CHAPTER TEN

LEATHERFACE AND LOVELACE

[The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is] “despicable … ugly and obscene … a degrading, senseless misuse of film and time.”

—LINDA GROSS, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Leatherface and Lovelace—two early 1970s icons of guerilla filmmaking tangled in a sociological courtship. Respectively, they explored the horrific and horny extremes, became movie mutations, and helped to instigate challenges about which films are “acceptable” to show, which age group could see them, and which communities—as well as other countries—would ban them.

As two marauders off to invade cinema’s visceral frontier, Leatherface and Lovelace stretched the boundaries of “good taste” and engendered future grindhouse offspring that combined brutality with doses of sex (although usually not hardcore pornography). Leatherface and Lovelace raided the body (or, for academics, “the body politic”) and broke tradition’s backbone during a unique and hot-blooded period in contemporary American history.

In Chain Saw Confidential, Gunnar Hansen mentions that Robert Burns, Chain Saw’s art director and production designer, once fashioned a “Linda Lovelace Deep Throat pinball machine … something Bob had designed and built from a previously defunct, more innocent machine. He was proud of his invention and quick to point it out.” Perhaps Burns also had an unconscious premonition that Leatherface and Lovelace might somehow cross cultural paths. Teri McMinn, in one of several squeamish reflections about her Chain Saw days in the role of Pam, reflected how, “at the time that was all happening, doing horror, hard-core horror, was like doing hard-core porn.”

When finishing the film, Hooper and Henkel were not exactly chirpy about its commercial promises. “There were quite a few days,” Henkel recalls in Hansen’s book, “where I thought, There’s no way in hell we’re going to get through this with anything that’s worth doing anything [with], except sticking it in a shoe box and throwing it in the back of the closet.” Edwin Neal was just as doubtful: “I didn’t know that it would all fit together. That was my biggest fear, was that the parts—some of which were quite good—how were they going to get them in a cohesive whole? This worried me a great deal.”

Along with Hooper, Henkel, chief editor Larry Carroll, Sallye Richardson also worked assiduously on a Steenbeck for over a year to stitch the right parts together. “Chain Saw was made in editing,” Richardson recalls in the Texas Chain Saw Companion. “But basically, once post-production started, nobody touched that film apart from Tobe and me … I’m the one who cut the tracks. And if you think Marilyn Burns screamed for one day—it took me maybe two weeks to cut that track …”

It was late in the summer of 1974 when they finished editing and made something greater than they had anticipated. Chain Saw was all trimmed to camouflage the clutter they had assembled the year before. Now, they had to convince players in the movie business to concur. The business side of Chain Saw’s history offers another kind of pornography involving the passions, degradations, and sometimes sadism of accountants, lawyers, plaintiffs, alleged mobsters, and fiscal busybodies obsessed with facts, figures, and fluid dollar amounts.

Apart from how the cast and crew withstood the heat, the stench, and Hooper’s incessant retakes, the distribution phase of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre provided extra layers of horror that reflected the changing power dynamics of movies, particularly the diminished role of the old studio system. Bigwigs like Paramount, Warner Bros., Universal, and even American International Pictures (Roger Corman’s old haunt) turned down offers to distribute Chain Saw. Columbia had initially agreed until its board of directors met in New York City, caught a screening, and refused to dine on Hooper’s cannibal holocaust.

Warren Skaaren, the film’s prime benefactor who contributed its jaw-dropping title, came to Hooper’s aid once again. A dream offer arrived after Skaaren touched base with Bryanston Films, which formed in the early ’70s, partly as a result of the vast sums of money its members were making from distributing Deep Throat. Bryanston proved adept at dispensing naughty, violent, low-budget fare that established studios would not touch.

Bryanston was manned by Joseph “The Whale” Peraino and his brothers Anthony “Big Tony” and Louis “Butchie.” They doled out hefty sums of cash for what they saw as promising projects. By the time Bryanston lured Hooper and company into a deal, the advance for the film went up to approximately $225,000. It was as if Daddy Warbucks were reborn from a comic strip figure into a real-life mogul hurling directives from a smoke-filled boardroom. Even Jay Parsley found new hope that his precious $40,000 investment was not doomed to swirl down a commode.

