What can we expect from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre TV series?
Last year, it was revealed that Legendary Pictures, the company behind the 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre film that was released through the Netflix streaming service, had let their rights to make new films in the franchise lapse, so Verve, which represents the rights, were looking to “build out a multimedia strategy” for the franchise, with filmmakers, producers, and buyers looking to get involved. It was said that writer/director JT Mollner (Strange Darling) and producer Roy Lee (It) were among the interested parties, teaming up with A24 for a TV series pitch that had actor Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) hoping to read the script. Five months ago, A24 came out the winner of that bidding war.
Two weeks ago, it was officially announced that there’s a Texas Chainsaw Massacre TV series in the works at A24, with Glen Powell serving as an executive producer alongside Roy Lee and Steven Schneider of Spooky Pictures, Stuart Manashil, Image Nation’s Ben Ross, Powell’s producing partner Dan Cohen of Barnstorm, and Exurbia Films’ Kim Henkel, who co-wrote the original film and produced several of the follow-ups, in addition to writing and directing Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. Exurbia’s Ian Henkel and Pat Cassidy are producing. JT Mollner is attached to direct.
While we wait to hear further details on the project, fans are left to ponder how a Texas Chainsaw Massacre TV series could actually work. The concept doesn’t seem like it would lend itself well to an episodic structure… but there have been clues that give an idea of what this show might be like, and what sort of story it might be telling.
An Epic Tale
Well, it’s almost a given that we will see a group of people, probably young people, running afoul of the cannibalistic family at the heart of the franchise, giving genre icon Leatherface a chance to carve some more victims up with his chainsaw. If that didn’t happen, there would be a lot of disappointed viewers. But it would be difficult to build a season of television around the simple set-up of the original film: young people wandering into Leatherface’s house and getting knocked off one-by-one. That’s why it looks like this TV series will be digging deeper into the story of Leatherface and his family, giving answers to some mysteries that have been lingering since 1974.
The biggest hint comes in the final line of the statement Kim Henkel gave about the TV series deal: “It was a difficult decision, but A24’s embrace of boundary-testing genre film, and its record of working with artists who are inclined to test boundaries made them a compelling choice. Plus, we believe having a great creative and producing team — JT Mollner, Roy Lee, Dan Cohen and Glen Powell — in place gives us the best shot at a series that could be genuinely eye-opening and unexpected. There’s an epic tale lurking in the Chainsaw backstory.“
As for what that backstory could involve, Osgood Perkins might have spilled some details when he was pursuing the rights during the bidding war. He said, “(The rights holders) really care about Leatherface. There’s a fondness about his character and the idea that he saw bad things when he was younger, and because he is neurodivergent, he had his difficulties processing, and that’s when turned him into a quote ‘monster.’ It goes back to Frankenstein or wherever you want to be with monsters that are usually the misunderstood, sensitive type. They provided us with a guide book that they had put together. ‘These are the things that we think are important, these are the things we’d love to see, these are the things we don’t like,’ so on and so forth. One of the things was ‘Leatherface should never have a love interest.’”
Although we have gotten prequels in the franchise before, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning was a prequel to the 2003 remake rather than the original film, and 2017’s Leatherface, from the producers of Texas Chainsaw 3D, gave Leatherface a backstory that didn’t feel like it lined up with the classic version of the character. The idea that Leatherface “saw bad things when he was younger, and because he is neurodivergent, he had his difficulties processing, and that’s when turned him into a quote ‘monster’” is something that hasn’t really, properly been brought to the screen.
The recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game was also a prequel to the original film, featuring Leatherface and his brothers from the ’74 film, along with new family members / associates inspired by Henkel’s suggestions. The game centers on a group of college friends who cross paths with the family in April 1973, five months before the events of the first movie.
Grandpa
By August 1973, as shown in the first movie, the Slaughter family (as Henkel likes to call them, rather than the Sawyer name given in some follow-ups) consisted of Leatherface, his two brothers (The Cook and The Hitchhiker), the corpse of their grandmother, and their ancient, barely-functioning Grandpa.
Dialogue informs us that one of the Hitchhiker’s brothers used to work at the local slaughterhouse, and so did their grandfather. “My family’s always been in meat.” Cook tells us more about Grandpa’s time at the slaughterhouse: “Old Grandpa was the best killer there ever was. Why, it never took more than one lick, they say. Why, he did sixty in five minutes once. They say he could’ve done more if the hook and pull gang could’ve gotten the beeves out of the way faster.“
It’s likely that the show’s writers will be drawing inspiration solely from the original film, so we probably shouldn’t expect to see any sequel characters show up (sorry, Chop-Top), and there probably won’t be any hints that the family is working for the Illuminati (as indicated in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation), but Cook did have more to say about Grandpa’s slaughterhouse days in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2: “Every spring, the Atlas Rendering Company used to throw a big barbecue for Grandpa. Oh, he was the master. He was the one and only. He showed us all the business. We was raised in meat. But then, after the glory, here comes the shame. Atlas went for automation. The electrified cages, the cold-steel chutes, the air-powered head hammers. That drove Grandpa crazy, seeing things done like that. The crunching and the grinding, he just couldn’t stand it, no way. So, that was all she wrote. One morning, Grandpa just quit going in. It was the shame.” That goes hand-in-hand with lines in the first movie, where it’s expressed that the family preferred the old-fashioned slaughterhouse approach of bashing animals in the head with sledgehammers rather than using modern air-guns.
Judging by the things Henkel and the out-of-the-running Perkins said, along with lines in the existing stories, it seems likely that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre TV series will give us some information on how Leatherface became the character we know while also showing how the Slaughter family shifted from being slaughterhouse workers to crazed cannibals. And they’ll torment some new victims along the way.
What do you think of the idea of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre TV series telling “an epic tale” of how Leatherface and his family went off the rails? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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