This installment of Phantom Limbs tears into Twisted Pictures’ initial attempts at tackling the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, developed during the early days of the company’s success with the Saw franchise. Joining us for this talk is Stephen Susco, writer of The Grudge and writer/director of Unfriended: Dark Web, who details the origins of the project, the ambitious plans he had for the series, and why it ultimately didn’t work out.
Along the way, The Conjuring/Malignant filmmaker James Wan pops by to detail his surprising connection to the project with some exclusive insights of his own.
“So this was back in 2006? I can’t remember the year. I was working with Evolution, which was a management company. I had a manager named Chris Ridenour, and he had gone to work with Evolution right around the time that The Grudge was about to come out. It was basically three guys – Mark Burg, Oren Koules, and Gregg Hoffmann. By the time TCM happened, Greg Hoffman had unfortunately passed away, which was really awful. He was an amazing guy. But those three guys basically were talent managers. What really sort of propelled them was the day they read Saw, which was weirdly having trouble finding traction. They took out second mortgages on their homes to give James and Leigh a million dollars to make Saw. It was just an incredible story. They just so believed in those guys and their vision. Obviously, it was enormous, and they basically owned it, so that loaded their coffers and they were off doing Saw II.”
Coming off of the first Saw‘s success and flush with cash, Evolution/Twisted looked to expand their brand further, casting their gaze to a beloved genre property. “So Evolution became more involved in producing. One day they called me and said, ‘Do you like Texas Chain Saw Massacre?’ And I was like, ‘Who doesn’t?! Why?’ And they said, ‘Well, we’re approaching the rightsholders.’ At that point, New Line had done two movies. They did the first reboot with Platinum Dunes, Michael Bay’s company, and then they did the prequel [2006’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning]. After that, they said, ‘We’re talking to them.’ It was pretty clever. They were essentially saying, ‘You know, you guys keep optioning the rights to New Line, and you get a big check, but if one of those movies makes a hundred million dollars, you don’t get that much of that. We want to do the Saw model. How about we partner up and you give us the rights now, but instead of just optioning the rights, we’re partners on it and we’ll finance the movie? So we’ll be financial partners in all of the backend.’”
Unfortunately, acquiring the rights to this particular franchise is a tad more difficult than it is with most, according to Susco. “The rights are in a weird place because there’s bad history, so you have to get a judge to sign off on it, you have to get Tobe to sign off on it, you have to get Kim Henkel to sign off on it. You have to make them all happy, basically. They said, ‘So we have their ear, but we don’t have a take. We have to give them a take.’ So it’s wide open. Like, what would you do if someone said, ‘Here’s Texas Chain Saw.’ It’s such a rare thing, especially for an existing franchise. Writers usually have to take what [producers] dream about and beat it out to make other people happy. This was an interesting case where they were like, ‘We have a shot, we just have to convince them.’”
Tasked with finding a way into the decades-old franchise, Susco reveals that it was its central figure that drew him in and spurred on his take on the material. “I’d always been really fascinated by it. I mean, I love all kinds of horror, especially the great slashers, but there was something about Texas Chain Saw that was always really interesting to me. One is that it was so less bloody than people remember. So much of the original was implied. I think that made it almost more frightening in hindsight. But also, I was just always intrigued by Leatherface. When you juxtapose him with Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, all the kind of most iconic characters at that time, there was something so kind of socially relevant about the way Leatherface had been set up in the original movie, which was a very socially relevant movie at the time. He was sort of the character who was maybe not crazy, whereas his family was sort of insane.
Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
“You kind of looked at him like, ‘Well, what if he was raised to be this way?’ He’s probably never left this house. What happens to someone who was raised to believe certain things are true and never has any data to convince them of anything otherwise? Is that crazy, or is that something different? I think when the movie came out, it was obviously a commentary on things like racial discrimination. It was all sorts of things. I just thought that there was kind of a deeper river there with Leatherface. I thought, ‘What if we really kind of got into Leatherface? What makes this character tick?‘”
In addition to delving into Leatherface’s psyche, Susco reveals that he would further justify the original film’s claims of being based on true events by bringing in some forgotten (and quite grim) Texas history. “The other thing that really piqued my curiosity as I got deeper into researching it … I had always heard about cannibalism in Texas. There was a tribe of Native Americans there called the Tonkawa, and they practiced ritualistic cannibalism, which not all Native Americans did.
Tonkawa Indians, 1898 (Credit The Tonkawa Tribe of Oklahoma)
“It was sort of believed that maybe it was because they had come up from further south, that they had more ancient rituals from the Aztecs and the Incas. I found historical documents that talked about how this Indian tribe did practice cannibalism. Not only that, they worked with the Texas Rangers, and even the U.S. Army at one point, as scouts and occasionally as soldiers. There were rumors that the units that had Texas Rangers and Tonkawa in them, that the Tonkawa made them do their cannibalism rituals before battle. So I was like, ‘I wonder if there’s a line that can be drawn…?’ I think I was always curious about the infrastructure behind [the Sawyer family]. The first movie didn’t peel back the curtain that much. It just dropped you in with the characters who stumbled upon this house. It was sort of an unsolved mystery, but like…how could this be an unsolved mystery? How could no one have figured out that this is a house of people who were cannibals? I was always like, ‘The aperture is wider here.’”
Susco went off and drew up his take on the franchise, coming back a month later with an eye-popping pitch: “I came back to them and said, ‘Okay, we should do a trilogy, and it should be called Leatherface, and the movie should be about him.’ My dream version of this movie is to act as if the first movie was a record, and it ended when someone lifted the needle off the record, and we’re just going to lower it right back to the same spot. So the movie is going to begin right where the original ended, in the back of the truck with Sally Hardesty.”
Marilyn Burns as Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Sally would have returned? One imagines recasting Marilyn Burns would have been necessary, to keep the character the same age as when we last saw her. “Yeah, with the original idea, I wanted the movie to start with Sally Hardesty, but we couldn’t [bring back Marilyn Burns]. So we would have to recast her, but we would have to try really hard to make it as seamless as possible, you know?’
In Susco’s original pitch document, he notes that the core questions that would fuel his trilogy would be “What happened to Sally? What happened to Leatherface? And what the heck is the story behind his family?” Using the Saw franchise as a touchtone, Susco wrote that the best way to answer those questions would be to tell a continuously-evolving story, enriching it, rather than merely remaking or reimagining the tale.
“We were going to continue Sally Hardesty’s story as she gets to safety,” Susco reveals. “Then you start to realize that people know about this family, and there’s more going on in this area than than it seems. We would sort of fill in the blanks and essentially kind of say, ‘Let’s continue Tobe’s story. Let’s build it out, you know?’”
To this end, Susco used the history of the Tonkawa to surmise the existence of a wealthy colony that isolated itself from civilization in the wake of the horrors wrought by the Civil War, removing itself from a “corruptive and base” world. To do so, the Colony’s leader used the wealth amassed from the discovery of a massive vein of gold in the Texas flatlands, buying up large swaths of land to shelter his community. Even still, the goal of the Colony wasn’t material wealth so much as spiritual wealth, with the gold acting merely as a means to that end. They would use it to buy their privacy, as well as a blind eye from local and state authorities, all to practice their religion in secret.
The religion, of course, having the core tenet of cannibalism. However, rather than the grimy, grisly, gritty displays that one might expect in a Texas Chain Saw film (or its many imitators), the cannibalism practiced at the colony would be “formal, elegant, and reverent.” In fact, anyone the Colony might eat would have to give themselves over willingly.
