Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [71]
HOOPER COULDN’T have picked a more uncomfortable time to shoot his movie. It was shortly after dawn on July 15, 1973, when the filmmakers gathered for the first time at an isolated farmhouse in central Texas, dressed in T-shirts and jeans. It was around 100 degrees, and there was a dead horse on the side of the road, which somehow didn’t make its way into the movie. The cast worked sixteen-hour days and spent much of the time covered in Karo corn syrup, widely used on horror movie sets to simulate blood, and real bruises. Cattle bones were strewn all over the unventilated room. Everyone was miserable. “Let me put it to you gently,” says Edwin Neal, a veteran who played Leatherface’s maniacal brother. “I moved troops through the jungles of Vietnam, and it wasn’t as bad as making this film.”
Parsley hovered around the edges of the set throughout the shoot, entertaining Burns and irritating the director and writers with worry and skepticism. At one point, when he found out from Burns that his money had been used to buy beer, Parsley came down hard on the crew, earning some resentment toward Burns from the rest of the cast that might have helped the scenes in which the family of cannibals tortures her. This is not to say that he didn’t play an integral part in creating the film. Parsley insisted that Hooper get an R rating, and that is part of the reason Hooper was forced to come up with more creative ways to showcase violence. “I was hoping to get a PG rating believe it or not,” Hooper says. “I called the MPAA and asked, could I get a rating when a girl gets impaled on a hook? At first, the answer was ‘You can’t.’ What if you show no contact? What if you cut the blood out? What then?” The result is a movie that is actually far less bloody than its reputation.
The worst day of shooting was a twenty-six-hour marathon that captured the notorious family dinner scene, the climax of the film. It had to be filmed in one day because some of the makeup for the grandfather of the cannibals had a short shelf life. It was designed and applied by a local plastic surgeon, and after a few hours, the plastic started to melt. Tensions were high. Heavy blankets were put over the windows of the room to make it darker. Cattle and chicken bones strewn over the table stank almost as bad as Hansen, who had not washed his clothes throughout the shoot. “They refused to let me wash the costume for twenty-eight days because they were worried about it changing color,” Hansen says. “By the end, my pants stood up and I smelled so bad that when we broke for lunch they wouldn’t allow me in the food line. I also couldn’t take off the mask because they were scared it would rip. It smelled so bad I felt nauseous.”
He was hardly the only one. “We used syrup for blood so we had flies coming in from Belgium,” Neal says. Parsley didn’t help matters. He complained that the scene was not working and his interference led Hooper to ask him to leave the set.
The movie starts at a leisurely pace, but once Leatherface arrives, it moves quickly from shock to shock. It captures your attention, but unlike most horror, it uses this advantage to take a risk—a long, slow, meandering scene, a portrait of a twisted family tormenting Burns’s Sally Hardesty that reveals relationships between the characters that are much deeper than you expect. Burns is tied up watching nearby. Leatherface sits quietly after serving the meal. The crazed imbecile son encourages his grandfather, who appears barely alive, to hit their guest, but the best he can do is swing his hammer with a pitiful flop. The family respects the father but he is cold to them.
Henkel wrote a piece of gothic realism, inspired by his own colorful, dysfunctional