Leatherface

Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface from Tobe Hopper's 1974 classic "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"

The first time I ever heard of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I had spent the night at my friend David King's house, and the morning after we were having an amazing breakfast, that included fresh fuit and freshly squeezed orange juice that his Mom had made. We were sitting on their deck over looking the Colorado National Park and as I munched I was looking through a copy of Hoberman and Rosenbaum's Midnight Movies (being fascinated with the amazing imagery of David Lynch's Eraserhead even back then) and I came upon the chapter about TTCM.

David's parents were very cool sci-fi/ horror folk, and David's Dad began to tell me all about the film, and how it was based on a true story. I went to bed that night with visions of lamps made from Human arms, and chairs made from bones. It would be another 12 years before I actually saw the film, and that first viewing is still among the most disturbing films I have ever seen.

An interesting piece of trivia:

After getting into the old-age makeup, John Dugan decided that he did not ever want to go through the process again, meaning that all the scenes with him had to be filmed in the same session before he could take the makeup off. This took about 36 hours, during a heat wave where the average temperature was over 100 degrees, with a large portion of it spent filming the dinner scene, sitting in a room filled with dead animals and rotting food. Edwin Neal who played the hitch-hiker claimed "Filming that scene was the worst time of my life... and I had been in Vietnam, with people trying to kill me, so I guess that shows how bad it was."