Leatherface grew from several separate sources that filmmakers fused into one nightmare. The “true story” framing made their fictional massacre feel like a real case.
Leatherface’s human-skin masks have a real-world connection to Ed Gein, the Wisconsin killer and grave robber who helped inspire 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Police discovered that Gein had preserved human faces as masks, assembled a suit from women’s skin and turned body parts into household objects.
Gein grew up on an isolated farm with his intensely religious mother, Augusta. After she died in 1945, he closed off much of their house and kept her rooms untouched.
From about 1947 to 1952, Gein dug up the bodies of recently buried, middle-aged women who resembled his mother. He brought the remains home and made bowls from skulls, covered furniture with human skin and created a skin suit tied to his fixation on becoming his mother.
His crimes eventually included 2 killings. Gein murdered tavern owner Mary Hogan in December 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in November 1957. The search for Worden led officers to Gein’s property, where they found her body suspended and cut open like a deer carcass.
Gein was found not guilty by reason of insanity in Worden’s case and never stood trial for Hogan’s death. He spent the rest of his life in a mental institution and died in 1984.
Director Tobe Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel described Gein as 1 of several influences on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre rather than a direct blueprint for Leatherface. A family friend’s account of a medical student removing a cadaver’s face for a Halloween mask also shaped the character’s masks.
Hooper drew further inspiration from the Houston murders committed between 1970 and 1973 by Dean Corll, known as the “Candy Man,” with accomplice Elmer Wayne Henley. The chainsaw idea came separately while Hooper was stuck in a crowded hardware store during the Christmas season.
The movie’s claim that it told a true story was part of its fictional presentation and marketing. Gein never belonged to a chainsaw-wielding family of cannibals, and the film’s central massacre didn’t happen.
