SPEAKER_02 0:00

And he only appears in the first film. He was offered every film.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

And they kept they it's insulted this guy every which way you could possibly they want him and they don't want to pay him anything.

SPEAKER_02 0:12

Right. They they offered him scale plus ten percent to pay his agent, and then they found out he didn't have an agent. So when he said, No, you're gonna have to do better, they came back and said, Well, just scale because you don't have an agent.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Yeah, so you don't need the ten percent. You're listening to the O Brother Podcast. Real Brothers, Real Talk. Welcome to the O Brother Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Smith, alongside me as always, my brother from the same mother, Mike Smith.

SPEAKER_02 0:41

Have we reached the end of another Halloween fest?

SPEAKER_01 0:45

You sound like ye old merry men of I don't know, it sounded like old English or something you were given there. Welcome back to Halloween Fest on the O Brother Podcast, Mike. We are back. We were intentional in the sequencing of the films we chose to review. And we thought we would sort of have this buildup, right, that would get more and more intense as we went through. And we started out kind of in the psychological horror realm, and we just sort of moved through until the last one, which we did, of course, was the 1981 Halloween 2. And then we get to what we thought was going to be the final episode of Halloween Fest this year, doing the 1974, the original OG, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I hadn't seen yet. I of course knew, you know, the lore of Leatherface and all of that. We can talk a little bit about terror on Church Street again, I think would be appropriate. And then but we I saw that Back Rooms has come out. And our first review this year was Obsession, and those were the two films that were really in the spotlight behind the world. A lot of money. Made a lot of money, very successful films based on the budgets and all of those things. And interesting stories, too, in terms of the making, how they got to be made, and all of that. So we thought, well, maybe that would be a good bookend to the obsession and then ending with backrooms. So a little bit of a pivot here in the O Brother podcast, like Big Brother here at O Brother, expect the unexpected. And so uh Mike, now a bigger Big Brother fan than I am, surprisingly, but I don't even watch the biggest. Yeah, you don't miss an episode, and I haven't seen it in several years. But so we're gonna actually, this is now, this is the penultimate episode of Halloween Fest 2026. And uh so we're gonna come back at you with one more episode uh of back to the.

SPEAKER_02 2:36

Now it's interesting, too, that this film today was the number one independent film for four years. And it got top by Halloween.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

1978 Halloween, John Carpenter's Halloween, yeah, which we talked about a little bit, you know, reviewing the sequel to that, the follow-up. And so, yeah, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Now, I've said many times on the podcast, certainly during Halloween Fest, like there isn't much that creeps me out, rattles me, but yeah. This movie definitely got to me. This there's something about Mike, those old 70s films of of this genre in particular, and this one did not disappoint.

SPEAKER_02 3:18

And wouldn't you say this is the least bloody film we've looked at?

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Well, yeah, and that's a that's a very interesting note because it's you you had said to me, it's older now, but this documentary that you can also find because we watched this on Prime Video. Yes, and that's where it was for free streaming. What is it, the shocking truth of the whole shocking story or something?

SPEAKER_02 3:46

Massacre the story or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 3:50

Something like that, yeah. And that's a good hour plus, I think.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

Yeah, it was almost 90 minutes. And when you a lot of the actors who were no longer with us were in this making of, so they cut it. It's also on 4K. Arrow has this on 4K. I don't think I need it on 4K. It's creepy as hell on regular.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Yeah, and maybe that adds to it, yeah, perhaps the old kind of grainy look of that time. That is an interesting note that came out. I don't think I was really processing that while I was watching it because I was so disturbed. But you're right, there's really not a lot of blood. There's a few spatters that you see at one point here and there, but that's about it.