A far cry from the Sawyer family, to be sure. Indeed, the films would reveal that the Sawyers practiced a “twisted, insane bastardization” of the Colony’s religion, which is the primary reason that they were expelled years before the events of the first TCM. Susco explains that their madness would stem from prion disease, which results from the consumption of human brains. “The idea was that when one of them emerged in a Colony member, the powers that be kept the Colony pure (mentally and psychologically) by isolating them… essentially, the Sawyer ‘family’ was a dustbin of sorts, a place to exile those whose biology went a bit haywire due to their religious practices.” The Colony wouldn’t simply kill the Sawyers (as with the Tonkawa, the Colony members viewed their own flesh and blood as sacred), so they were banished, with the local authorities paid to keep a watch on them.
When the events of the first film occur, the titular massacre threatens to destroy the Colony’s stability, which forces their hand and ensures an intervention of sorts. It is here, at the beginning of the story, that we’ll witness a wounded Leatherface return home in the wake of the original film’s climax, only to discover his home ablaze and the bodies of his family members burned. The events that follow bring Leatherface to the Colony, where he is revealed to be the bastard son of its current leader, himself a descendant of the Colony’s founder. This revelation kicks off a series of events which rock the Colony, and will lead to its inevitable destruction.
Along the way, the main story will unfold a mystery which will envelop Sally and Franklin’s parents, their Vietnam vet buddy who knows more about their children’s predicament than they realize, and a young University of Dallas senior taking a road trip to meet her fiancé’s parents, who we’ll discover have “some rather peculiar religious and culinary practices.”
Much like the original ’74 film, the events of this trilogy would have happened over a rather short period of time, with each installment taking up a single day. “The first movie is going to be the rest of that day,” Susco explains. “Then Movie 2 is the day after that, maybe 3 is the day after that, and we were going to shoot it in 16mm handheld. It was going to look like it was filmed back then and was lost in time.”
“So they liked it, and they said, ‘Okay, we have to pitch it to Tobe and Kim Henkel and, and everyone else.’ And they loved it. I think to me, it was like, as a fan, this is what I’d like to see. Everybody signed off on it.”
Given that it was being developed in-house, the producers would thankfully not have to worry about studio interference. “We had this amazing plan. Again, because it was Twisted Pictures, we were going to do it like Saw, where they had total control. The idea was, we were going to do three movies, and there was going to be $10 million total spent. So $3.3 million each, and we’d probably shoot them all at the same time. Actually, I remember we were working on this big Comic-Con announcement where there was going to be an unnamed film that was going to be announced. The Saw producers were going to come out, then I was going to come out, Tobe was going to come out. We were going to build to it, then it was going to be, ‘Leatherface Trilogy! First movie, Thanksgiving. Second movie, Easter. Third movie. Thanksgiving (or something).’
“As a writer, it was kind of a dream come true, because it was a wide open landscape. Tobe and Kim really resonated with the idea of continuing their legacy. In fact, for a while, there were talks of Tobe directing [one of the installments]. In fact, James Wan was going to do the first one, and Tobe was going to direct the second one.”
Hang on. So, after helming the first two installments of the original franchise, Tobe Hooper was set to return to the series that he’d started?! And hot off of Saw, before the mega-successes of The Conjuring films, Furious 7 and Aquaman, James Wan was going to direct a Texas Chain Saw film?!
Tobe Hooper and James Wan
“We had these epic dinners,” Susco laughs. “James put together these incredible drawings that I think he did himself of what Leatherface was going to look like. So it was kind of like, ‘Man, this is going to be extraordinary. And the best part of it is, there’s no studio influence!’ It was just going to be really pure. You know, if you control the money, you control the vision. Developing good horror at the studio level is really tough. I think that’s part of what was so enthusiastic about this process, it felt like probably what the original Texas Chain Saw process felt like. It was like, ‘Someone has money and a camera!’ And we had money and a camera, and Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel. So it felt like, ‘Man, this is going to be something that we can really be proud of.’”
