Texas Chainsaw Massacre Stars on the Intense Shoot and Their Franchise Connections

The original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the most beloved and infamous horror movies of all time, which has gone on to inspire a number of follow-up adventures for Leatherface, ensuring that the character’s legacy persists throughout the decades. In some regards, the opportunity to get involved in the franchise would be an immensely exciting prospect, but one that could also come with a lot of pressure. For stars of the latest sequel Sarah Yarkin and Elsie Fisher, the excitement outweighed those pressures, though there were other more practical challenges that they faced while actually bringing the sequel to life. The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre hits Netflix on February 18th.

Netflix describes the new film, “Melody (Yarkin), her teenage sister Lila (Fisher), and their friends Dante (Jacob Latimore) and Ruth (Nell Hudson), head to the remote town of Harlow, Texas to start an idealistic new business venture. But their dream soon turns into a waking nightmare when they accidentally disrupt the home of Leatherface, the deranged serial killer whose blood-soaked legacy continues to haunt the area’s residents — including Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré), the sole survivor of his infamous 1973 massacre who’s hell-bent on seeking revenge.”

ComicBook.com caught up with the performers to talk about their connection to the franchise, bringing the project to life, and the challenging shoot.

ComicBook.com: The original Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 50 years ago, it was a notoriously challenging shoot where everybody ended up hating each other. Something tells me this experience was maybe a little bit more fun, but for both of you, can you think back on just the single most difficult day of filming?

Sarah Yarkin: It’s a toss-up. There’s a lot of fun, difficult days. I would say one that really sticks out to me was, there’s a sequence where I get stuck beneath the floor in the crawlspace. They built this whole crawlspace in a studio and covered it with dirt, just crap, and there were three days of me on my knees with knee pads and everything. And I’m already, at that point, covered in every crap you can imagine; blood and sweat and whatever, everything. And just crawling in that for three days, that was probably the most physically and emotionally … And that was also at the end of the shoot where I’ve already just been traumatized.

This was the most physically and mentally draining thing. And then a sewage pipe explodes on me at the end and I’m covered in poop … On my hands and knees all day.

It was fake, I hope.

Elsie Fisher: I sprinkled a couple real nuggets of poo in there. I didn’t tell you.

Yarkin: No, I smelled it.

I don’t know how much deeper I want to dive into that train of thought. So instead, I’ll just say, Elsie, what was your most challenging day set?

Fisher: I mean, when I was just sprinkling… Just kidding, just kidding. No, I mean, it’s an amalgam at this point where I’m like, “What were the days?” Everything was on the same lot, so it was very easy to transfer between locations and it wasn’t like, “All right, we’re going to get all the stuff outside or all the stuff, blah, blah, blah.”

I do remember there being a day, I think it was with a big rain machine, and it was the scene after we get out of the bus and we’re on the ground and we’re running out … Just being on the wet asphalt covered in this stuff. You have to get up every time, and then the fake rain, it was … I don’t know, I felt very dramatic afterward. But it looks great.

At least you didn’t have Sarah’s poop raining down on you.

Fisher: I got a little bit. A little bit when we were hugging.

The original film is so beloved and so iconic and it has remakes, reboots, prequels, sequels. What was your connection to the franchise before getting involved, and did any of the franchise’s history weigh on you when you took on this role?

Fisher: I think it is so interesting because it is such a long-running franchise and there are so many different installments. It was very fun to figure out what ours was going to be. Because there’s — isn’t there Texas Chainsaw in space? That’s a thing, right?

Not yet, but it sounds like the three of us are making it.

Fisher: Right? Anyways, that being said, there are a lot of installments. I was mostly familiar with the original because I saw it when I was way too young and I was traumatized. And now I watch it and I’m like, “That’s really funny. This is a good movie. This is a good, funny, comedy movie.” It was really fun, though, to maybe play into or discover more about the elements, getting to play into that humor a little bit, and the horror and all of it. It was awesome.

Yarkin: I don’t watch horror movies. I’m scared of everything in the world. I’m just scared. I’m a scared person. So, I didn’t watch the movie until I got the role because I wasn’t going to sit through that for no reason. And then I watched it and felt quite intimidated to take something on like this that has such a legacy, but excited to see, again what Elise said, what this version was going to be and what lane they were going to take with it. But kind of scared, like, “This a franchise people like, what if I do bad?”

Fisher: It’s a franchise, baby, and people love it.

That’s going to be the headline. Sarah says, “It’s a franchise. People like it.”

Yarkin: “Genius Sarah Yarkin says…”

When it came to going from the script to setting foot on set and you’re waging battle with Leatherface, you’re crawling under floorboards, you’re being chased, rain, all that stuff; how does the actual experience of shooting some of those more intense things compare to when you read it in the script? Does that help you prepare, or is it one of those things where no matter how much you prepare, it’s nothing like once you get on set?

Yarkin: So, it’s funny. I was so excited, obviously, reading the script and there’s all these crazy scenes, blood and guts, and [thinking], “This is going to be gnarly.” And I’m so psyched like, “Get me there tomorrow and cover me in sh-t.” And then when you’re actually doing it and half a page of hiding under a bed is really three days, 10 hours a day hiding under a bed crying, it’s not quite as fun and really draining. I learned a lot from this experience of what this kind of thing means and entails. It was crazy, though.

Elsie, I think with your character, you have this very serious trauma in your character’s past, and it’s some very heavy, real-world trauma that your character suffered. How did that influence your take on the character? Did that real-world horror for this somewhat entertaining, almost silly, heightened horror movie experience, did that help ground the experience or did that add a whole extra layer of intensity to your role?

Fisher: No, I actually think it is a very grounding thing. And just, especially because school shootings are, unfortunately, a very visceral thing and it’s happening, and I think everyone has a lot of feelings about it. It was really important for me because it is such a real thing. Just the concept, to give it the nuance it deserves, I wanted to do my own research and look at interviews, look at people’s experiences.

But also, I think it’s just the whole arc of having that trauma beforehand and having the survivor’s guilt. I think a lot of people in real life who do have that survivor’s guilt are drawn to horror as a genre, which is then very interesting to tie it in within the realm of the movie itself and have that be the arc of the character.

So, hopefully people can — well, not relate to, I don’t want to say see themselves, maybe they can find something in that. But then also, I know a lot of people who have had really awful things happen to them and they generally tend to be little funny sh-theads. I wanted to add that to her, just make her feel like a real person and not defined by a terrible thing that happened.

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre lands on Netflix on February 18th.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter.