Chain Saw Confidential: How We Made America's Most Notorious Horror Movie by Hansen Gunnar

Author:Hansen, Gunnar [Hansen, Gunnar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2013-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

When Leatherface and the Hitchhiker bring Grandpa downstairs, they decide to feed him Sally’s blood. Leatherface grabs a bone-handled knife from the dining table and slices her finger, which he then sticks into Grandpa’s mouth. The old man works on it like a suckling baby.

Tobe told John that Grandpa “was an embryonic old man,” John says. “He’s so old that he’s become an infant, almost an embryo. Even the feeding on Sally’s finger, Kim talked to me about it. He said, ‘Have you ever seen a baby when they nurse? How their hands and their legs start going?’ So I knew exactly what he was talking about.” And that is exactly what he did. It was disturbingly creepy.

It is actually much creepier.

We were having problems with the prop knife. To make it look like Leatherface had actually cut Sally, Bob Burns had taped a tube to the side of the blade away from the camera. The tube led from a bulb of fake blood in my hand to the tip of the blade. The blade, in turn, was covered with a piece of clear adhesive tape, so it had no edge to actually cut Marilyn. As I slashed the knife along her fingertip, I was to squeeze the bulb and deposit the fake blood on her finger.

But no blood came out. Bob fiddled with the knife. He handed it back to me, saying it was fixed. We shot again—nothing. He fixed it again. It did not work. I do not know how many more takes we shot—maybe five, maybe six. I was getting frustrated. The heat and long hours were getting to me. The knife failed again. This time, when Bob handed the “fixed” knife back to me, I decided to make sure it worked. I turned away from the others and quickly stripped the protective tape off the blade. I tested the blade with my thumb—nice and sharp.

I would cut her for real. I wanted to be done with this shot, whatever the damage.

The camera rolled, I grabbed Marilyn’s finger, sliced quickly with the knife, and watched the blood ooze out. I squeezed her finger a bit to get more blood, then stuck it into John’s mouth. He went into infant mode and sucked it down, not knowing that the blood was real.

As he watched, Ed thought, God, that looks great.

Marilyn did not know I had cut her on purpose. In fact, no one else knew I had even cut her. (Well, whoever bandaged her finger must have known.) Marilyn did not find out till many years later, when we were answering questions at a Chain Saw screening, and I mentioned casually what had happened.

She was stunned and upset. “All these years I’ve been telling people that it’s an accidental thing with the prop knife,” she says. “Then you’re on stage with me and you go, ‘Oh, come on, Marilyn, we really had to cut you, we were running out of time, and the knife wouldn’t work.’ I was shocked, I was angry, I was mad, I was furious.

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