In addition to exploring what makes Leatherface tick, Susco reveals that he wanted to focus on the why of the masks. “One of the things that we really wanted to get into was the point of the masks, because they’ve had so many. It’s one of the things that’s been interesting about watching all of the new iterations of TCM, how people sort of interpret the way that he uses other people’s faces. There are a lot of different variances, and some of them feel like they’re just kind of to be cool. Some of them seem to have a psychological element, and we really were interested in the psychology, really trying to plumb the character of Leatherface and look at … you know, when a person is raised this way, and they don’t have any outside perspective, then there’s no good or bad. It’s just, if they’re not part of this family, they’re just meat. They squeal like a pig does. A scream is just a squeal. If that humanity has been stripped away … that’s what we really wanted to get at.
“So we were trying to figure out why he uses the masks, what is the purpose of the masks? What did they do? Do they act as insulation? Is there a struggle going on inside of him? As if he started to feel something, and he uses the masks to block that.
“James was so in on that idea. I remember his drawings. He had, I think, three different ones. It was Leatherface in three different masks, and the way he used makeup when he was wearing the woman’s mask. I remember he also had Leatherface’s posture being different in every mask, and it really captured the idea that Leatherface sort of presented himself differently depending on what he was wearing. Like, when he was cooking dinner, he switched into a ‘mom’ sort of role. But then when he’s chasing them, he switched into a different role. I think he was inspired by the original.”
In addition to granting Bloody Disgusting permission to publish the photographs Mr. Susco provided of the epic dinners mentioned above, James Wan was kind enough to detail his intended approach for Leatherface and his masks: “One of my ideas was for Leatherface to wear a few masks, each one reflecting his emotions – happy, sad, mad/angry. It could say a lot without needing him to do anything. Plus a mask with a leering/grinning smile could be so sinister and creepy.
Tobe Hooper and James Wan present Leatherface
“I was on this project briefly. The highlight was meeting Tobe again (I had met him once before at a Masters of Horror dinner). He was the sweetest and nicest guy, and I wanted his blessing, which he totally loved and embraced. I thought it was funny that the Saw-guy was contemplating also being the Chainsaw-guy. This was during the period where I was developing and semi-attached for two seconds on three different projects – Castlevania, Texas Chainsaw, and The Blob (I got to meet the legendary Jack Harris). None happened. Eventually, I went off and directed Insidious.”
An epic dinner with two Masters of Horror
“It was so great to just have that kind of level of conversation,” Susco enthuses. “And be like, ‘We’re going to have three movies to arc this out!’ you know?” The writer even reveals that another noteworthy genre director was being considered to follow up Wan and Hooper to direct the third feature. “I think Neil Marshall was brought up, but we never got past the discussion of [the first and second films].”
Unfortunately, as we all know, this trilogy never came to fruition. So what happened? “The Twisted Pictures guys were extraordinary. They were not the issue at all. Everything went from being absolutely heavenly to pure hell.
“Something changed, and no one ever told me what it was, but all of a sudden they said, ‘We’re going to go in and we’re going to talk to Lionsgate about this.’ They were distributing all the Saws at Lionsgate, so I was like, ‘Oh, is this like a formality? Or you have a first look deal with them? You’re going to get the money from them to distribute?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ It was a very strange meeting [with Lionsgate]. I was like, ‘Do I need to just talk about the take?’ And they’re like, “Yeah, just talk through it.’ I mean, I had so much research, and most of the three movies arced out. So we went in and had a meeting. It was big, there were like twelve people there from Lionsgate, I think because Saw was making them so much money at that point, probably.
“It was weird, because I was talking about [the take], and we were getting very strange looks. Then I remember Mark Burg, who is the head of Evolution and Twisted, [asking] ‘Has everyone in this room seen the movie that we’re talking about? The Texas Chain Saw Massacre?’ And they hadn’t. To Mark’s credit, he ended the meeting. He said, as politely as he could, ‘Let’s convene after everyone has had a chance to see the original movie.’
