Leatherface stalks Salt Lake
Many argue the entire slasher movement started and was shaped by the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974.
Gunnar Hansen, the actor who portrayed Leatherface in Massacre, was in Salt Lake City last weekend to help start this year’s Rocky Point Haunted House.
In 1973, Hansen had just finished graduate school at the University of Texas. He heard about the movie and decided to audition as a summer job. The rest is history. His portrayal of the killer has been refereed to as the model for all movie killers since.
“Chainsaw was the first movie I was involved with,” Hansen said.
He was not new to acting. He had been involved in several plays at the university, but never intended to act professionally. His real interests were with writing.
“I was always interested in movies, but I was interested in writing,” he said.
After he finished with Massacre, he took a break to focus on his writing. He was offered jobs with other films, but always turned them down. At one point, Wes Craven offered Hansen a part in his movie The Hills Have Eyes, but Hansen turned this picture down as well.
“I’ve never even thought this was something I was going to do,” he said.
When the sequels for the fist movie were made, Hansen was not involved, something he is grateful for.
“Each one has been less of a movie than the one before,” he said.
Yet even with his desire to move away from the movie industry, the film had a strong impact on his life. The entire experience was worth the effort for Hansen.
“It was very hard,” he said. “Fun was never the word I would have thought of while doing the film.”
The film was shot during the summer months in Texas. The cast and crew worked between 12 and 16 hours a day, seven days a week. For the first week of the shoot, the cast had the use of an air conditioned RV, but after the first week, make-up was done outside or in another RV with no cooling system. Hansen attributes the poor conditions to the lack of money for the film’s budget.
But even with the conditions the cast worked in, Hansen is positive about the film’s shoot.
“It was an amazing experience,” he said.
Hansen felt the experience was positive because of the people he worked with.
“This was the first time I was involved with something where everyone was good at what they did,” he said. ” I wanted to be in an environment where I did my best.”
Hansen called the movie a life changing experience. He looks at movies differently, watching how the film was put together or edited. But it did not change the way he felt about the genre.
“I never liked horror movies,” he said.
Despite the fact he did not like slasher movies, much of his work has been with this style of films.
Fourteen years ago, Hansen returned to making movies. Since then he has made 12 pictures. One of the more recognized is Mosquito. Hansen played the “bad guy” in this film as well. But he had a hard time shaking his past. In one scene, he finds a chainsaw in a shed and holds it up over his head and comments, “I haven’t held one of these in a long time.”
Mosquito received mixed reviews when it was released. Entertainment Weekly gave it a B+ in the first week of release, which Hansen said was the highest rating given that week by the magazine.
“It’s supposed to be a fun romp of a giant bug movie,” he said.
Hansen has worked mostly with movies which went directly to video. He is trying to move from the horror style movie though.
“I did a comedy a couple of years ago that was basically a USA Up All Night thing,” he said.
He plans to continue writing, but has also found an agent and manager to help him work on his film career.
“I will be doing more film work,” he said. “I would like it to be mainstream work.”
Even with the paths he has traveled, Hansen still looks back on Massacre with awe.
“It’s funny to think how this character [Leatherface] has entered the culture,” he said.
Hansen said the character appears in haunted houses across the nation.