Just as the promises of money and exposure helped Hooper feel restored, another American, much more prominent and supposedly the most powerful, was falling from grace. As he prepared to leave his Oval Office after clinging so long to stay, President Nixon resigned. Mystically speaking, Nixon became the ritual sacrifice in an atmosphere that was tough on government corruption but prosperous for transgressive movies that allowed Leatherface to become a new species of monster and for Lovelace to introduce a large swath of America to body parts and activities they otherwise dared not talk about in public or to themselves.

When Hooper and company signed the deal in August of 1974, and Bryanston released the film, Hooper had no pretenses about “socially redeeming value.” The press notes quote him with a detached and somewhat nihilistic attitude: “It’s a film about meat, about people who have gone beyond animal meat and rats and dogs and cats. Crazy retarded people going beyond the line between animal and human.”

With Deep Throat and other feature-length “skin flicks” going more mainstream, a few who had tinkered in what some in those days referred to as “poontang” became horror-bound. Wes Craven admitted to making porn films in the weaning stages of his career. So, when he spiked The Last House on the Left with rape and the close-up of a woman forced to urinate in her jeans, he was already inured in the art of mixing horror with kink. Instead of making dirty pictures, however, Hooper and Henkel started with sex-free horror but fell into a web of financial mischief usually associated with an underworld that bankrolled “smut.”

Despite its shady side, Bryanston was shrewd about marketing independent movies that reflected the shifting tastes. Among them was Return of the Dragon (1972), which Bruce Lee both starred in and directed. In bringing out this second-to-last Lee entry, Bryanston contributed to the massive idolatry surrounding him after his death in July of 1973. In 1974, Bryanston was responsible for letting the public see John Carpenter’s first feature Dark Star, as well as the 3-D nudity, sex, violence, and even bowel rape in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. Amid the horror, lechery, and violence, the Perainos also hoped to put out a movie about a pope. For Chain Saw, they also produced a killer poster: Leatherface flaunts his weapon, Pam hangs by the meathook in the background, and the caption asks, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”

Who could fault Hooper and company for flirting with the purported underworld, when the respectable overworld proved so dismissive and prissy? Bryanston had an instant appetite for Chain Saw, but its initial largesse proved to be an illicit fix when actors and others involved with making the film later discovered that, despite the millions of dollars it was raking in, tiny fractions of those earnings showed up on their royalty checks.

There was all that talk about how Chain Saw required merely several thousand dollars to make and was grossing millions, but most of that cash got funneled into a mystery wallet. Years afterward, actors complained about getting little or no pay. The attempt to settle this matter with Bryanston head-on proved as treacherous as those dramatized accounts in Hollywood blockbusters of the time like The Godfather: Part II. Chain Saw got mired in what appeared to be a mob-style scandal.

With a reputation for usually being easy going, the Bryanston bosses were known to display a different temper when clients complained about not getting their expected share. The Perainos attempted to distract the dissenters with tales about accountants being out of town. And when the disgruntled crossed the Rubicon by asking to examine the Bryanston books, the Perainos gave their pre-break-your-legs notice: “You ain’t got the balls to sue me.”

To comprehend the quicksand Hooper and Henkel had entered is to understand Deep Throat’s cultural impact and commercial success. When Deep Throat premiered at Time Square’s New Mature World Theater on June of 1972, curious crowds stood in lines spanning blocks to witness the incursion into what many called “porn chic.” Prominent feminist authors like Erica Jong and sexologists like Dr. Ruth Westheimer lauded how the movie would inspire everyday folk to bring up otherwise icky sexual matters at watercooler conversations in the workplace.

Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Mike Nichols, and Jack Nicholson caught a screening. The ever-puckish Truman Capote liked the film and thought Lovelace charming but admitted, “I know a lot of people who don’t want to see that sort of thing and so they don’t. They probably couldn’t stand it. You see it at your own peril.” Others with more middle-of-the-road reputations such as Frank Sinatra, Barbara Walters, and even Nixon’s vice president and public moral scold Spiro Agnew had a peek at this kryptonite to the mores of the Silent Majority.

Like lemmings, audiences were willing to pay the then-extortionate $5.00 admission to witness the sixty-five-minute sex tale that became the event of the season. Unlike the usual porn, with its spiritless and mechanical loops, Deep Throat had a story plot, a catchy soundtrack and theme song, and lots of self-deprecating humor that allowed the explicit scenes to fall back on parody. And many, likely embarrassed or nervous, laughed along.