“But that’s also when I realized that something had gone horribly wrong, because I was sort of like ‘This doesn’t seem like a formality. Now this seems like they’re involved. They’re not just distributing the film.’ And that ended up, in fact, being the case. We heard from them, after everyone I guess watched Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and we essentially got a dictate. They said, ‘Okay, here’s what we want. This movie has to be PG-13. It has to be in 3D. There can be no cannibalism. And it has to take place in the present.’”
…what?
“I was like, ‘Okay. So are we going to find another distributor? Or are we just going to make it?’ And this is when I realized this wasn’t the case. That for some reason, what Lionsgate said had to actually occur. I was just flabbergasted. Like, “Why? Why?! You guys had total control!’ And I don’t know what the answer was. It was just one of these things where it was like, ‘This is the situation. We have to develop this version with Lionsgate. But, you know, we want to fight for this take, for this version.’ So we did a bunch of things. I wrote a 3D treatise. I said, ‘If we’re going to do 3D, here’s how I think it should be used.’ And I wrote this treatise about how it can’t be old school 3D, where it’s like someone shoots an arrow and it flies into the camera, you know? I wanted to do what modern 3D was really leaning into, with ‘You’re in the world.’
“I pitched them a scene from what was going to be the first movie, where someone was under a butcher’s table as Leatherface was rendering one of their friends above them. And there’s like an arm in the foreground, there are things in the background, and you’re hearing stuff above you. I was like, ‘The audience is under the table. That’s how you use 3D … you put the audience in this predicament. I even wrote the first chapter in 3D, with the sections that were in 3D put in bold, and I said ‘3D’. I described it to try and be really specific.
“So we tried that dance. We said, ‘Okay, how can we make this work?’. And one of the things they would not budge on was … they were like, ‘It has to be present day. Has to be present day.’ I think because the New Line version with Jessica Biel was period, even though it felt very modern. That caused a problem because they were like, ‘We don’t want it to be anything like the New Line version.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but we’re going to shoot ours 16mm handheld on really old stock. Marcus Nispel’s was a period piece, but it was really shiny, with lens flares and saturated colors. [Ours] is not going to look anything like it.’ But they were adamant. ‘Can’t be period. Has to be modern.’
“And I was like, ‘Okay. Well, it’s primarily about Leatherface. Maybe it would be fun to do Old Leatherface, you know?’ It was actually the one thing I liked about their insistence upon making it present day. I was like, ‘Well, then, we could just bring back Gunnar Hansen and have it be Old Leatherface. Like, that’s great!‘
Mark Burnham as an older Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)
“You know, a Leatherface who’s in his 60s and is like an old bull. Still massive, but creaky. There could be something so fascinating about that, especially if we’re trying to really unpack this character’s psyche. That was what energized me when I tried writing the draft, reframing my thinking on that. Maybe it’s more interesting to look at him so many years later, and to bring it home with Tobe Hooper being involved, with Gunnar Hansen being involved, it would just be the perfect sweet spot, you know?”
Unfortunately, the team kept running into walls with Lionsgate. “We weren’t getting anywhere. They were like, ‘It has to be PG-13.’ All these things. So Mark Burg – again, to his credit – said ‘You have to let him write the first chapter. Let him write the first film, and let him convince you on the page, because we believe in this. Tobe believes in this. Kim believes in this.’ So it was obviously helpful to have the original guys say, ‘We like this version.’ So they said, “Okay, write the first chapter.’”
”But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul.”
– Mary Shelley
Opening with the above quote and launching us right into the final moments of Hooper’s original film, Susco’s Leatherface wastes no time in getting down to the shocks. Just after SALLY and the semi truck driver dodge LEATHERFACE and his chainsaw, our heroine finds herself driven to safety at a gas station several miles away by the driver of the pickup truck that ferried her away from danger. There, Sally rests in the back of the truck while its driver steps inside of the station, conferring with the people inside and presumably calling for help.
