×

WHERE TO WATCH

SUBSCRIPTION

Tubi TV

Stream

PURCHASE

Amazon Video

RentBuy

Fandango At Home

RentBuy

YouTube

RentBuy

Apple TV Store

RentBuy

Google Play Movies

RentBuy

Powered by JustWatch

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre^note  Despite most people and the film's original theatrical release poster spelling Chainsaw as one word, the film's official title uses the two-word Chain Saw per the opening credits and its U.S. Copyright Office registration. is a seminal American slasher film directed and co-written by Tobe Hooper, depicting the "true" story of a group of young people traveling by van through rural Texas who happen on a secluded old house inhabited by the world's most horrifying family—and in particular one disturbed young man with an interest in leather masks and amateur butchery. The film was released on October 1, 1974.

While the film was marketed as being based on actual events, this was in large part a deliberate conceit to attract a wider audience, though it was also intended as a subtle commentary on the political climate surrounding its release, as Hooper believed similar lies-presented-as-fact were being pushed by the government on a regular basis on subjects such as Watergate and The Vietnam War. However, Hooper did draw inspiration for the movie from real-life murderer Ed Gein (that's right, the same person who inspired Psycho's Norman Bates, and later Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs), and based the character Leatherface on him.

The film was produced on a budget of $140,000,^note  equivalent to $887,819 in late 2025 and Hooper cast mainly unknown actors from the local Texan population. When it was completed, Hooper struggled to find a distributor due to its graphic depictions of violence and corpses. While Hooper had hoped for the film to get a PG rating, it was originally rated X; an edited resubmission was then rated R.

Controversial on release (with several countries banning it outright), the film was a great commercial success despite being critically divisive, and it has gone on to be hailed as one of the greatest, scariest and most influential horror films ever made. The film has since spawned a franchise including three direct sequels (none of which are connected to each other narratively), a remake, and a direct prequel, with the lattermost loosely in-continuity with the second sequel.

The Texas Trope Massacre:

• Abusive Parents: The Old Man is the parental figure to the Hitchhiker and Leatherface, and he beats both of them. When Leatherface assures him that all the teenagers are dead and can’t go to the police, he beats Leatherface anyway for ruining the door.
• Acrofatic:
  • Leatherface keeps up with Sally despite being 6'7 tall, weighing well over 300 pounds, and carrying a chainsaw. It's even more impressive that he has the cardio to keep up with her over many minutes, including running up and down stairs. Gunnar Hansen, Leatherface's actor, revealed that he had to intentionally slow himself and provide distractions such as sawing tree branches because of how slow Sally's actress ran. Multiple reshoots were required because he kept catching her.
  • A downplayed case with the truck driver. He may not be graceful about it, but he (wisely) hauls ass when Leatherface start chasing him.
• Admiring the Abomination: Franklin is fascinated by the Hitchhiker and talks about him constantly after their altercation. At one point, he admires the willpower the Hitchhiker showed in pointlessly slashing his own palm. Upon hearing this, Kirk tells Franklin that he's weirder than the Hitchhiker.
• Alter-Ego Acting: Leatherface has three personalities depending on which outfit he’s wearing. There’s his normal mask and apron which he uses while cutting meat and chasing people. There’s his old lady and dress outfit which he wears while cleaning up and greeting his returning family. Finally there’s his pretty woman mask and suit that he wears for dinner with the family.
• Axe Before Entering: Leatherface cuts his way through a door to get Sally — his own door. The Old Man is not pleased at all and beats him for it.
• Badass Bystander: While getting chased, a semi-truck driver accidentally plows into the Hitchhiker. Though he runs from Leatherface just the same as Sally, he does clock the psycho right in his leather face with a wrench. A few moments later, a pickup truck driver passes by the scene, does a bootlegger turn, waits for Sally to hop in the truck bed, and high-tails them both to safety. We never even clearly see the hero's face.
• Bad Samaritan: When it seems that Sally has made it into safety from Leatherface in the gas station, its owner binds and gags her, stuffs her in a bag and brings her to his family's house.
• Bag of Kidnapping: Drayton Sawyer kidnaps Sally after knocking her out, then brings her back to their house in a sack.
• Bait-and-Switch: Quite a lot of screen time is spent with the teens puzzling over the blood mark left behind by the Hitchhiker, wondering if it's some sort of occult symbol or indication that the hitchhiker will track them down. Ultimately, the mark is meaningless, and the teens get in trouble by crossing paths with Leatherface rather than the Hitchhiker, though the Hitchhiker does eventually return.
• Big Bad Ensemble: All three cogent members of the killer family are the villains. Though Leatherface is the most famous, deadliest, and most prominent, he's subservient to the others.
• Bittersweet Ending: Sally makes it out alive and the killers will probably be caught, but everyone else is dead and there's no way she'll be mentally well after all she's been through.
• Bloodless Carnage: While not exactly bloodless, the film is light on gore for the most part, exceptions being the harm done to hands and Hitchhiker's death. Most of the violence is implied or hidden, and most of the gore is actually bones and pieces of dried corpses
• Blowing a Raspberry: Quite a bit of it:
  • The Hitchhiker does it several times to taunt the kids as the van speeds away. He also keeps blowing them to The Old Man who keeps barking orders at him when they're all together.
  • Franklin blows raspberries in frustration during his rant at the kids upstairs for leaving him behind, possibly inspired by the Hitchhiker.
• Broomstick Quarterstaff: When it is revealed that the gas store attendant is one of the villains, protagonist Sally quickly grabs a knife to defend herself. She is immediately disarmed and beaten unconscious with a broomstick.
• Bound and Gagged: Sally is bound and gagged by the Old Man and brought to the home. Her gag is removed so that she can scream and beg, to the family's amusement, while she's bound to a chair.
• Bury Your Disabled: The wheelchair-using Franklin gets a chainsaw into his guts. And if the sequel says anything, looks like he also got it to the face too.
• Butt-Monkey: Poor Franklin just can’t catch a break, besides using a wheelchair he also rolls down a hill while trying to pee, then he gets his arm sliced by the hitchhiker’s straight razor, then he is taunted by his friends about the hitchhiker coming to get him, he also gets stuck while trying to move around the house and finally he is sliced and diced while stuck in his chair and becomes the only person killed by Chainsaw in the movie.
  Franklin: If I have any more fun today I don't think I can take it!
• Cannibal Clan: The family turning people into meat products.
• Cannibal Larder: Probably the Trope Codifier.
• Car Fu: The Hitchhiker gets driven over by a truck.
• Cassandra Truth: Pam urges the group not to pick up the Hitchhiker, but she's ignored. This is a mistake. Then she urges Kirk not to enter the killer family's creepy house, but she's ignored. This is a mistake. Then Franklin urges Sally to drive them both back to the gas station rather than search for their missing friends, but this is a subversion. The viewer knows that searching for the missing teens is both pointless (because they're dead) and dangerous (because the killers are still at large), but it turns out that the keys are gone, so they can't drive away anyway. And then it turns out that the gas station proprietor is one of the killers so they were screwed no matter what.
• Chainsaw Good: Leatherface's weapon of choice, which he uses in the chase scenes and cutting up the captured meat. However, he actually has a higher body count with the sledgehammer.