SPEAKER_02 4:38

Yet this was withheld. They couldn't show it in Britain for 25 years. It was censored, it was getting NC 17, and so they still had to cut the film, even though there was no blood to cut. And there's nothing gory, but it's certainly high on the creep scale.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

The creep scale, yeah. October 11th, Mike, 1974, it comes out, and it is, as you said, it's banned in many territories, and uh, as you said, it's it's only opened up in a few markets just recently, which is crazy to think. Now, certainly it's been pirated and people have found their way to the film, there's no question about it. But and another thing that I wasn't really thinking about that was you've got to think back. Now, I'm I'm a baby at this point when this film comes out, right? And you've really got to recognize that this is sort of the beginnings of this type of character in a film like this. This big huge gunner who plays Leatherface, this big massive character who wears a mask. And it's hard to realize it hadn't really been done before.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

His movements with the chainsaw, which we'll get into when when we talk about terror again.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

And maybe it's been done before. I that's probably not accurate, but certainly this inspired a whole new sort of chain of pardon the pun of films in the genre.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

I remember when it came to HBO, and the HBO came out early 70s, sometime around there. And dad was like right on board. This is movies, home box office. We can watch box office films right at you know at home.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Dad, an early adopter of streaming.

SPEAKER_02 6:32

Totally. You know, if it wasn't for him, probably wouldn't exist.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Yeah, and that's also how we got uh corrupted into seeing things like this that we had because it was uh accessible everywhere in the house, there was no parental controls.

SPEAKER_02 6:45

No. I you know, I lived in the basement away from everyone, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:50

As was fitting.

SPEAKER_02 6:52

It seemed to have my privacy, but if ever I watched something on HBO and there was nudity, it was like a magnet for mom.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

All of a sudden be like Michael, I'd be like, oh gee, lock the door, bolt all the shackles and everything you get, the dead bolts. Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 7:11

And you know, every once in a while she'd glimpse and go, what are you watching?

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Right. Yeah. Well, come on in, mom, have a seat, check it out with me. Yeah. Well, and this was also in the age of drive-ins, and this was playing at the drive-in theater, which I'm sure that was an itself a creepy experience. But yeah, it's really for me what stands out here is it's it's what we don't see. This is a this is a masterclass in building suspense. I mean, we don't even see Leatherface until I marked it the 35-minute mark into the film, and we don't see the thing that you're erasing, and I was feeling the whole hitchhiker sequence at the beginning, and I mean, it goes weird very fast.

SPEAKER_02 8:00

Yes, yes, it's it does not take long to get you uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

You could hear the banjo music right away. Yeah, and you know, I was thinking of the only other film that quickly comes to mind that disturbed me in this way that I saw in the theater was the original wrong turn film. And this has sort of elements of that. It's always some you know, inbred family and God knows where Arkansas. Right. Where and apologies to the people that live in those places where it's always in West Virginia or something. But yeah, the creep factor was super high. Now, Toby Hooper, the director, it didn't ring any bells and it should have. He also did poltergeist.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

Yes. Right? That was towards the end of his career because he's no longer with us. But yeah, poltergeist was his real his biggest film next to this.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

And you know what's an interesting fact about that, I'm realizing, going back to our last episode doing Halloween two from 1981, is Dean Cundy was gonna be the cinematographer on Poltergeist, and he pulled out to do Halloween two. Funny. That's uh that's wild.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

And you know what? Can I please get this off my chest from last week? Because I was so convinced that the director of Halloween 2 directed Halloween H2O. I was like livid with you.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Rick Rosenthal, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

And it turns out he did direct one 20 years after the one he does, but it was Halloween Resurrection.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

Which was kind of a nightmare. It was it was in the early stages of the internet, so it was interesting to use that vice.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

A good concept, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

Good concept, but really wasn't there yet.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Well, overall, it wasn't a great film. But again, there's a lot of things as we've talked. We we did a whole, we did an episode on the entire Halloween franchise. So if you haven't seen that, go back and check out that episode. And and uh that's another one in the in the franchise that uh there's plenty about it that I do like. I I think he did a lot of good things with it. But anyway, so so this one, Toby Hooper, written by Kim Henkel, and there's a really again, this is a bit of a mess. There's a story here about the making of that you see in the documentary of the financing and what the actors didn't do. It was financed by the mob.

