the temperature up even more. Poor ventilation meant that the stench from the rotten food and sweaty bodies made the conditions almost unbearable.
After hours of intense, non-stop filming some of the cast were becoming delirious. Gunnar Hansen (the O.G. Leatherface) recalled for the DVD commentary how the cast began embodying their characters in a whole new way, blurring the lines of reality. He notes that for a moment, he genuinely desired to murder Marilyn Burns after his in-film brother instructed him to. With a few more hours in those conditions, who knows what could’ve happened!