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: Averted, compared to later slasher films as only 5 characters including villains explicitly die. It is played straight in a different sense, however, as four of the five leads all die within 15 minutes of each other, leaving Sally alone for an entire third of the film.
• Crapsack World: The setting of the original film feels post-apocalyptic or very near to it. The opening act of the film displays long stretches of abandoned buildings and factories, gas stations closed or non-functional due to fuel shortages^note At the time of filming, the effects of the 1973 oil crisis were still being visibly felt., desecrated graves, almost no signs of civilization short of truckers huddled by the road, and a narration on the car radio giving an endless stream of terrifying and disturbing news. The main characters gleefully explore and laugh about the memories they had playing in their grandparent's home just a few years earlier, but the house has clearly been abandoned for decades, with massive structural decay they don't even seem to notice, and their favorite swimming hole is scarcely more than a dried-up ditch. The cannibal family themselves seem to have fallen upon their madness and unravelling partially because of the collapse of the slaughterhouse which kept them employed.
• Creepy Gas-Station Attendant: The Old Man. Probable Trope Maker, by the way. Encountered early on by the protagonists, he appears normal enough, but when Sally goes to him seeking aid after her friends are killed, he is revealed to be the head of Leatherface's family and captures the girl to take home for dinner.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Kirk is bludgeoned to death by Leatherface, but the first blow doesn't quite kill him, leaving Kirk convulsing violently on the ground until Leatherface finishes him with a second hammer strike.
  • Pam is impaled on a meat hook then thrown in a freezer to slowly freeze to death, which still hasn't quite happened when Jerry finds her.
  • Franklin gets a chainsaw rammed through his torso, mulching his insides.
• Curiosity Killed the Cast: Played as straight as possible, as three of the protagonists meet their end by wandering into the maniacs' house.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: Grandfather's so old and decrepit he's mistaken for a mummified corpse at first.
• Decoy Antagonist: The first scene makes it seem like the Hitchhiker is going to be the Big Bad. While a prominent villain, he takes a backseat to Leatherface and the Old Man.
• Deep South: The Sawyers represent the worst that this trope has to offer.
• Deus ex Machina: Sally is saved from certain doom by two passing motorists: the 18 wheeler driver gets The Hitchhiker off her back and the pickup truck driver saves her from Leatherface.
• Developing Doomed Characters: We don't learn all that much about the five teens during the first act of the film. Sally is Franklin's sister and Jerry's girlfriend. Franklin is disabled and a bit of a Manchild, at least at first. Jerry is the most mature of the group and handles the driving. Pam is a hippy who is interested in horoscopes. Kirk is her boyfriend.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: There are very strong parallels to the meat industry. Sally and her friends are livestock, they are led into the slaughterhouse (with the other four following after the first), they are treated with unnecessary cruelty, and they are eaten. The three maniacs represent different positions in the process. The hitchhiker is the farmer who brands them (the blood on the van), Leatherface is the slaughterhouse worker who kills and butchers them, and the cook only works with the final product and dislikes the killing process.
• The Dragon: Leatherface is the enforcer for the Old Man.
• Drone of Dread: The entire score.
• Dumb Muscle: Leatherface is not very bright and is implied to have a developmental disability.
• Dwindling Party: In something of a subversion, four fifths of the group are killed off really quickly, with the remainder of the film focusing on the ordeal of Final Girl Sally.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The relative lack of Gorn arguably counts, as every other film in the franchise would live up to the bloody sounding name.
  • Leatherface wearing multiple masks, as Gunnar Hansen and Tobe Hooper claimed in interviews this was done as a means of expression due to his lack of personality. Later films seemed to imply he wore masks as a means of covering a facial deformity.
  • To both the franchise and to slasher movies as a whole: it makes perfect sense that even a freakishly big and strong man like Leatherface would be knocked down by a thrown wrench to the head and scream in pain when he accidentally chainsaws his leg. The fact that he's able to get back up and keep attacking means he's still Made of Iron; even so, such signs of human vulnerability would not be shown by the supernatural killing machines of the post-Halloween slasher genre.
• Evil Gloating: The Old Man, the Hitchhiker, and to a lesser extent Leatherface do this during the dinner scene.
• Evil Is Hammy: The Old Man and the Hitchhiker are extremely animated people. The Hitchhiker especially spends nearly all his screentime either screaming or giggling.
• Evil Is Petty: Nasty customer though he may be, the Hitchhiker's villainy never really rises above petty malignance; he robs graves and desecrates corpses for fun, cuts Franklin's arm for refusing to buy an unrequested photograph, and spends the infamous dinner scene mocking and tormenting Sally like a teenaged bully.
• Evil Laugh: A sequence in the film just has the family laughing maniacally at the bound Sally's expense.
• Extremely Short Time Span: The whole movie takes place in just under twenty-four hours, as it seems to be mid-morning or early afternoon when we first meet the party going to the graveyard, and the conclusion takes place at dawn the next morning.
• Eye Take: The dinner scene features some extreme closeups of Sally's eyes as she looks around in terror.
• Fainting: Sally faints when she sees Grandfather sucking blood from her fingertip.
• Fanservice:
  • A third through the film, Kirk unbuttons his shirt down to his navel, exposing his sweaty chest.
  • There is also an early shot at the gas station of Pam's legs from a very low angle.
  • The film has at least one long tracking shot of Pam in those red shorts before her death.
• Fat Idiot: Leatherface is a 300 pound killer who is developmentally disabled.
• Faux Affably Evil: The Old Man tries to somewhat comfort Sally a few times, but still fully intends to kill her that evening. Since the film can be interpreted as an allegory of the workings of a slaughterhouse, the Old Man may be the "compassionate" kind of slaughterhouse worker who wants to treat the cattle kindly before killing them.
• Final Girl: Sally ends up being the sole survivor to confront the family. She's often considered the first-ever final girl, with the heroines of the later slasher genre following in her footsteps. Also a bit of an Unbuilt Trope, as Pam is just as much a "good girl" as Sally is, and Sally never Took a Level in Badass. She never even gets into a fight or confrontation with Leatherface. She's just a normal girl who happens to survive over her friends.
• Fingore: The finger slicing scene, which was actually done for real, after the blood pumping machine broke.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: We've already seen Leatherface's slaughterhouse and meat locker at the house. When Sally waits for the Old Man to return, the camera lingers suspiciously on the meat he's barbecuing. When the Old Man returns, he pulls out the bonds he's going to use to tie Sally up.
• Flat Character: None of the victims really have anything in the way of identifiable personalities. The most we really get is that Pam likes astrology and Franklin is kind of snarky sometimes.
• Foreboding Carcass: One of the first shots of the movie is a dead armadillo, an ominous omen of the death ahead.
• Foreshadowing: Several examples:
  • The Hitchhiker talks about how the sledgehammer is a better method of killing the animals in the slaughterhouse. The first member of the group to die gets killed with a sledgehammer and it is not pretty.
  • The gas station attendant also mentions that it's a bad idea to just go into people's houses, especially since the owner might not take kindly to it. This is exactly how and why the first two deaths happen, even though the conversation was about a different house.
  • Franklin describes (in hideous detail) how some of the slaughterhouse cattle would twitch and convulse after being hit with the sledgehammer. Exactly how Kirk dies when Leatherface cracks his head open with a hammer.
• Gas Station of Doom: The gas station unfortunately turns out not to be the sanctuary for Sally as the proprietor ties her up, gags her, and forces her into his truck. It also turns out to be the place where human meats are barbecued.
• Girly Run: Sally runs like this throughout the film, much too terrified to adopt a more efficient running stance.
• Good Samaritan:
  • An unnamed trucker plows down the Hitchhiker to save Sally as he begins to slash her. He then knocks Leatherface down with a pipe wrench before fleeing.
  • Another one appears within minutes: a young man driving a pickup truck comes across the melee, and has the presence of mind to whip around, slow down so Sally can jump into the bed of his truck, and then speed away to escape.
• Gorn: Famously averted despite what old reviews would have you believe. While not bloodless, it is fairly light on blood in contrast to most slasher films.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Implemented with most every kill in the film except for the explicit depiction of the Hitchhiker getting obliterated by a passing truck. Also purposefully invoked when Pam is hung on the meathook. Hooper was seeking to cut down violent content to try to get a better rating, so he opted not to show the impalement. Instead, he established her wearing a shirt with no back, emphasized the hook and showed splatters of blood in the room. As he said, "The mind fills in the gaps for you."
• Grave Robbing: The Hitchhiker's hobbies include unearthing corpses and making grisly art, trinkets and furniture from them.
• Gross-Up Close-Up: The first shots in the film focus extremely close on decomposed corpses.
• Harmless Villain: Lampshaded with the Hitchhiker. Apart from cutting Franklin, he's not a very good villain. His kill count is virtually zero. The Old Man scolds him for grave robbing and leaving Leatherface alone. It is thanks to him that Sally escapes. And when he manages to catch up to her in the final chase scene, he doesn't really do anything to slow her down. And in the end, it's kind of his own stupidity that leads to his downfall.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: Leatherface seems to have a subtle bond with Grandfather and how willing he is to help him in his old age. Adding to the theory that Leatherface is simply a manchild who falls victim to abuse, it's a subtle touch that shows he's still human.
• Hooks and Crooks: One of the most famous kills is of Leatherface hanging Pam on a giant meathook while she's still alive and screaming.
• Hope Spot: During the first chase scene, Sally makes it to the barbecue joint and thinks the owner can help her. Unfortunately, the owner is actually the patriarch of Leatherface’s family, and he’s none too willing to let her escape.
• Hostile Hitchhiker: It's immediately clear that there's something seriously wrong with the Hitchhiker. After snatching Franklin's knife and cutting himself with it, he brandishes a straight razor, which puts all the teens on edge. He then asks to be taken directly to his house, and the teens are clearly too freaked out to endure him much longer. He takes a photo of the teens (after having showed them pictures he took of slaughtered cattle) and demands money for it. When the teens refuse, he burns the photos and slashes Franklin before finally being kicked out. It turns out that this is the least menacing he'll get for the rest of the film.
• If It Bleeds, It Leads: In addition to the news about the cemetery robberies, the first act is full of background radio chatter of nerve-wracking events happening around the world such as disease and violence.