SPEAKER_02 10:23

Essentially, yeah. And and then you often hear me say, I hope they got points on the back end, or and and I'm I don't know if I've ever really explained that. But what some actors will do is if they think a film is gonna do really well, like Jack Nicholson, for instance, in The Batman, he knew the Joker character was gonna be big. And even though he got paid a a good sum up front, five million, he usually gets 20 million at that time. So he says, okay, I'll take, you know, every time a new Batman movie comes out, I get paid. So he's made well beyond what he would have been paid if they just paid him a lump sum up front. So as that goes to box office and then home video, the money keeps accumulating. Well, some of the actors in this film thought that was gonna happen, but it never did.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

No, it never did. They they basically made nothing on the film.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

Yeah. Like 400. Now, Lionsgate, who now I think they still own it. They came in and actually did right by the surviving members and paid them 25,000. It's still minuscule, but it's still minuscule to what do we think about obsession.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Yeah, it would have been nice to have that 25,000 in 1974, but thanks. Thanks, anyways, folks. Yeah. So let's run down the principal cast here, and you can make some comments if you want as I go through. I guess they're teenagers in the film. They look like they're in their 30s, but you know, you know, even like kids today, younger kids today, look, you know, they got full beards.

SPEAKER_02 12:13

I love the comment by one of the actors who was like, you know, we were kind of snooty, which is kind of the remark I got hammered on for obsession. You know, they thought they were like big-time actors and should be treated a certain way. Oh, yeah. And they were treated terribly on this show.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Yeah, yeah. Marilyn Burns plays one of them. Uh her name's Sally. And then you mentioned uh the hitchhiker. There's this hitchhiking scene in the beginning, and played by Edwin Neal, uh, this guy. Wow. And this guy, he's a studied, like trained actor, and he was creepy as all get out.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

And and Sally was screaming through the whole movie. I can't imagine her voice at the end of this.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Yeah, and that that's a terrifying sequence. And she talks about it in the documentary as well. Alan Danzinger plays Jerry again, another one of the the teens here, if you will. Paul Partain uh plays Franklin. He's uh he's in a wheelchair, this character, and uh nobody likes this guy on or off screen, apparently. He was not popular. But as as the story goes, and he says he was he's made a decision to stay in character. And so it ended up leading to them because he was very annoying, his character. Right.

SPEAKER_02 13:31

He was whining playing and one of the other actors didn't like him, and he didn't realize till years later, because they, you know, even as old as this is, they were out on the circuit signing stuff, making money. So they did make money by being in the film. It was just in different ways.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Yeah. William Vale plays Kirk, another uh Terry McMinn, who is Pam, another one of the bunch. And then we uh Jim Mike, is it Sado? The plays the older guy, he works at the gas station.

SPEAKER_02 14:05

Yeah. Chainsaw 2, which Toby Hooper also directed. Did he do the second one?

SPEAKER_01 14:13

He did the second one. Okay, okay. I didn't, I thought they moved on. But uh, that was the one with Dennis Hopper. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:19

Which it was more of a comedy. Have you seen that one?

SPEAKER_01 14:24

I I'd seen bits of it, but no, I've never seen it in its entirety. Now, Gunnar Hansen, who plays I mean, arguably the most famous horror character. I mean, that would be argued by people listening, and everybody's got their factors.

SPEAKER_02 14:38

You can put him up against anyone, Freddie, Jason.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

Somebody came out on Instagram when we put out one of our promos for the Halloween 2 episode. They're like, Yeah, Michael's a B-I-T-C-H, and Jason would wipe the floor with him, you know, all this stuff. So everybody's got their favorites. But you know, he's an OG here. And Gunnar Hansen is a pretty big guy in his own right, but you know, you add these three four-inch heels that he's got on, and he's just a towering figure and really menacing.

SPEAKER_02 15:06

And he only appears in the first film. He was offered every film.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

And they kept, I mean, they insulted this guy every which way you could possibly, you know, they want him and they don't want to pay him anything.

SPEAKER_02 15:19

Right. They they offered him scale plus ten percent to pay his agent. And then they found out he didn't have an agent. So when he said, no, you're gonna have to do better, they came back and said, well, just scale because you don't have an agent.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

Yeah, so you don't need the 10%. Yeah. I I mean it's fascinating. This went all the way up through what have there been, four or five force installments, I think, in this four.

