10 Things you might not know about THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974)

In the 1970s a new wave of horror movies hit the screens of grind house theaters, these were low budget exploitation films which did not focus on quality but more on there unique selling points of sex and violence. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released in 1974 and spawned a new generation of slasher films. TXCM differentiated itself from the original horror films such as Dracula, Frankenstein and later on The Exorcist as it based itself on real people and realistic situations creating a truly new horror film experience. 

1. Tobe Hooper explained how Leatherface was loosely based around the notorious serial killer Ed Gein who was believed to make lamp shades out of real human skin

2. During filming of the infamous dinner scene temperatures rose to over 100 degrees. With the room filled with the stench of dead animals, rotting food and body odour some of the crew passed out and were sick just from the smell. 

3. The human skeleton shot in the house at the end of the film was real. It worked out to be a lot cheaper to buy a real skeleton from India rather than a fake plastic skeleton from America. 

4. Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface) wore three inch lifts in his boots to make him tower over the rest of the cast. Even with the lifts he could still run faster than Marilyn Burns (Sally Hardesty). Therefor he deliberately had to do random things in order to slow him down whilst chasing her through the woods.

5.  Filming only took four weeks and was shot in chronological order. 

6. Alternative names from the film included "Headcheese", "Leatherface" and "Stalking Leatherface"

7. Edwin Neal (The Hitch-hiker) was quoted saying that filming the dinner scene was a worse experience than fighting in Vietnam and that he might have to kill Tobe Hooper if he ever saw him again.

8. John Larroquette explained how his payment for doing the opening narration was a marijuana joint 

9. Despite the title of the film only one person is actually killed by a chainsaw, two were bludgeoned, one impaled on a meat hook and one run over by a truck 

10. John Dugan's  (The Grandfather) old-age makeup took 5 hours, the experience was so grueling he decided he wanted to shoot all his scenes back to back which took roughly 36 hours.