The semi arrives just behind them, its own driver rushing inside to speak with the others. Seemingly rescued, Sally hears some distressing noises from the back of the truck and investigates, only to discover its cargo is a number of human carcasses hanging from meat hooks, one of them alive and pleading for help. Before Sally can help or flee, an older woman previously glimpsed inside of the gas station appears behind Sally and swings an axe into her neck, murdering the short-lived survivor of the previous night’s horrors.
Leatherface in the final moments of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Back at the Sawyer residence, Leatherface has gathered the various pieces of the Hitchhiker, flaying the face from his brother’s skull before lowering his body parts into a shallow grave that he’s just dug himself. The behemoth collapses from the blood loss resulting from the grievous chainsaw wound he received only minutes ago, barely conscious enough to register the arrival of two men (one in a suit, the other a cop). They stare down at Leatherface, contempt in their eyes. Cut to black.
37 Years Later. Nearly four decades have passed to bring us to the then-modern day of 2010. Leatherface, now in his mid-50s, works at a slaughterhouse for an abusive older couple (BETHANY and TOBIT) tasked with watching over the killer and keeping him in line. It’s a sad existence for the man, his days filled only with killing and cutting apart cattle, his only friend in the world a stray dog that visits and appreciates the food that Leatherface slips to him when his cruel caretakers aren’t looking. Gone is Leatherface’s signature skin mask, replaced here by a cloth veil affixed to his head with screws driven into his flesh and bone. An awakening of sorts occurs when Leatherface stumbles upon the knowledge that Bethany and Tobit have been drugging his food to keep him docile. Leatherface stows away a few tainted meals, plays possum, then makes a bloody escape from his captors.
Bethany hears a chainsaw going near the house, sees a spray of blood painting its side. She finds Tobit, still alive, his arms missing. Blood pumps out of his ragged stumps. Bethany sees Leatherface nearby, kneeling beside his dog, feeding it Tobit’s fingers. Leatherface dispatches her with a garden hoe, then removes his veil and replaces it with Tobit’s face, newly peeled from the man’s skull. Fueled by visions from his past and with his new canine friend by his side, Leatherface sets off in the same direction as a pretty young woman he glimpsed driving away from a general store in the small town seated below the slaughterhouse.
And about that girl. We first meet COLLEEN (20, blonde, beautiful) as she awakens next to her boyfriend ISSAC (22, Texan). The two are a cute couple – Colleen a Michelin-level chef in the making, Issac her adoring test subject who exasperates his girlfriend with his vegetarian diet. The two are planning on spending some time apart, with Issac visiting his family back in his small Texas hometown while Colleen heads off on a ski trip with best friend DEBBIE (20, party girl) and her rich douchebag boyfriend JARED (27, chiseled). When a winter storm grounds their flight and derails their plans, the trio plans a surprise visit to Issac’s family home.
Just before they leave, Colleen is confronted by WILL (21), her ex-boyfriend who vanished two years prior when he went off into the military. It’s hinted that whatever business Will got up to there was of the top secret variety, explaining why he was unable to keep in contact with Colleen, effectively ending their relationship. Colleen leaves Will behind, setting off on the fateful road trip with Debbie and Jared in the latter’s sleek convertible Jaguar.
Their journey takes them to Effet, where a brief stop at a general store finds Colleen glimpsed by a hulking figure haunting the hill above her near the slaughterhouse. The group heads on towards Issac’s family home, finding it to be a massive plantation-style estate resting within a canyon below. Colleen is stunned. She had no idea Issac and his family were wealthy.
At the house, they find EVE GALTON (17, pretty) and DAVID GALTON (17, video game junkie), Issac’s siblings. Neither Issac nor his parents are there, but the brother and sister make our heroes feel right at home while they wait on their family to return.