SPEAKER_02 15:43

At least four, right? There's one with uh Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellwicker.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Yeah, and you see clips of that too. And I'm in fact, when you play the trailer on Prime, it's actually the trailer for that one.

SPEAKER_02 15:57

Yes, it is. And I'm like, is that Matthew McConaughey? Yeah, I was confused by that. Yeah. You can see that on Netflix, by the way.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah. Mike putting a plug out there for McConnell. For people Zellwigger looking for it. There's a narration in the beginning of the film that sets it up. I would never in a billion years have guessed it was John Laraket. Now, for folks that don't know, you'd have to be of a certain age. John Larquette, famously from Night Court, that show, right, that he was on, and and we went on to have a career in other shows too, of course, but I never would have guessed it. And this the story is, and I think even according to him, he got paid with a joint, a marijuana joint, basically.

SPEAKER_02 16:41

That was his that was his pay. That is wild. So and and Toby Hooper said, you know, I want you to be like Orson Wells, thinking of you know, War of the Worlds. And he and Toby, it's a great, it's a great like shot to him, almost like the office where they shoot to somebody and they're just looking. He wanted them to sound like Orson Wells, and he just looks at the camera and goes, he sounded like John Larakat.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Yeah. Well, and Toby Hooper, there is some spectacular directing in this film. There's this one, I guess it's a now a very famous shot that folks would know who are fans of the film. This under the swing shot. There's a scene where one of the couples, because there's two couples and then Franklin basically. Right. And they're in this old van. It looks like one of those VW vans from back in the day, and they are getting low on gas, and they stumble on this farmhouse. Lo and behold, it's a slaughterhouse for humans. We come to find out where Leatherface has taken up residence and so forth. But uh, this one couple goes to the house, and as these films go, right? The plot, he's up to the door, hello, because they're trying to get some gas. And they hear these, they hear this generator going in the backyard, and they find all these cars kind of in a cocoon, Mike. So you realize they had stopped at a gas station.

SPEAKER_02 18:06

Yeah, they had stopped at a gas station before that. Yes. But even that scene is creepy, like we don't have any gas. You'll have to stick around, maybe tonight, tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

And that's Ed playing the old man character who's attending at the gas station. They don't have any gas, yeah. Right. And man, is that scene later at the gas station again? Creepy is the only word you can really use. It's very disturbing, too. But so he goes in and he gets taken by Leatherface, which is like having not seen it, like again, I was so happy to see this for the first time after so many years. That is really intense. It's brutal, it's quick, and it's brutal.

SPEAKER_02 18:51

And he talks about it in the making of. Yeah. And he really hit the guy really hard, and then he slammed him head first into a wall right behind him. I mean, I think the actor was rough.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

Yeah, I think the actor probably soiled himself in like legitimately because it was it looked rough. It was really intense. So after that happens, of course, cut to his girlfriend's waiting outside on a like a swing in the yard, and he doesn't come back out for a bit, so she gets up to go to the front door. Well, this shot that Toby Hooper gets from behind her as she's sitting on the swing, and then when she gets up to walk towards the door, the camera goes under the swing and then rises up to follow her. It's a spectacular shot. There's many. So, you know, you you f some folks who maybe aren't fans of horror may not expect that level of cinema. And uh, this is up there with uh any other great-looking film. I loved what he did with it, but so you'd seen it, but it probably had been a number of years, I would guess.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

Yeah, I can't even remember because we didn't do it for any of the other Halloween fests. Did it feel like seeing it for the first time in a way? Sort of, yeah, because I don't have it in my collection. And so I wouldn't have stumbled upon it unless I was on a streamer or something.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

And you said Arrow has a special edition out?

SPEAKER_02 20:20

Yeah, a 4K edition with all you know, it has that documentary we saw, but it has other interviews as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

A commentary, perhaps, on this?

SPEAKER_02 20:31

Yeah, there is a commentary.

