Leather face In October 2006, New Line

Cinema released The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. A prequel to the 2003 remake of the original 1974 film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it features the childhood development and first chainsaw murder of a character known as Leather face. Before it, there were five movies and several documentaries associated with this series. Viewers never seem to get enough.

This is leather face with a chainsaw in the movie

When the police arrived at a secluded farmhouse outside Plainfield, Wisconsin, where Ed Gein lived alone after the passing of his parents and brother, they meant to question him about a local incident. It was a cold November day in 1957 and he'd been seen in the store from which a woman had gone missing, inquiring about antifreeze. Known to be a bit strange, they were aware that the diminutive high school dropout-turned-handyman was capable of some odd behavior, but he'd always seemed fairly benign. His deceased father had been an alcoholic and his mother an antisocial religious fanatic. Brother Henry had mysteriously died in a fire.

The Movie!!!

A notable scene that gets replayed in some fashion in all the subsequent films is the dinner scene, where a girl (Sally, in this case) is tied to a chair and forced to watch the clan eat sausage made from her friends. A withered old man, Grandpa, has drunk her blood from a cut finger, and he returns in most of the movies, as does Leatherface. In fact, Leatherface is one of the most memorable slasher-film villains of all time, co-equal with Freddy and Jason.

It seems that Gein was not at home, so the officers decided to look around. Entering a deteriorating and darkened out-building, they spotted a dressed deer carcass hanging from the rafters. Going closer, they thought there was something odd about this deer. It didn't hang right.

Suddenly, under a flashlight's glare, they realized that the carcass was no deer: it was a human corpse. Hung feet first was the headless nude body of a woman, slit from her genitals to her neck, with her legs splayed apart. The officers wondered if this might be the missing storekeeper, Bernice Worden. Whoever it was, she'd clearly been the victim of a crime, and there was no one around but eccentric Ed Gein. Was he peculiar enough to commit outright murder, they wondered? It certainly seemed possible.

Next, the police entered Gein's house and right away their question was answered. Inside, scattered around, they found all manner of body parts, including skin, a box of preserved female genitalia, a heart in a frying pan, a box of cut-off noses, the sawed-off crania from several skulls, death masks peeled off dead females, a skin vest with female breasts and genitals, and a female scalp with black hair. They wondered just how many women Gein had killed. It appeared that there were parts from at least a dozen victims, possibly more. Then they found Bernice Worden's head in a bag, with nails driven through the ears.

In those days, little was known about the kind of person who might kill repeatedly —although a handful of serial killers were at large around the country — other than that he had to be some sort of monster. It was one thing to kill; it was quite another to remove and preserve body parts to decorate one's home. This wasn't Nazi Germany, after all. In fact, it appeared to the investigators, from items in a frying pan, that perhaps Gein was indulging in a bit of cannibalism as well. They could only wonder how long he'd been doing it and they intended to check their records for more missing women when they returned to town. But first they had to find Gein.

Once arrested and taken to Madison, Gein freely admitted that he was aware of the

body parts and corpses, but he said that he'd stolen most of them from the local

cemetery — to the tune of some forty grave robberies. He'd hear about a woman

who had recently died, he explained, wait until she was buried, and then go dig her

up to take whatever he wanted. Sometimes he took the whole corpses, sometimes just

a specific part.

However, Bernice Worden had been alive the last time anyone had seen her. She'd

gone missing from the store where she'd been working that day. Gein readily

confessed to having killed her, as well as another missing woman, Mary Hogan,

who had disappeared three years earlier. They both had been about the size of his

dead mother and he'd been unable to wait until they died; he'd needed them to

complete his project. So he'd shot them and brought them home. The police listened

in horror as he described his grisly pastime.

Gein remained a suspect in the disappearance of four others, but those women he did

kill or dig up he'd used to make himself a female "suit." He'd skin them for the

various pieces, but he found that dead skin was not very pliable, and he'd heard or

read that living women worked better for this purpose. Apparently he missed his

dead mother so much that he was trying to become her by dressing in his special

female "suit." Sometimes he wore it, he admitted, while he pranced around in the

yard during a full moon.

Gein Admits

When I made these masks,

you see," he said in his

confession, "I stuffed them

all out with paper so they

would dry." He also had

used salt as a preservative.

In any event, he was

detained and diagnosed

with schizophrenia.

Eventually, Gein was

deemed competent to stand

trial for one murder, but

then found not guilty by

reason of insanity. In 1974,

he petitioned for release

from the psychiatric

institute in which he'd been

a patient, but his petition

was denied. He died a

decade later.

