9 Once Terrifying Horror Villains Rendered Lame By Sequels

Leatherface’s introduction is one of the most shocking in genre cinema; he appears out of a doorway, we get a quick look at his terrifying visage and then he murders someone with a hammer. He doesn’t get a ton of screentime in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but when he appears he always makes an impact; Actor Gunnar Hansen gave him a ferocious, unpredictable quality with just a small hint of humanity underneath.

A sequel was never going to rival the impact of the original, so director Tobe Hooper decided to make a gory black comedy instead. While TCM 2 is fun in its own way it turns Leatherface into a drooling idiot, and any sense of menace is gone. Part three ignored his death in the previous entry, and tried to make him scarier by giving him a larger chainsaw; didn’t work.

TCM: The Next Generation is a travesty barely worth mentioning, and while the remake tried to make him scary again it was too slick and glossy. Put simply, none of the sequels managed to capture the essence of the character, and he essentially became a chubby dude running around with a saw.