Fifty years ago, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre premiered and shocked audiences to their core.
The film centered around a group of young people traveling across Texas. Running low on gas, the group finds a remote farmhouse running on a diesel generator. Hoping to get fuel, they enter the house, only to discover the horrors within, including the chainsaw-wielding, human flesh-wearing killer called Leatherface.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is famously “based on a true story,” but just how true is it? The “real” Leatherface was a man named Ed Gein, and while his actual story is very different from the films, it’s still macabre, horrifying and filled with grave robbing, murder and an obsession with human skin and body parts.
In the years after the movie’s box office success, Chain Saw was eventually changed to Chainsaw and the franchise released nine sequels, prequels and spinoffs. 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the movie, and on top of it streaming on numerous platforms like Peacock and Pipesit’s also getting a special 50th Anniversary Blu-ray release.
To mark the film’s milestone anniversary, here is the true story behind The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre based on a true story?
Serial killer Ed Gein is escorted from the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory to the county jail after confessing to two murders.
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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre isn’t really “based” on a true story, but it is heavily inspired by one.
The movie’s inspiration was serial killer and graverobber Ed Gein. He filled his home with body parts he collected from corpses and because he often kept genitals, many believe he likely was a necrophiliac or had an obsession with gender. Gein eventually turned to murder and was officially charged with killing two women, though he later also became the prime suspect in his brother’s mysterious 1944 death as well.
When police raided his house, they not only found the bodies of his victims, but also numerous skulls and decapitated heads, the bodies of various other women, chairs upholstered with human skin, a belt made of nipples and masks made from human faces that had been meticulously skinned and preserved. This directly helped inspire the flesh masks that Leatherface wears in the Chainsaw films.
Texas Chain Saw’s director, Tobe Hooper, told The Flashback Files in 2015 that he grew up hearing stories about Gein from his relatives who lived in Wisconsin.
“They told us the story about this man who lived in the next town from them, about twenty-seven miles or so, who was digging up graves and using the bones and skin in his house,” Hooper said. “To me he was like a real boogeyman.”
Did The Texas Chain Saw Massacre actually happen in Texas?
Actors Gunnar Hansen (front left) as Leatherface, Jim Siedow (front right) as Old Man, John Dugan (back right) as Grandfather and Edwin Neal (back left) as Hitchhiker in a publicity shot for the slasher film ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 1974.
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No, Ed Gein actually lived over a thousand miles away in rural Wisconsin. Gein lived outside the small town of Plainfield, which sits in the middle of the state.
After police raided his home and discovered the horrors inside, Gein was nicknamed “The Butcher of Plainfield” and the “Plainfield Ghoul.”
Who was Ed Gein?
Farmer Ed Gein, 51, (center), confessed slayer of two women, stands with his Arthur Schley in the Wabsara county Court here November 21st. Gein was charged with first degree murder in the butcher slaying of Mrs. Bernice Worden.
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Born in 1906, Gein had a rough life growing up. His father was an alcoholic, and according to the MGM+ docuseries Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein, his mother was fanatically puritanical. She was allegedly domineering and pious to the point where she reportedly forbade Gein from interacting with most of society, deeming virtually everything and everyone to be evil.
Gein was said to have had an unhealthy codependency with his mother to the point that he idolized and was obsessed with her. After her death in 1945, Gein spiraled out of control, becoming a recluse who rarely left the farmhouse he lived in alone.
For reasons that are still not fully understood, Gein then developed a gruesome interest in human bodies. He began digging up graves so he could fill his house with human remains, but eventually, corpses weren’t enough, and Gein turned to murder. He finally got caught in 1957 after killing local hardware store owner Bernice Worden.
In November 1957, Worden’s son went to visit her store and found a trail of blood leading out the back door. When he told police about her disappearance, Worden’s son mentioned that a receipt for antifreeze, which Gein had been inquiring about the previous day, was the last in the register. Gein was also immediately the main suspect because he had started lingering around Worden’s store in the previous weeks.
When police arrived at Gein’s home to question him, they discovered a grisly sight. Worden’s body had been decapitated, gutted and hung by its feet like a deer. Other body parts were also scattered around the house — Gein had even made furniture out of human skin and crafted household items out of bones.
The front page of The Milwaukee Journal on Nov. 18, 1957 read “Murder Farm Horror Grows” with the subheading, “Five heads wrapped in plastic bags, 10 death masks, four skulls found.”
What happened to Ed Gein?
Home of serial killer Ed Gein in Plainfield in Wisconsin in 1957. Gein murdered women in his town and robbed many graves in the area.
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Gein was found guilty of murdering Worden as well as another woman, Mary Hoganwho had mysteriously vanished a few years beforehand. During the investigation, Hogan’s head was found in Gein’s house, linking him to her disappearance.
In the Nov. 18, 1957 edition of The Milwaukee Journal, crime pathologists told the publication they believed Gein had been amassing his collection of body parts for around 10 years.
Despite being found guilty, Gein was also declared insane and unable to stand trial. He spent the rest of his life in mental institutions before dying of lung cancer in 1984 at the age of 77.
A few months after Gein’s arrest, his now-infamous farmhouse mysteriously caught fire and burned to the ground. The March 20, 1958 edition of the Stevens Point Journal cited that many in the town suspected the house was intentionally burned to prevent it from becoming a museum.
What other movies did Ed Gein inspire?
Ed Gein, 61, sits alone behind the defendant’s table and waits for the judge to call court to order in Wautoma, Wis., Jan. 22, 1968. Gein, who is charged with the slaying of a Plainfield, Wis., woman ten years ago, was assigned an attorney and is scheduled for another hearing tomorrow.
AP Photo/Paul Shane
Gein not only inspired The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but he also was the inspiration for Norman Bates in Psycho and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.
Gein also served as the inspiration for the lesser-known 1974 movie Deranged, about a man who becomes a grave robber and murderer after the death of his mother.
In 2024, Netflix announced that Charlie Hunnam would star as Gein in season 3 of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series Monster. The character previously appeared in season 1 of the series, which suggested that Gein inspired Jeffrey Dahmer.
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