SPEAKER_01 20:33

And you don't think you'd pick that up?

SPEAKER_02 20:35

I haven't, you know. It's been out for a while.

SPEAKER_03 20:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:39

Uh I don't know. I think it's almost too creepy. It's very creepy. I think I I get enough from the making of. I don't think I in in the commentary, it's Toby and Franklin and a good chunk of the cast.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

Yeah, I mean, it's a good one to pull out this time of year. I'll tell you that. It is like, wow. You do not. I mean, if you're gonna watch it with the lights off and alone and in the basement of you, you know, if that's where you're living like Mike, a troll under a bridge, then be prepared to be creeped out because it it was wow. I mean, that that in that first image of Leatherface is just imprinted in my brain now. I cannot see it. I can't unsee it.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

The image of Sally like rooting through bones and corpses, a lot of those were dead animals.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Yeah, the production designer was scouting all of these, and a sound designer, this woman that's in the documentary talks about how veterinary. It's a vet, yeah, a vet, and then they dispose of all these animals. So the guy thought it was a gold mine to heavy. He was taxiderming certain things, and right, the opening shot of the armadillo. That's right. He tells this story about that. While they were filming it, they stumbled on a horse, which you don't see that every day on the side of the road. No, a massive animal, right? And so, but but Even Toby Hooper says that was now this is kind of funny, but that was just too horrifying to use in the film. You know, a domestic animal, if you will. And so they end up with this this armadillo that uh he ha does the taxidermy on, and that's what you see in the opening sequence on on the road.

SPEAKER_02 22:24

You know, it's very hot, like hundred-degree weather, okay, and there was no air conditioning. And the night dinner sequence is shot indoors, but because it was night, they had to put blankets over all the windows, making it like 110 with rotting animals all around them. And they took they talked about not only the stench from the animals, but their own personal stench.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

Well, in particular Gunnar Hansen, because he did not change outfits for that entire shoot. Now you're talking what, 12, 16-hour days for a couple of months, whatever it was, and he never changed.

SPEAKER_02 23:08

That that's pretty that's and the old man who was like 18 years old, put that makeup on, and he only would do it once. He said, I'm not doing that again, so you gotta shoot my whole thing. Well so he had to shoot for like th three days straight.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

And to be clear, when you say it's actually the grandfather character played by a an actor John Dugan, and not to be confused with the the the old man, you know, Jim Sadow plays him. Yeah, this is another film. Of course, at that time it was much more common. These long takes, right? They the way that they would just sit on a scene with dialogue or not, and it just worked. It works so well to build the tension in a film like this. I mean, up until that I was already creeped out, and I hadn't even seen Leatherface 35 minutes into the film. Right. Well, I knew I had the anticipation, right? Because I know of the character, I so I know he's coming, and I know people are gonna get chopped up with chainsaws. Right. But still, it it works very effectively so many years later. And like I said earlier, it's what we don't see that's most disturbing. It's implied, and we've talked about that a lot. On I mean, look at Jaws as a perfect example for those who argue whether or not that's in the horror genre. And we've done an episode arguing just that, and you can go watch that and get our take on it. But but that's a masterclass in building that suspense without even seeing the main antagonist, right? Which in that case was an animatronic shark that was a nightmare. But now you mentioned this mafia company because of the dis the was it Bryanston distributing company, some front for the mob. And and they made a deal with Henkel, the writer, and Hooper, the director. They had their own production company called Vortex, and the actors were already getting a pittance off of the act. It was like they were already starting at whatever they got was going to be based on 50% of the profits of the film, or the net, not even the gross, the not the pro you know, the net. Right.

SPEAKER_02 25:17

And little did they know that percentage was the percentage of only one of the companies that owned only a third of the movie. So again, it was nothing.

SPEAKER_01 25:29

It was really a wild kind of thing. So this is very loosely based on a serial killer, quote unquote, named Ed Gean. I think he only killed a few people, I believe.

SPEAKER_02 25:41

Is it two, right? But they did call him a serial killer.