Johnny Carson, a barometer for relevant topics via his Tonight Show monologues, joked about judges being able to watch Deep Throat but not being able to listen to Nixon’s tapes. One night, Carson’s alter-ego, the turbaned seer Carnac the Magnificent, who routinely guessed questions to answers, responded to “The Mississippi River” with “What’s the only thing that has a bigger mouth than Linda Lovelace?” Bob Hope said that, being “fond of animal pictures,” he went to see it and “thought it was about giraffes,” while Nipsy Russell perhaps accidentally called the film “Sore Throat.” Al Goldstein, the jovial publisher of Screw magazine, found religion: “I was never so moved by any theatrical performance since stuttering through my own bar mitzvah.”

Deep Throat became such a common coffee-klatch topic that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used the movie title to denote a mystery Watergate leaker in their tome All the President’s Men. However, for all of its widespread outrage, Deep Throat sounded an alarm to the staid movie industry: independent movies, even without customary cinematic merits, could gross hundreds of millions of dollars and leave an indelible impact.

Into 1972, the West Coast contributed to these cultural shifts. San Francisco porn kings the Mitchell Brothers, who ran their own theater on O’Farrell Street, were bemused by a hilarious moral contradiction. A young model named Marilyn Briggs moved to San Francisco in 1970, where she took several jobs including topless and bottomless dancing. She answered a casting-call advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle for what seemed like a major Hollywood production. Instead, she became the Mitchells’ superstar Marilyn Chambers. But while she portrayed the nymphomaniac lead in Behind the Green Door, another Marilyn confronted casual shoppers in supermarket aisles across America, this time holding an infant as her wholesome mug appeared on boxes of Ivory Snow for a photoshoot she did before her Green Door breakout.

Unfortunately, as many well-meaning media voices tried convincing the public that sex is not a vice, the sexual entertainment industry was often vice-ridden. In the early ’70s, the Colombo crime family was grabbing a fair share of attention. For those immersed in numbers, Deep Throat supposedly cost only $25,000 to make, was shot cheaply on 16mm, and took away over $600 million. But the cash was attached to the Perainos, who were in turn, reportedly attached to the Fort Lauderdale-based Colombo gang. In order to assure that they got their investment back, which ended up letting them accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars, the Perainos used the rough tactics displayed in such Hollywood productions of the time as The Don is Dead and other variations on The Godfather.

For decades, the film world and its public ambled in a haze about what is “dirty” or worse “not socially redeeming.” In 1957, the Supreme Court’s “Roth Decision” defined “obscene” to be any work whose “dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest.” Then in 1966, the Court attempted to clarify its definition, with a ruling that included the familiar phrase “utterly without redeeming social value”—a judgment so subjective that practically any book, including that high school favorite The Catcher in the Rye (with its sexually addled protagonist Holden Caulfield) could be labeled as obscene. Two years before, when the Court attempted to rule whether or not to apply the Scarlet “O” to Louis Malle’s The Lovers, Justice Potter Stewart was so perplexed at what constitutes “obscene” that he uttered the now-legendary line, “I know it when I see it.”

While still commanding his executive power before facing his own scandal, Nixon joined Congress in rejecting the results of the LBJ-sponsored Commission on Pornography and Obscenity. When released in 1970, Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography found no evidence of a direct link between pornography and bad behavior. Worse for Nixon, the study results also recommended sex education in schools to help combat venereal disease and unwanted pregnancies. The only Commission member to dissent from its findings was the future bankruptcy fraudster Charles Keating, Jr., who in the late ’50s headed a Roman Catholic anti-pornography group called Citizens for Decent Literature.

Nixon responded by going into overdrive:

“If the level of filth rises in the adult community, the young people in our society cannot help but also be inundated by the flood … The pollution of our culture, the pollution of our civilization with smut and filth is as serious a situation for the American people as the pollution of our once-pure air and water. Smut should not be simply contained at its present level; it should be outlawed in every State in the Union. And the legislatures and courts at every level of American government should act in unison to achieve that goal.”

