Hey I'm David Blue Garcia, director of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
I'm Fede Alvarez, writer and producer.
We're taking you through the best Easter eggs in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre.".
Spoilers ahead!
One of the great Easter eggs is that when you watch the beginning of the film, the opening
documentary is actually narrated by John Larroquette, who narrated the original 1974 film.
"The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes
in the annals of American history.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."
"The shocking murders were committed with a variety of tools, including hammers, meat
hooks, and, most disturbingly, a chainsaw."
It's a very recognizable and distinct voice and when we were recording the ADR session
with them, he came on and he nailed it in his first take.
I believe we used some unused behind the scenes footage or snippets from the original Texas
Chainsaw Massacre shoot as well in the footage to sort of invoke the Texas landscape.
I think every classic horror movie will have people stopping by a gas station and getting
a bad omen at the station.
They don't get it straightforward here but I think the audience knows, just by watching
the documentary, that's the bad omen itself.
But I think, who doesn't love a good old stop by the gas station with a crazy old man who
kind of treats you a little bit rough and sends you on your way?
"Whatever happened to her? Is she still alive?"
"She became a Ranger here in Texas. She must've looked for that maniac for more than 30, 40 years."
"So she found him?"
"He was wearing a mask."
There's a really cool image of the state of Texas with a chainsaw blade coming out, and
that's the top panhandle.
I believe that was designed by our production designer Michael Perry…
I love that one. …which was a really cool idea that he came
up with.
And they had a lot of fun printing that out on mugs and making those DVDs and posters
and t-shirts and stuff like that.
It's there to show that in the world of the story that this town still kinda talks about
these fantastic murders that happened…and they're not fantastic murders, but they were
awful murders that happened 40,50 years ago.
I want that t-shirt man.
I didn't get it in the mail.
Still waiting for it.
Someone promised it to me, someone promised it to me I'm pretty sure during production,
"Yeah I'll get the t-shirt, Fede."
If you watch the original film there's a lot of fields, a lot of sunflower fields, it's
kind of a visual motif throughout, you know Texas summers and stuff like that.
And in this film we also filmed in a sunflower field although you may not know it.
Because I think a few weeks before a thunderstorm rolled through and I think hail destroyed
all the petals in the field, which left it sort of a brown dead mess of stalks - but
I actually thought it was kind of appropriate for an aging Leatherface emerging from this
dead sunflower field.
It's like a pretty unique look.
Not only that when the, eventually the van rolls over you can see the sunflowers being
beheaded.
It's kind of a great omen for the horrors about to happen.
This is the first time Leatherface has worn a mask in probably 50 years, so he treats
it with kind of a grandiose gesture.
Just from a story standpoint, I think what's important, something that is never really
explained is why he wears that face, you know.
Based on the original folklore it's supposed to be his mother's face, right?
So we thought wouldn't it be great in the story where he's at the end of the day Leatherface
is enacting revenge in the name of his mother.
From a thematic and character standpoint it made a lot of sense that he was wearing his
mother's face - that is, the one that's been wronged in the first minutes of the movie
and triggered his killer rant.
"He's wearing her face.
He's wearing her face."
These original murders, the original story that happened in 1974 made an impact on the
world, and there was an investigation and Leatherface was never found.
And so we wanted to suggest a bigger world that Sally Hardesty as a character has been
living in this whole time.
You know, she's been preparing her whole life for this vengeance against this man.
She's been hunting him down.
And she has prepared herself for the level of violence that she would need to take him
down.
So she knows her way around a knife.
She's not afraid of blood anymore.
And there's that kind of image of her slaughtering the pig - sort of connects her to Leatherface,
and you know he used to be a butcher, part of his family line of work, and I thought
that was an interesting connection between the two characters.
Based on the way she's introduced is like, she's probably been looking for this guy for
a long time, and...She probably hit a lot of dead ends for many, many years.
And when we meet her it feels to me like she's close to given up…
And she gets the last phone call.
And I think she probably got similar phone calls in the past, but something in her tells
her maybe she should explore this one.
Though it's not said, I think the way she looks at the photo feels like she made a promise
to her friends that she was gonna find this guy.
And I think David maybe you can talk, or…you had a lot of fun with that, getting Mark to…
kind of the way he slashes, and just the way he moves and he uses the chainsaw, that is
definitely reminiscent of the way you see it in the original film, right?
Yeah we talked a lot with the actor, Mark, about how Leatherface would move, and Mark
had studied Gunnar Hansen's movements from the original film.
But we have to realize that he's a much older man now, so he's gonna move in a different
way.
He still has some of that unpredictable, irregularity to his movement.
He can move fast when he needs to but he's also an old man so he gets tired a lot.
So the movie, if you watch, he vacillates between very active, but then very tired.
Some people might criticize his movement and say that, "Oh, no, an old man could never
move that fast."
But I've seen some old men here here in Texas that could kick my ass, so I'm pretty sure
that it's accurate.
If you go back and watch the bus massacre closely, we actually hid a couple of images
in some of the lighting flashes that happen during the sort of montage of slaughter.
If you look in the windows of the bus you'll see a few flashes of things from earlier in
the film.
So I'm not gonna say what those are, but you can go find them.
"Try anything you're canceled, bro."
And then there was the other one…
So when Dante first goes into the orphanage and goes upstairs and he tries to remove the
Confederate flag from the window, there's a wide shot, and in the corner, in the bottom
left-hand corner, you can actually see a chair made of bones, which Michael Perry, our production
designer, was doing an homage to the original bone furniture from the first film.
If you look again, you'll actually see Leatherface sitting in that chair in the darkness.
Yeah it's a great one, 'cause you kind of blink you miss it, right?
It's one of those.
Then at the end of the film when Melody kind of uppercuts Leatherface with the chainsaw,
it's sort of an homage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 where she does a very similar finishing
move.
And I don't think we had realized that when we shot it, but we later connected that.
And I remember I showed up and I was like "Dude, did you do it because it was done like
that?"
And then you said like "No."
And I love that, because that feels like, you know, the spirit of the original director,
of Tobe Hooper, just like came to you, said like I'm gonna do that.
I'm gonna take this one.
I'm gonna do it the way I did on part two.
Boom.
Thanks for watching.
Go back and watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre again on Netflix and let us know in the comments
if you found any other Easter eggs.