8 Horror Movies With Creepy Urban Legends
4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Is A True Story
One of the first, and certainly the greatest incident of producers of a horror movie using the based on a true story gimmick, the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre film, released in 1974, is one of the best examples of cunning misdirection in cinema. The poster frantically emoted: "Can you survive THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE",while the back of the subsequent video cassette cover advised potential viewers that "the film is an account of a tragedy which befell a group of young youths this video cassette is based upon a true incident and is definitely not for the squeamish or the nervous."
Director Tobe Hooper and writer Kim Henkel had simply heard the Ed Gein story, about a Wisconsin man who had been convicted in the late 50s of killing his neighbour, and whose story had inspired several fictional stories already - most famously, Robert Bloch's novel Psycho, and decided that it had legs.
Gein was only ever been found to have killed two people. He claimed that he simply stole the other body parts that littered his house from graves and mortuaries. However, just as in the film, his house was found to contain furniture made from human bone and skin, masks and clothing taken from corpses, body parts in fridges, boxes, tubs and littering the rest of the house and the decapitated body of a young woman out in his shed, hung upside down and dressed like a deer carcass.
The mask of human skin that Leatherface wore was based upon Gein's own, as were the depictions of the inside of the house in the film. But the family of psychopaths killing travellers, hitchhikers, and other missing people? The chainsaws themselves? All created specifically for the film. Still, the legend persists to this day. The actor that played Leatherface himself, Gunnar Hansen, has said that he's been told stories personally by people who claimed to know people whod met the original Leatherface, that he was a convict in a state prison in Texas, and who refuse to believe him when he explains the movie's true provenance to them.