Along with Nixon’s scolding, Keating tried to stop newsstands close to his office from selling magazines like Oui and Playboy and lambasted the Ramada Inn for offering adult entertainment on its cable television system. The Burger-led Supreme Court also threw its monkey wrench into the age of free expression. In June of 1973, the Court ruled in Miller v. California that “obscenity” could be defined by community standards, nullifying previous notions that the definition of “obscene” could apply nationally. What was acceptable for New York could now be deemed obscene in less lenient states like Texas or even small towns in California.

The 1973 decision had a three-pronged attack. In order for a work to be “obscene” it had to 1) offend people according to the “community standards” where they lived, 2) describe or show sex or excretion in an offensive manner, and 3) be devoid of “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific values.” In short, the Court decision left the country more confused. The first two stipulations at least confined the decision to communities, but the third depended too much on the personal quirks of “reasonable persons.” With this third specification, even The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as sexually chaste as it is, could be ruled as lacking in all of the esteemed values that city fathers in locales across the nation could arbitrate willy-nilly.

Deep Throat was the litmus test. The FBI started small by intimidating Lovelace, its director Gerard Damiano, and its co-star Harry Reems, who played the endowed Dr. Young. When Deep Throat started getting into trouble, and the New York Court of Appeals seized it while subjecting its makers, distributors, and exhibitors to another obscenity court case, some prominent writers and academics came to its defense. Film historian Arthur Knight, whose book The Liveliest Art is often required reading in college cinema courses, defended the film, insisting it indeed had all of that “socially redeeming value.” Sexologist John W. Money, from Johns Hopkins University, attempted to be complimentary when declaring, “It puts an eggbeater in people’s brains.”

Subsequent scandals involving its stars, including a court case that Reems later faced when Jerry Falwell charged him with obscenity, spiced up talk shows. In the 2005 HBO documentary Inside Deep Throat, Larry Parrish, a prominent prosecutor who worked against the movie, claims, “Deep Throat attacks the very core of our being.” But in a recursive chain of absurdity, the more the government and various moral crusaders tried to gag Deep Throat, the bigger and more rousing its legend got.

Poor little Chain Saw, with nary a smooch and only a few cuss words, putt-putt-putted to fame yet still got snagged into the institutional and financial mire usually consigned to “dirty” movies. The Chain Saw squad called the Perainos’ bluff and did sue. Unfortunately for them, Bryanston faced peril when they transgressed the Burger Court obscenity standards by marketing Deep Throat from state to state, inevitably reaching states that took umbrage—and action. The company got caught up in litigation and no longer had enough money to pay back their debts even if they so desired. A baffling web of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits followed, with members of the Chain Saw crew even suing each other. The film’s original producers fought to get their creation back, but creditors and other distributors would not let go of the rights.

In the meantime, Chain Saw still managed to cling to sprockets around the country. In New York City, in the midst of budget crises and rising crime, it offered some catharsis for horror enthusiasts fixing for another jolt to their jaded systems. The movie also found two unexpected enthusiasts. Judith Crist appreciated it as a new chapter in horror history. But Rex Reed was the most zealous. Reed, noted for rolling his eyes when showing disapproval, issued biting and verbose movie pans when appearing on television venues like The Mike Douglas Show. He tended to lambaste films he thought were in “bad taste” and even panned Myra Breckinridge, the only movie he starred in.

Reed, who saw Chain Saw at Cannes, appreciated the genuine subversion and cinematic novelty. For him, the film had the power to make “Psycho look like a nursery rhyme and The Exorcist look like a comedy.” He hailed it as “the most horrifying picture I have ever seen.” To pique interests all the more, Reed proclaimed, “The film is positively ruthless in its attempt to drive you right out of your mind.” After such a build-up, who could resist?

Critical reaction elsewhere was, in some cases, similar to the negative reception of Deep Throat two years before, particularly on the West Coast, when Ms. Gross from the Los Angeles Times called it “ugly and obscene.” “Be prepared for a totally disgusting and, for many, literally nauseating experience,” the Catholic Film Newsletter wrote in October of 1974. “The film is sick, and so is any audience that enjoys it.” What better way to inspire errant Catholics to run and see it as soon as possible?

