In 1974, just the title of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre put the fear into viewers, those four words–Texas. Chain. Saw. Massacre–had both individual and collective impact.
Tobe Hooper directed it with a suspense worthy of an existential grindhouse Hitchcock.
He took the story of five post-hippie teenagers driving a van through Texas wilds and turned it into a plunge into the American abyss.
The film’s central image is that of a mentally arrested mute hulk, Leatherface, who wears a mask of human skin and wields a power tool of torture and death.
He’s the first (and still scariest) of the slasher genre’s masked killers (Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees). He was a butcher, killing people like cattle, going on a rampage.
As much as “Psycho” or “The Exorcist,” it created a timeless mythology of horror, capturing the descent of the American spirit into the abyss.
What makes it more indelible and haunting than other horror film is its image of madness: Leatherface, swinging his chain, and his crazed dance of death not just a ritual but an ominous warning.
Death of Iconic Actor
He was 68 and had been suffering from pancreatic cancer.
His famous scene in the 1974 film was the chainsaw dance, where he twirled a chainsaw after the final victim escapes. Hansen’s character in the movie “is one of the most iconic evil figures in the history of cinema,” his agent Mike Eisenstadt told the Associated Press.
Born in Iceland, he moved to Maine with his family at the age of 5, and then to Texas, where studied at the University of Texas.
In 2013, he published a book “Chain Saw Confidential” about the making of the film.
Though he didn’t appear in “Texas Chain Saw” sequels, he appeared in other horror pictures including “Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers,” “The Demon Lover,” “Freakshow” and “Chainsaw Sally.”
He was a regular presence at various horror conventions.
Hansen was currently working on a film called “Death House,” which he wrote and produced, about a secret government facility where a horrific prison break takes place.
