Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s legendary Leatherface sails among us.

Interview by Claire Z. Cramer

Gunnar Hansen’s life might have been forever changed in 1973 when, just out of graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin, he was signed to play the killer in a horror movie being filmed nearby. When it was released in 1974, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre became a runaway success, an instant cult classic, thoroughly controversial, critically decried for its terrifying horror, and of course box-office gold. Hansen’s character Leatherface and Chain Saw pioneered what are now familiar and gruesome conventions of the horror genre: the use of power tools as murder weapons, skin masks, and what Hansen calls “friends in a van going somewhere with one annoying fifth-wheel guy who always gets killed first.”

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