SPEAKER_01 25:45

They did, yeah. And he inspired like Silence of the Lambs, and I think they said even Psycho was inspired by this character, this guy. Yep. Now, so what do you make of this device that Toby uses here and others have Fargo for a good example, where they say at the beginning, based on true events.

SPEAKER_02 26:04

Well, I think I told you this a long time ago, but I bought into Fargo when the Cohen brothers came up and said this is based on a true story and blah, blah, blah. And for years I thought that was based on a true story.

SPEAKER_03 26:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:24

Until I think DVDs came out, and all of a sudden a special edition with someone saying, Oh, yeah, they they put the old we, you know, based on a true story. Right. But yeah, like back then, I would have thought, oh my God, this is this really happened. It's not hard to b you know, think that.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

I guess there's no blowback or or consequence to stating that up front. Like, I don't know if somewhere there's a disclaimer. I guess there isn't because they weren't going to do it, but people still do it.

SPEAKER_02 27:00

Like, so when you see based on a true story, do not believe it unless it's followed by some kind of statement.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

Well, there's always something at the very end of films, right? All you know, the the all the events depicted in this motion picture, blah, blah, blah. Fimptitious. Yeah. So that was an interesting point right away. You're like, oh my God, this is based on true events. So you're kind of hooked in and creeped out even more. I think it was in the documentary talking about this is like, who did it make become a vegetarian? Was it Guillermo del Toro said that or something?

SPEAKER_02 27:35

Yeah, Guillermo del Toro. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

Yeah, who's a master of the genre himself. But yeah, they call it a pro-vegetarian film, which I thought was pretty interesting. Now, this mic, IMDB Metascore, 92. 92. And Rotten Tomatoes. So 85% from the critics, 82% from the audience.

SPEAKER_02 27:58

You like to point out when you think a film is perfect, I've done it too. Guess who thinks this is a perfect film?

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Roger Ebert. Quentin Tarantino. Oh, Quentin Tarantino. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So I mean, you know, get better.

SPEAKER_02 28:15

He's no sludge.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

Yeah, exactly. Now, talk a little bit about the the time in which this is coming out in 1974. Like what's happening around us that influences the tone and the comics of the state.

SPEAKER_02 28:29

Like the gas station sequence, I pointed out they were out of gas. Well, our dad was a mechanic, you know, owned a gas station. And during the 70s, mid-70s, the Carter administration, we were at war and gas prices went crazy. They like our pumps only went up to 99 cents, right? When when we took over the gas station, it was gas was like 50 cents a gallon. That was for like Supreme. So then people never thought it was going to get to a dollar. And I can remember we used to have to half the price on the pump to do it. So people would wait for hours, and they would line up for a couple of miles down the street, and we would run out of gas in like an hour. We would just pump nonstop. It's crazy. But that was everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Yeah, that was, yeah. So that you've got that going on. And also this whole idea of true events, it said, just from what I've read, and I can't remember if it was commented on in the documentary, you might remember, but this whole idea of it's sort of based around the you know, the idea of at that time people dealing with the the government lying to the American people, right? The Vietnam War, and you got all of these, you know, Nixon, it's the Nixon era that you have going on with Watergate, right, and all these things.

SPEAKER_02 30:05

The guy, the hitchhiker, had been to Vietnam said the stench of that house was worse than anything I experienced in Vietnam.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

And he was in the battles. He would be able to comment on it, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, the oil crisis, the Nixon, Watergate, all these sort of things swirling around. And I think that was certainly not unique to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it would it would find its way in in many films in in terms of its tone, and it continues to this day, of course, to do that.

SPEAKER_02 30:38

And you know, I don't think there's any way this gets shot the way they shot it today, especially with the animals. Like one of the Marilyn, she was putting when an animal dies and they they want to preserve it. The taxidermy? Taxidermy. What's the what's the stuff? Formaldehyde. Formaldehyde. Formaldehyde.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:03

She was injecting the animals with formaldehyde so they wouldn't rot under the heat. And at one point she injects herself by mistake.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

Right.

SPEAKER_02 31:16

I mean, they'd never do that today.

