The Tragic, Shared Histories of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ and ‘The Blair Witch Project’
2024 is a milestone anniversary for two of horror’s most celebrated and scary films. Fifty years ago director Tobe Hooper’s, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre hit theaters and helped redefine what could be done with both horror and exploitation films. 25 years after that saw the release of another low-budget independent film that would go on to become insanely profitable and help popularize the found footage sub-genre: directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project. These two seminal horror films have more in common than just a milestone anniversary and helping to redefine the horror genre.
The most obvious shared trait is thematic because The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Blair Witch Project both follow groups of young people who travel to remote, rural locations and stumble into monstrous misfortune. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the young cast does so by walking into a remote house and attracting the murderous attention of its current inhabitants, including the hulking, but also very frightened Leatherface. The Blair Witch Project’s young, documentary team’s downfall comes when one of their number accidentally knocks over a stone cairn. That same night their long, supernatural, psychological, and ultimately fatal, ordeal would begin.
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They may be separated by a quarter of a century, but The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Blair Witch Project also share a similar style. While The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a straightforward narrative and The Blair Witch Project is told via found footage aesthetics, both visual styles are imperfect and therefore feel more real. In a November 2004 article in Texas Monthly John Bloom (who is best known to horror fans by his alter ego, Joe Bob Briggs) wrote of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, “Many people believed, and still believe, that the movie is entirely true, in part because of its effective cinéma vérité documentary style. In this respect, Hooper anticipated The Blair Witch Project by 26 years . . .”
The similar visual styles of both films stem from their meager budgets. The Blair Witch Project was shot for approximately $60,000. Interestingly enough, in his Texas Monthly article, Bloom notes that the initial operating budget of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was also $60,000. Because of their budgets, both films were made under extremely difficult conditions that would test the mettle of even the most seasoned actors, especially in the case of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre which began shooting on July 15th, 1973 and lasted for 37 days.
In the 2000 documentary Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth, writer Kim Henkel recalled, “It was murderous. It was hot. It was the middle of August.” Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, stated that the film shot seven days a week and those days usually lasted between 12 to 16 hours.
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Some days went on much longer, though. To shoot the film’s infamous dinner scene, the cast and crew worked 27 hours. Making matters infinitely worse was the unbearable heat both outside and inside where they were shooting. In The Shocking Truth, Gunnar Hansen described the shooting of that scene, saying, “It was 95-100 degrees almost every day. And the dinner scene, which takes place at night, was shot during the day. We covered up the room with curtains and had all that lighting. So, that room was probably 120 degrees.” It was so hot that a number of the cast and crew, Hansen included, threw up.
Adding to the discomfort was the very limited wardrobe available to the cast. Actors like Hansen and Marilyn Burns, who played Sally Hardesty, had one outfit that they wore for the entire shoot.
The cast also suffered a number of injuries. In his Texas Monthly piece, Bloom wrote that Ed Neil who played the Hitchhiker burned his face on hot asphalt; Paul Partain who played Franklin Hardesty had a bruised and cut arm after rolling down a hill; and Hansen, who had no peripheral vision in his Leatherface mask, had a near-fatal accident.
It came when he slipped while running with a chainsaw which flew up into the air and landed on the ground inches from his body. Burns especially was put through the wringer during the shoot. She suffered a number of bumps, bangs, and bruises. Some of the most painful came during the scene where Jim Siedow’s character attacked her with a broom. After a number of takes it was decided the beating looked fake. So, Siedow was ordered to really hit her with the broom.
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The cast of The Blair Witch Project did not endure the grueling Texas heat or as many accidents, but that doesn’t mean their shoot was easy. In a Vice article titled, “The Terrifying True Story of How The Blair Witch Project Was Made”, Daniel Myrick recalls a famous line that one of the film’s producers, Gregg Hale, told the cast: “Your safety is our primary concern, but your comfort is not.”
Part of the cast’s discomfort during the shoot, which began on October 23, 1997, in Montgomery County, Maryland, came from the fact that the film’s actors were camping outdoors. As the shoot went on, the producers and directors began to ration their food to help make the mounting tension and conflict between the film’s protagonists feel genuine. Michael Williams, who played the crew’s sound person, told Vice, “They decreased the amount of food we were eating, which we knew was going to happen, but it wasn’t like… It wasn’t like we didn’t eat for days. Our safety was never at risk. The whole idea was to have us as uncomfortable as possible without putting us in danger.”
The crew also made the cast uncomfortable by staging the surprise nocturnal haunt attacks of the Blair Witch right when the three actors had gotten comfortable for the evening. Joshua Leonard, who played the documentary crew’s camera operator, revealed to Vice that the cast was never scared when the film crew would come calling to their campsite for late-night scares. It was more that they were exhausted.
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“What was usually happening behind the scenes was we were exhausted and hungry and often wet,” Leonard said. “We’d set up camp and crash, and just about the time we got warm enough in our damp sleeping bags to fall asleep, the guys would start playing a boom box with creepy children sounds outside the tent. So a lot of what you’re seeing on film is directly following a collective groan, when we realized we had to pull our shoes back on and start acting again.”
The other major difficulties for the actors of The Blair Witch Project were that they were their own crew and the improvisational nature of the story they were telling. Before shooting began, the cast members received training in how to use the equipment that would record the film. They had very little contact with the directors and producers, though. Instructions came in the form of film canisters left at various GPS points. The documentary team’s leader Heather Donahue, who now goes by Rei Hance, told The Week, “Each of [the film canisters] would have our initials on them. We would read the instructions for that scene, and each of those instructions was in conflict with each other. So that basically provided the skeleton of what the conflict was, and then we were free to fill that out however we liked.”
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Portraying characters in close proximity who are often in conflict with each other while improvising all the film’s dialogue and dealing with being cold, wet, tired, and hungry meant that sometimes things would become too difficult for the cast. So, they had to devise a way to take breaks from the fictional reality they were bringing to life.
Michael Williams explained to The Week,
“In the beginning, it was confusing because we needed to set some boundaries as to when we were acting and when we were not. And the directors did not establish that for us; they wanted us in character as much as possible. So at one point, we decided, as actors, that we needed code words to break from being an actor to being who we actually are. We chose, ‘taco.’ If you said ‘taco,’ the other two actors had to repeat the word ‘taco,’ so I knew, and they knew, we were all out of character at the same time.”
The marketing of The Blair Witch Project blurred the line between fact and fiction. So the cast had to endure several surreal and discomforting things after the film’s release. Joshua Leonard told Collider, “As individuals, it got a bit weird since we’d used our real names in the film. Our parents were getting condolence calls. Then, when the cat was finally out of the bag and we started doing press, some people still didn’t believe us. They thought we were actors, hired to play Josh, Mike, and Heather in order to keep the whole thing from seeming like a snuff film. To this day, there are still conspiracy theories about this stuff.”
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Rei Hance had an especially difficult and surreal time. She said, “It was my mother getting sympathy cards, it was people coming up to me on the street telling me that they wished I was dead, saying they want their money back. It was me in my 84 Toyota Celica breaking down in LA in La Cienega underneath a billboard with my own face on it.”
The casts of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Blair Witch Project endured a lot in order to make their films. Now 50 and 25 years later they know that their blood, sweat, and tears helped bring to life two films that are widely considered to be some of the scariest movies ever made. Unfortunately, neither cast ever received the monetary compensation, despite both being wildly successful at the box office.
The financial woes for the cast of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre began even before they signed onto the picture. To raise the initial funds for the film, 50% of it was given to investors. Then to keep costs down, the cast agreed to defer payment and be awarded points based on the film’s gross. Unfortunately, those points would only come from the portion of the movie that the filmmakers owned; a fact that the actors were unaware of.