Ed Gein’s kitchen

This is Gein’s Kitchen the police and detectives found people hearts, fingers and all kind of body parts in skillets and all over the kitchen.

On the Special Edition DVD of the original film, Tobe Hooper discusses his experience and inspiration with star Gunnar Hansen (Leather face). Among the comments they make is that many fans believe the film was based on an actual incident. In fact, some believe they have met Leather face himself, working at some odd job in Texas, and they're certain that the incident took place where the film is set. However, Hooper notes that such viewers have failed to read the entire crawler or to pay attention to dates: it says the incident occurred in the summer of 1973, which is exactly when they were filming it, so it had to be fictitious.

Family PortriatIn 1988, TCM: A Family Portrait was released as a documentary about the film, since it had become such a cult classic. Much of the same ground is covered as in the conversation for the special edition DVD, but some new gems are offered as well - notably, the way Gunnar Hansen was cast for the role. Apparently, as he walked into the room, he "filled the doorway," and that was impressive. Hooper was seeking an actor with imposing physical presence and he knew this was the guy. To become Leather face, Hansen says, he walked around a school for the mentally retarded to take on their mannerisms. He also watched pigs to try to get the squealing right but believed he did not master that particular skill.

The crazy hitchhiker, Leather face's brother, had heard about the film by chance and had gone to the screening. When asked to read, he took on the persona of his nephew and it went over well enough to secure the part.

Only one chainsaw was used throughout the entire film, and they apparently did not see the phallic symbolism, because in comparison to the sequels, it was just an average size tool. Hansen describes his relief that it always started when he pulled the string.

For the most part, the script was a bare outline, and the actors improvised the story as they went along. It didn't take much to act out their discomfort, as the persistent smell of sweat, the Texas-in-August heat, the unrelenting dust, and the grimy sets provided an aura of reality. Hansen had only one shirt, he says, and he wore it for every scene.

There's another serial killer that sometimes gets mentioned as a source of inspiration, so let's examine the basis for it next.

Some sources indicate that the original TCM was based on an unsolved series of murders known as the Texarkana Moonlight murders. Since Hooper has never said so, and since those murders bear little relation to the violence in TCM, this seems a bit far-fetched. However, this series did take place in Texas, which gives the movie, as an "actual incident" type of picture, more of an authentic feel.

A full moon was out on February 20, 1946 (some say the 23rd), when two teenagers were attacked in their car, and the girl was raped, but no one died during this incident. The attacker, a tall man wearing a white mask, used his gun to bludgeon the boy, Jimmy Hollis. Apparently an approaching car frightened the attacker away and the police were unable to identify a suspect.

Then a month later and a mile away, also under a full moon, another couple was similarly attacked. It was March 23 when Richard Griffen was in the car with his girlfriend, Polly Ann Moore, and both were shot in the head from behind with a .32. Investigators thought that they had been killed outside the car but then placed back into the seats. The motive for this behavior remained a mystery, as did the perpetrator. The next couple to endure such treatment was treated quite differently.

In April, fifteen-year-old Betty Jo Booker and her boyfriend, Paul Martin, were slaughtered, with evidence that Betty Jo had been raped and tortured for hours. The body of her boyfriend, Paul Martin, had been dumped more than a mile away. He, too, had been shot. Since the bullets had come from a .32 revolver, investigators believed that at least the two shootings were related, and possibly the initial lover's lane attack. Tire tread impressions from all three scenes supported this linkage and the press gave the fiend a name, "the Phantom." There was more to come, by some speculations, but this time the victims would be older, attacked in their home.

In May, more than ten miles from Texarkana, an elderly couple was shot in their farmhouse, but the wife, Katy Starks, managed to escape and raise an alarm. She survived, and nearby, police found the tire tread impressions again. They also had muddy footprints from inside the house to compare to a suspect, if they ever caught one. Yet if the Phantom had committed this shooting, he had used a different gun, and it seems more likely that it had been a burglar looking for goods. In the 1940s, police tended to group similar crimes in an area to a single repeat offender.

Then the killings stopped and the murderer was never identified, although some believed that a man who had killed himself and incinerated his car—with attention to the tires—had ended the spree himself. There were other suspects as well, but clearly there's no relationship between this brief spree and the incidents in TCM, aside from the hit-and-run nature of the Phantom, which is similar to the Hewitt clan members in some of the sequels, and the white mask. Why it's even suggested as an inspiration seems a real stretch.

RICHARD GRIFFEN AND POLLY ANN MOORE

BETTY JO BOOKER AND PAUL MARTIN