Meanwhile, Leatherface makes his way into Effet, noticing a strange crescent symbol on the police cruisers (the same symbol worn by the men who killed his family all those years ago). He lumbers into a small diner, sees a Deputy, a waitress, a cook, and a handful of customers staring at him with wide eyes. He makes quick, bloody work of them all, using everything he can at his disposal to dispatch the townspeople: a check spike, a knife, and his bare hands. He grinds up the cook’s severed arm into a hamburger patty for himself and his pet, then takes notice of the transmission lines running along the hills above the town. He remembers them from when he was young, when he was bound and transported in a van, and how the lines terminated at a station full of metal pylons. He heads off in the direction of the lines, which inevitably leads him to the Jaguar carrying the pretty blonde he’d previously seen, the vehicle sitting just outside the Galton mansion.
Leatherface makes his way inside, slaughtering David, then the house’s cooks, who wear the same crescent symbol of those who killed his family. A flashback hits him, reminding him of being caged by a man who wore the same crescent, who viciously tortured and disfigured him. After dispatching the final cook via table saw in the mansion’s large garage, Leatherface looks over a wall of tools and sees a chainsaw.
Colleen and Eve return from a trip to a nearby lake, noticing a pool of blood on the floor leading into the kitchen. Before they can react, Leatherface fires up his chainsaw and drives it through Eve, lifts her high above his head (“He SWINGS HER AROUND, trying to un-harpoon her – -“). Jared arrives, attacks Leatherface with a golf club. A brief battle follows, with Leatherface pressing the chainsaw into Jared’s head.
From there, a cat and mouse game ensues between Leatherface and our remaining heroines, with Colleen and Debbie seeking refuge in the mansion’s attic and eventually getting split up as they attempt to escape. Her own phone broken, Colleen uses a landline to try Issac’s phone, getting his voicemail. She then dials the only other person she can think of – Will. She shouts out her location, that “he’s killing everyone”, before Leatherface arrives and races after her. Will drops everything, grabs a Texas map, and tears off on his motorcycle.
At the Galton’s, a vehicle pulls into the driveway, distracting Leatherface from his pursuit. It’s Issac’s parents, having just finished listening to a religious sermon in their vehicle. The father, HENRY (60s), steps from his vehicle at the sight of Leatherface, recognizing him and attempting to talk him down. It does no good, especially after the chainsaw-wielding butcher recognizes the older man as not only his torturer, but the man who presided over the killing of his family. Leatherface pulls out a large pair of gardening shears and advances on the couple.
Will makes it to Effet in search of the Galton home, only to be met with resistance by the local authorities, in particular a Sheriff that seems to be in service to a wealthy master. Frustrated, Will calls an old Army sergeant for a favor, even as a Deputy calls in a couple of men to deal with Will and his questioning.
Back at the mansion, Colleen attempts to escape, only to be backed into hiding beneath a kitchen table. In an intense sequence, bodies are butchered just above her (“the limbs hanging around Colleen JERK UP AND DOWN HORRIBLY as Leatherface butchers them”), all as Leatherface’s stray dog stares at Colleen. Just as the canine is about to give her up, inspiration strikes. When Leatherface isn’t looking, she tosses a scrap of human meat over the dog’s head as a treat, then slips out of the kitchen quietly as Leatherface is distracted.
In town, at a small bar, the three men enlisted by the Deputy corner Will, intending to murder him. Will makes short work of the group, killing them swiftly. Debbie bursts in, bloodied and frantic. She recognizes Will, runs into his arms, and tells him where Colleen is. A shotgun blast catches her in the back, fired by the bartender who’d intended to kill Will. He kills the bartender, then sets off toward the Galton’s, shotgun in hand.
Meanwhile, Leatherface corners Colleen in the mansion basement. Just as things look bleakest for her, Leatherface reaches out and caresses her face, thinking of a young blonde girl who was once kind to him when he was young. A Deputy enters, tasing both Leatherface and Colleen. Going in and out of consciousness, Colleen is carried by Issac, allowing her to witness a number of dinner guests filling the house, as well as several human bodies roasting in the home’s large oven.
Later, once she’s fully awake, Issac explains his family that he’d intended to introduce her to his world, to the Colony. Realizing she will not take part in the Colony and its practices, Issac drugs her just before Leatherface appears and steals her away, taking off into the night with her.
