After two entries in a rebooted Texas Chainsaw Massacre universe were released, 2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3D aimed to course correct the franchise and make Leatherface a horror icon once again. The movie was received with mixed reviews, with both new and devout fans having a hard time trying to wrap their minds around the film’s timeline. The film’s writer, Adam Marcus, recently shared that the timeline confusion was due to the studio changing his intended timeframe without doing much to account for the discrepancies.
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“For Texas Chainsaw [3D], the studio wanted a direct sequel to the [1974] original film, so my lifelong writing partner Debra Sullivan and I started from that idea,” Marcus told The Agony Booth. “We wanted to adhere more to the first movie. I love the first movie. [Director] Tobe Hooper loved our script, which was exciting. There was a certain reverence to what came before. I also loved [Friday the 13th‘s] Jason character and the hockey mask, but there was no real mythology for Leatherface, and we wanted to create a mythology.”
To some, the mystery behind the mask was the most compelling component to Leatherface, yet Marcus’ script allowed the filmmaker to go into uncharted territory.
“With Leatherface, there was a really broken psychology there, like Frankenstein’s monster,” Marcus pointed out. “For Debra and me, we wanted to tell the story of Leatherface’s imprisonment and his reverence for family. Shooting in 3-D added another challenge, in that how the killings could be more in your face. It was more figuring out all the mechanics before we wrote the kills. And although we enjoyed the end product, we wrote a $20 million movie, but they shot it for less than half that budget. There are a lot of cool sequences they couldn’t afford to shoot.”
The most confusing element was that actress Alexandra Daddario, who was in her 20s while filming, was revealed to have been playing a character that was nearly 40 years old.
“Our draft took place in the early 1990s, but the finished film took place now, which makes no sense,” Marcus admitted. “The original film was in the 1970s, and the main character is in her 20s, which is why the script took place in the ’90s. It didn’t make any logical sense, and it’s frustrating.”
Last year’s Leatherface was a prequel to the original film, which also failed to revive the franchise. The fate of the franchise is currently uncertain.
[H/T The Agony Booth]