Johnny Carson continued to be a bellwether for the “norm” in his nightly monologues. Just a couple of years before, he was relatively generous, though facetious, toward Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat, but when he caught a Chain Saw screening, he was livid and flabbergasted over the existence of such “trash.” “Johnny Carson, on the Tonight Show, hated it,” Hansen recalls in Chain Saw Confidential. “I watched him one night as he ranted about the movie, getting angrier as he went. Though I do not remember his exact words, essentially he said that Chain Saw was junk and should have received an X rating, not an R.”

Overseas, the reactions varied. British critic Derek Malcolm saw and admired the film in 1975, but he sensed there might be some kind of ban. “Morally retrograde it may be,” he wrote, “but then so are nightmares.” The BFI London Film Festival did host a BFI-members-only screening, but British authorities, who continue to display a habit of banning things as well as people, spoiled the fun. England still had actual blasphemy laws that remained on the books as common law offenses until 2008. Though blasphemy was not the issue with Chain Saw, the British Board of Film Classification found other excuses to block distribution.

Stephen Murphy, then acting as the BBFC’s Secretary, saw the film, liked it, placed it in the rather flattering category of “fictionalized documentary,” but thought it too disturbing even for an “X” certificate. The distributor made some cuts, but the Board still said no. Oddly, even its members admitted that, while it lacked much explicit violence, its atmosphere of madness and terror was so constant that no truncated version would have altered the menacing tone. James Ferman, who replaced Murphy in 1975, was more adamant about repressing what he described as “the pornography of terror.” Chain Saw did not get a formal nod from the BBFC until 1999, around the time Ferman left his position, when even its members credited the film’s relative subtlety, at least compared to subsequent horror offerings.

In France, it got selected for the Director’s Fortnight at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. In Italy, whose earlier Mondo shockumentaries jostled the world and whose directors like Dario Argento would follow up with layer after layer of giallo excess, took a natural shining. They released it, dubbed it, and even renamed it Non Aprite Quella Porta (or Don’t Open That Door).

Wes Craven, credited with bringing out the first chain saw in a modern horror film with The Last House on the Left, appreciated Hooper’s foray, fixating on the adjective “Mansonite” to describe the film’s impact. John Kenneth Muir, in his book Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper, elaborates when quoting Craven who, upon watching the film for the first time claimed, “I remember thinking, whoever made this must have been a Mansonite crazoid. A filmmaker like Tobe Hooper can convince you you’re really at risk in a theater—that’s quite an attainment.”

Author Wilson Bryan Key, who in Subliminal Seduction, claimed to see a man’s “partially erect genitals” in a 1971 Gilbey’s London Dry Gin ad, also wrote in The Age of Manipulation, the following accusation: “Hysterical fear reactions were initiated by movies such as The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Their producers publicly admitted both films contained violent and frightening subliminal stimuli.”

In the meantime, life proved more complicated for Gunnar Hansen, who had difficulty hiding in a crowd. A year or two after the film’s release, some pearl-clutching culture vulture confronted him at an “art” event. He tells of the incident in Texas Chain Saw Massacre: A Family Portrait:

“When you’re involved with a project like that, particularly if you’re visible like being the killer, you get blamed for a lot of society’s problems. I was at a chamber concert, and during the intermission, this Philadelphia dowager comes up to me and is talking and says, ‘You know, Gunnar, there were 12 people murdered today in New York City, and it’s your fault.’ I’m usually made speechless by comments like that. But I think that a lot of people think that movies like that are the cause of a lot of problems, when I think they’re symptomatic of some societal issues. And to my mind, though I’m not a psychologist, [the movies] probably are harmless or at least let people work through some misery. . . . My answer is that the misery is there, and the film simply uses that misery.”

Judging from how reactions to Chain Saw resembled some of Deep Throat’s negative feedback, the movies with explicit sex somehow gave hostile critics a perspective for judging movies with unprecedented violence. Two strident examples occurred in 1976. One was in Ottawa, Canada, when “morality detectives,” as an article in Ottawa’s Citizen newspaper described them, descended on a theater and a drive-in to warn proprietors that they would face charges if they did not withdraw the film. To underscore the comparison with pornography and sexploitation films that included gang rape, the article states, “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a low-budget screamer, which shows every intention of becoming an underground classic of the macabre, has gone to join Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.”