SPEAKER_01 31:18

Yeah, never be able to. That reminds me of the making of the Night of the Living Dead, frankly, with George A. Romero and some of the stuff that was going on there because you had it was like the casting crew were also in the film. Like that was a wild production and got that beautiful book.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

The stuff they were eating, sometimes it was really like organs.

SPEAKER_01 31:39

It's just awful. Nasty, yeah. Now, certainly, this is an influence on subsequent films in the genre. Arguably, okay, this is the first time we're seeing a power tool used as a weapon. You've got this map, this chainsaw that Gunnar, this real chainsaw, by the way, that Gunnar Hansen is running around with.

SPEAKER_02 32:00

He has this little dance he does with it over his head.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

Yes. Yes, at the end. Crazy. Yeah. It ends up in the end of the film. I think it was supposed to be used. Wasn't it supposed to be in an earlier sequence and they didn't love the take or something? I forgot. But now Gunnar says that was all out of frustration for him to be done with this production, and he was kind of doing a celebratory dance out of frustration, I guess. I don't know, but it's very one of our previous interns actually cut this awesome montage together, if you remember, and it had that image in it of him doing the circular dance with the chainsaw. So when I saw that, I was like, oh, now I it makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 32:39

And that became a staple in the sequels.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

Yeah, and uh the final girl, Mike, is another thing here that this that would, you know, go on to become. I mean, Jamie Lee Curtis and so many others, you know, the the sort of last surviving woman in the film. Right. Um, and then as I said earlier, this large masked killer. These are all now they're staples of any horror film, quite frankly. Right. Now, the budget's about around $140,000. Again, this is 1974. It makes about 30 million, somewhere around there, 30 and plus. Something like that. Yeah. So successful in that sense in the day, but again, you talk about how that was divvied out and who made what, and there's not a lot going on there. No, I think the mob got the biggest taste of that. Right. And they say we don't really know. The one guy says we it's hard to really say what it made.

SPEAKER_02 33:31

Because they, yeah, they went out of business and there was no way to audit them.

SPEAKER_01 33:35

They weren't keeping receipts, you know. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 33:37

It disappeared.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

Yeah, these cement shoes and whatnot. I don't know. Listen, that's I'm not claiming anything to be true of the Your Brother Podcast yet. Save your letters. Yeah, this is not based on true events, Mike. In the title, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, right? Two separate that was a very intentional thing they did with the title. So what what's your takeaway here and your final assessment of it?

SPEAKER_02 34:09

I think it's one of the creepiest films you can see from my money. Well, is it one of the best horror films you've ever seen? It's up there. Um it's hard to compare with what they can do today. Like some of the effects of Dracula. What Coppola could do, like making Kano float into the cab like we talked about. But I mean 1974, this is pretty pretty good stuff.

SPEAKER_01 34:41

It's it's very good, yeah. If if you're into this genre and you had not seen the film after so many years, like I had not, I would strongly encourage you to check it out as soon as you can.

SPEAKER_02 34:52

And if you've only seen the Dennis Hopper version, which you know, from that was me for a long time. That's more of a goof. They're kind of goofing on the characters. The guy, the hitchhiker, they asked him to do the sequel, but for some reason they wouldn't pay him or something like that. They get a guy that's almost his doppelganger with the head cheese.

SPEAKER_01 35:19

Bill Mosley, who, yeah, right, would very has gone on to become very famous in the genre for sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:27

Yeah, you're right. Very, very close comparison.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

I would have thought it was the same actor.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

Yes, it's one you gotta see again if you're into the horror genre. If you're not, then stay steer clear, because this will definitely keep you up at night, uh, for sure. It's very tight, it's an hour 23 minutes. It's got an R rating, of course. Toby Hooper was looking to get a PG, but that wasn't happening. And it was good, it was gonna get slapped with an X rating, whatever that was.

SPEAKER_02 35:53

Yeah, NC 17.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:56

Or it was probably back then, it was probably X. You change that at some point.

SPEAKER_01 36:02

Yeah, yeah, you don't really see that anymore. So yeah, I I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would recommend it as a horror fan for sure.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

If if you're into like the terrifier, okay, this is very different than that.