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Things became even more complicated and even dangerous after the filmmakers made a deal with Bryanston Distributing Company to distribute The Texas Chains Saw Massacre. That’s because Bryanston’s heads, Joe and Lou Peraino, were members of the Colombo crime family. In his Texas Monthly article, Bloom wrote that a year after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre hit theaters Variety had reported the film had made $12 million, but according to Bryanston, the film had only grossed one million dollars. When investor Robert Kuhn confronted Lou Peraino about this and demanded to see the books he was told that he wasn’t going to audit the books. Kuhn then threatened a lawsuit and Peraino, flanked by several muscular attendants, told him that he didn’t have the balls. Kuhn filed suit anyway. But it didn’t matter because Bryanston had made several disastrous investments and eventually declared bankruptcy.
The cast did end up getting paid a pittance. Hanson told Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth that nine months after the film was released he received his first royalty check. Because the filmmakers only owned half of the film and Bryanston’s corrupt and creative bookkeeping, it amounted to $47.07.
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In an Instagram post on April 11, Leonard revealed that he and his Blair Witch co-stars were paid approximately $300,000 as a buyout of their points percentages in the film. His statement also mentions that in 1999, The Blair Witch Project’s original distributor claimed to have released the most profitable independent film. It was bought for a million dollars and ended up grossing more than $250 million. However, Leonard states that he and his cast members were told that the film was losing money on marketing expenses and that they might end up owning the distributor money.
The studio didn’t just pay the The Blair Witch Project’s cast a pittance. They also tried to take something deeply personal from them: their names. Since the characters they played in the film had their real names, the studio claimed copyright. That meant the cast had to go to court to reclaim their names.
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Leonard’s Instagram post came a day after Lionsgate and Blumhouse announced the development of a new The Blair Witch Project film. Nine days later, he followed up with a post on Facebook where he and his cast mates, Williams and Hance asked for retroactive and future residual payments equivalent to what they would have gotten if they had proper legal and SAG-AFTRA union representation at the time, meaningful consultation on any future Blair Witch Project content that would involve their characters and likenesses, and the establishment of “The Blair Witch Grant”; a $60,000 grant to be paid out yearly by Lionsgate to an unknown/aspiring genre filmmaker for assistance in making their first feature film. The post also featured an open letter of support from the directors and producers of the film.
The low pay the casts of The Blair Witch Project and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre received is even more tragic when you factor in that none of those actors would go on to high-profile roles in any larger films. Partain had small roles in 1975’s Race with the Devil and 1977’s Rolling Thunder before retiring from acting in 1979. His onscreen sister, Burns, got a supporting role in CBS’ 1976 Manson murders mini-series, Helter Skelter. Some of the other actors would appear in low-budget genre fare over the years and future Texas Chains Saw sequels. However several of them found that being associated with the film was detrimental to their careers and left acting.
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The cast of The Blair Witch Project fared a little better. Hance had supporting roles in a few independent films and TV shows before leaving acting altogether in 2008. She currently works as a writer, gardener, podcaster, and spiritual guide. Williams also appeared in small roles in television and film over the years. He still acts and also teaches acting. Leonard has racked up a number of roles as a character actor in film and television, but none of those parts has been as high profile as his first acting gig in The Blair Witch Project.
The final interesting shared trait between The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Blair Witch Project is that both films are testaments to the freedom and enduring power of independent horror films. Studios have attempted to replicate the success of these films with sequels and movies inspired by them, but the nature of those productions and what they have to account for means a film’s vision might not be as pure. Ultimately, the reason why these movies still capture the imagination of horror fans is the fact that Tobe Hooper, Kim Henkel, Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, their casts, and their crews had a vision that they were able to realize on their own terms, without studio interference. In doing so, they created dark, magical, haunting, and timeless pieces of cinema.
Categorized:Editorials