Will arrives at the Galton mansion and finds Issac – bloody, but alive (thanks to Colleen’s pleas). Colleen’s new beau tells her ex that he knows just where to find both she and Leatherface: the remaining Sawyer’s true home.
The climax of the film unfolds at the old family farmhouse, where both Will and Issac attempt to save Colleen from Leatherface’s clutches (not realizing that the lumbering maniac has no intention of harming her). A vicious battle follows, with Leatherface beating Will to the ground and stomping on his wrist. Issac handcuffs himself to Leatherface, buying Colleen and Will just enough time to escape. Unfortunately for the young Galton, “Leatherface SWINGS ISSAC AROUND THE ROOM like a rag doll. Breaking bones with every collision. He’s dead in seconds.”
Colleen and Will drive away from the farmhouse, only to break down alongside the road not far away. They attempt to escape the town, only to find themselves at a small suburban colony standing behind a large wall. Hundreds of homes inside. She and Will move toward the Colony’s main gate.
At the farmhouse, three men show up to confront Leatherface, the leader bearing the crescent mark on his palm. He shoots Leatherface’s dog dead, then has his men tranquilize the killer and stow him away in their Range Rover. They tie up Leatherface and drive him to the Colony. “Leatherface has finally returned to the place he came from…”
So ends the script, setting up the next two installments which would sadly never come.
“So I wrote the first chapter, the first movie, and I think within two days of emailing it to them they said, ‘Okay, now here’s what we want you to write.’ So I don’t even think they ever read it. We were sent a three paragraph thing, and it was basically ‘Teenagers pick up a hitchhiker and there’s a guy with a chainsaw and he chases them around and kills a bunch of them and there’s a cool scene where the chainsaw comes through the backseat of the car and then they all get killed.’
“Like, that was what they wanted, and that was when I bowed out. I just said, ‘I can’t. I was too excited about [the original take].’ You know, sometimes you just go, ‘It’s a job. Okay, if that’s what you want, fine. I understand that’s my role as a screenwriter, I will give you the best version of what you want.’ And I couldn’t do it in this case. It was just like … it was going to be too good, you know? There was so much potential, and I just didn’t understand drowning the potential before it really had a chance. It was so frustrating. ‘I just can’t. No hard feelings, but I just can’t do it.’ The guys understood, and they let me kind of bow out of the project, and it went on from there. That was basically my experience on the project.”
At this point, your writer sighs heavily and notes that one of the major drawbacks of doing these Phantom Limbs articles is discovering some truly amazing projects that sadly never happened due to infuriating choices like the ones detailed above. “I console myself by thinking that these stories are probably a dime a dozen,” Susco responds. “That any filmmaker you talk to will have a ‘Oh, wait, let me tell you about this!’ It’s hard in particular when it comes to a beloved franchise. That’s when it really, really hurts.
“The most frustrating thing is that there was nothing in the way. Everyone was on board. They had all the money to make it. They didn’t need, I thought, to partner with a studio. That’s the part I will never understand, why someone made the decision to do that, and how much that changed everything.”
In wrapping up our talk, Susco provides his final thoughts on the franchise he came so close to resurrecting. “I’m glad that the Leatherface legacy lives on. I’m glad people are still making them, and that they’re finding inventive ways to make them. I hope new people keep coming in and reduxing it. I’d rather it continued on. I’d rather my movie had gotten made and been a part of that series, but I’m certainly glad that the legend hasn’t died.”
Very special thanks to Stephen Susco and James Wan for their time and insights.
This has been Phantom Limbs, a recurring feature which takes a look at intended yet unproduced horror sequels and remakes – extensions to genre films we love, appendages to horror franchises that we adore – that were sadly lopped off before making it beyond the planning stages. Here, we chat with the creators of these unmade extremities to gain their unique insight into these follow-ups that never were, with the discussions standing as hopefully illuminating but undoubtedly painful reminders of what might have been.
Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)