SPEAKER_01 36:16

It is gore and blood. It's splatter horror was one. And so, yeah, very, very different. So it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be right to even compare them. So it's again, it's more about what you don't see. It's the implied horror uh that's so scary. I watched it like in the late afternoon on the weekend, and but I had the shades, you know, kind of drawn, and I was trying to get some some ambiance, but uh, I would put it extra creepy if it was like pitch black and you know. At night.

SPEAKER_02 36:43

I I saved it for for a night shoot. Yeah, I wanted to see it at night.

SPEAKER_01 36:48

Yeah. Now, Terror on Church Street, I mentioned at the beginning, a place that you worked uh back when that was a thing here in in the Central Florida area, and that was the big climax to Terror on Church Street. I'll I can I can see it in my mind like it was yesterday. This yeah you'd you'd be walking through the the haunted house, if you will, and you'd get to this last spot, and there was a bridge. They had built a bridge over this water. Is this inside of like an old bank building or car dealership, I think it was back.

SPEAKER_02 37:18

Outside, you would never guess. Never guess inside. Right. And it was quite lengthy.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

And I I played Leatherface a few times. Which is interesting. Did you wear like platform boots or something? Because you know, we don't have a gunner height.

SPEAKER_02 37:33

We had like I forget, it was like a sting, and the mask was really creepy. But my buddy Jack, who went to we went to Japan and we did this in Japan, he was perfect. He was like 6'4, and when he did it, man, he did the dance.

SPEAKER_01 37:53

Well, it was it was crazy because you would get to that spot at the end and you'd and then you'd hear him fire up the chainsaw, and he would come out.

SPEAKER_02 38:01

Exactly. And you had nowhere to go. Right. And and what it was is what you would do is you would wait for the people to come into the room. And again, they can't see you. Yeah, you're in the corner in the dark, and you wait till they get to a certain point, and you hit the chainsaw, that freaks them out. Yes. And then you start jumping behind them, and they they run right up.

SPEAKER_01 38:27

Yeah, there wasn't anybody that wasn't pushing, trying to get out. And and he would there was a couple of times I remember getting chased out onto the sidewalk. He would chase people right onto orange app. And the funny part about that is you would exit out to like a lobby area. Right. So it gives shit. You just wanted to get the hell out of there. And he would go right out, and that was like, wow, that was intense.

SPEAKER_02 38:49

Jack was fantastic. He did it most nights, but he was like a manager. So when I would show up for work, I would be told, you know, what character I got Freddy more often than anyone.

SPEAKER_01 39:03

You did get Freddy and you got uh Hannibal Lecter.

SPEAKER_02 39:06

Yeah, and the reason I got Freddy is because there was this lift, and you hit a button and you go fli you're on a lift and it takes you across the room and you have the fake Freddy hands with the blades and you scratch over the top of people.

SPEAKER_01 39:25

Right.

SPEAKER_02 39:25

And I was like the thinnest person. I weighed like 140 pounds, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 39:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:32

So, you know, if you put somebody on there that was too heavy, it would break by the end of the night.

SPEAKER_01 39:37

Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Good effect. That was was Leatherface. And so certainly the highlight of this film, if you can call it that, because it that'll get burned in your brain when you see it. So be forewarned. Uh, but I'd recommend you see it if you're into horror. This is a good one. And and for very different reasons, like you, like you said there. So, well, there you go, Mike. Not the final installment on O Brother Halloween Fest this year. We're gonna come back with another episode reviewing back rooms. So I'm looking forward to seeing that. I haven't seen it yet. Yep, a newer film. And uh it's a good bookend to, like I said, we started off with obsession, we'll end with back rooms, and it keeps Halloween fest alive into early November. So we'll you'll you'll be getting Halloween fest uh over the span of two months, technically. But that's gonna do it for this episode of the O Brother Podcast. I've been your host, Dan Smith, alongside me as always, my brother from the same mother, Mike Smith, and we will see you next time.

SPEAKER_02 40:28

Bye everyone.