In America that same year, Harper’s ran a feature called “Fashions in Pornography.” In it, Stephen Koch, a friend of Warhol and author of a book on the Warhol films, suddenly channeled his inner prude, calling Chain Saw “a vile little piece of sick crap with literally nothing to recommend it: nothing but a hysterically paced, slapdash, imbecile concoction of cannibalism, voodoo, astrology, sundry hippie-esque cults, and unrelenting sadistic violence as extreme and hideous as a complete lack of imagination can possibly make it.”

Koch went on to write that Chain Saw is “a particularly foul item in the currently developing hard-core pornography of murder.” He wrote off the entire work as a “scab picking of the human spirit.” An apparent fan of “classic” Silver Screen musicals, Koch lamented the “impossible trip from the rosettes of Busby Berkeley to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre … that sickening ride from an impotent but refreshing sentimentalism to an impotent but monstrous viciousness.” Not content with just trashing the film, he also took aim at its star, referring to Hansen in the plural as “Obese gibbering castrati snarling chain saws as they chase and kill screaming women.”

In the early 1980s, the Chain Saw producers prevailed when the courts at last let the film rights revert back to them—just in time for a second life through New Line Cinema. From there, a franchise was born: what Hansen describes as “Chain Saw tchotchkes (including Chain Saw lunchboxes, t-shirts, clocks, facsimile posters, aprons, masks, and toy chain saws, as well as countless different Leatherface action figures).”

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was also being hailed as “art.” Writing for the New York Times in 1981, after the film got re-released and around the time that it got added to the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, Vincent Canby acknowledged that Chain Saw “represents the changes that have taken place in the last eight years between what was then and what is now acceptable (read expected, perhaps) in terms of horror-film horrors.” Canby was being more or less complimentary: “Mr. Hooper’s camera (the photography is unusually good, even in the seemingly blood-scratched print I saw) never dwells on the carnage as it happens, preferring, instead, to suggest the carnage by interior decoration.”

According to Edwin Neal, Oliver Stone was so impressed by the dolly shot of Pam walking from the swing to the Slaughter house that he gave Neal a bit part in JFK, hoping to get some inside information on Hooper’s technique. As Chain Saw got more acclaim, Deep Throat ended up with more notoriety than popularity.

Adding to the off-screen melodrama, Bill Kelly, a police chief with a reputation for enforcing tough laws and recruitment tactics, was among the sanctimonious crusaders against the Deep Throat revolution. As quoted in The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, Kelly boasted about using a particular object lesson: “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been seen by innumerably more people than Deep Throat. About twenty million people saw Deep Throat, roughly, if there’s a hundred million-dollar take. Probably fifty million people saw Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I mean, I was teaching police recruits, and I’d ask, ‘How many of you saw Texas Chain Saw Massacre?’ About 75 percent of them raised their hands. I said, ‘Congratulations. You sent two and a half dollars of your money to the Colombo family in Fort Lauderdale …’”

Leatherface and Lovelace inevitably diverged into separate paths. Linda Susan Boreman (Lovelace was a fake name, after all) seemed to enjoy her work until a few years afterward, when she joined other groups such as Women Against Pornography, testifying that she had been hypnotized, exploited, and essentially raped. She would chronicle it all in her 1980 autobiography, Ordeal.

Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface, on the other hand, hated his ordeal during the filming, feeling the equivalent of being hypnotized, exploited, and emotionally raped as he reeked his way through the final throes of production. When the nightmare was over, and the plaudits poured in regarding his performance and the movie in general, he crowed about his contribution to horror history.

Hansen continued to show pride in the film, though he felt understandably bitter about not getting his fair share of the loot, a similar gripe that both Deep Throat’s director Gerard Damiano and its co-star Harry Reems expressed when they too received crumbs from the vast sums. Hansen and the rest of the Chain Saw cast and crew were deluded into thinking that the remuneration would equal the adulation.

Despite fond memories of fiendish times, Hansen continued to share a caveat, claiming that nine months after the film’s original 1974 release, his first royalties came to a monstrous $47.07. “I guess I was just naïve,” Hansen wrote in his 1985 article for Texas Monthly called “A Date with Leatherface.” “The truth is that I made very little money, most people don’t even recognize me, and those who do certainly don’t think about sex.”