• Ironic Echo: Sally tells The Hitchhiker that they can't drive him all the way home because they're in a hurry. Later, when she is tied up in his house, he taunts her and says, "I thought you was in a hurry!"
• Jump Scare: Leatherface's first appearance just before killing Kirk; Pam springing out of Leatherface's freezer when Jerry opens it; and Leatherface suddenly appearing before Franklin and Sally in the dark woods.
• Karma Houdini: Apart from Sally having escaped and the likelihood that she'll go to the police, Leatherface and the Old Man suffer no onscreen consequences for their crimes. The worst that happens are the injuries Leatherface sustains while chasing Sally, and even then, they don't seem to bother him much.
• Karmic Death: The Hitchhiker's grave robbing is what brought Sally and her friends to the area (she and Franklin wanted to make sure that their grandfather's grave hadn't been secured), setting off the chain of events that results in his gruesome death.
• Kick the Dog:
  • The Hitchhiker's habit of Grave Robbing has absolutely nothing to do with his family's eating habits. He's just cruel like that. In fact, the Old Man calls him out on the whole thing being stupid and pointless.
  • The killer family as a whole tying Sally to a chair while they eat, mocking her screams the whole time.
• Laughing Mad: When the Hitchhiker's not smiling broadly, he's giggling, and when he's not giggling, he's laughing maniacally. This also applies to Sally at the end of the film, as she goes from screaming to laughing in a deranged way, having succumbed to madness from her ordeal.
• Losing a Shoe in the Struggle: When Pam attempts to escape the house, she is caught by Leatherface right after she leaves the exit. He catches by her hugging her body which leads to her flailing her legs and lose her flip-flops during the process.
• Made of Iron: On top of being huge, strong and psychotic, Leatherface is extremely resilient. A pipe wrench to the face, followed by a deep chainsaw wound, only slows him down for a moment. He's soon up and twirling around on a chainsawed leg.
• Male Gaze: Pam's red shorts get a lot of camera shots, many of them from behind including a famous low-angle shot.
• Manchild:
  • Franklin is characterized this way in the first act. He fiddles with a knife like a kid, talks theatrically about disturbing subjects without realizing he's being upsetting, and throws a tantrum when he's upset at the others for leaving him behind. His manchild traits fade in the second act, however, when Sally starts freaking out, and he becomes the level-headed one of the pair.
  • Leatherface seems to have the mental capacity of a very small child. He is bullied by family members whom he dwarfs, and actually seems to be freaked out by the presence of intruders in his house, as if he was a scared kid instead of a large, powerful man who is much more dangerous than they are.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The family of cannibals are named Sawyer; a sawyer is a person who uses a saw.
  • The film is set in the fictional location of Muerto County, Texas — "muerto" is Spanish for "dead".
• Media Scaremongering: News recordings play over the opening credits, and they're not exactly cheerful news either. In addition, the title itself is reflective of this trope, exaggerating the carnage in the film when only one character in the film is killed by a chainsaw.
• Middle-of-Nowhere Street: The film takes place in a desolate place in the middle of nowhere. This is highly emphasized when the main characters pick up the Hitchhiker near the slaughterhouse. It is shown as a long shot with deafening silence from the outside world.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: The teens are drawn to the area because Sally and Franklin heard about grave robbing in the graveyard where their grandfather is buried. They run afoul of a local Cannibal Clan as a result.
• Mummies at the Dinner Table: When Sally enters the second floor room, she finds an elderly male and female sitting on chairs. The male (Grandfather) is later revealed to be alive, but the female (presumably, Grandmother) is very obviously dead.
• Ms. Fanservice: Pam is an attractive young woman who wears a Stripperific outfit during the summer, which contains of a completely backless tank top, red hotpants and black flip-flops. She gets a lot of fanservice shots during the movie.
• Never Trust a Title: A marginal example given that only one person is murdered by the chainsaw itself. We do see a second victim's corpse get dismembered by chainsaw, with a third implied. Two additional characters get attacked with the chainsaw but not injured by it.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The teens decide to pick up a hitchhiker because it's so hot out that they figure his life might be in danger. Even though Pam notes how unsavory he looks, they pick him up anyway. Once he's inside, they immediately realize their error, because he's a total lunatic. Before they finally kick him out, he's set a fire and slashed Franklin across the arm.
• No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: Instead of instantly killing Sally, the Sawyers invite her to dinner, where she is bound to a chair and served a plate of dubious meat. They really just want her to scream and beg as their entertainment.
• Not Quite Dead: When we see Pam in the meat locker, she looks dead. But then she sits up convulsively and sprawls over the top of the locker. By the time Leatherface pushes her back inside, she has apparently died.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Legendarily so. When James Furman, the Director of the British Board of Film Classification at the time, tried to cut the movie, he found that he couldn't. Almost all of the most horrendous violence takes place offscreen, making the film seem far scarier and more disturbing than if they just showed all the gore.
• Obviously Evil: Pam notes that the Hitchhiker looks "weird." When we see him, he's so obviously unsavory that it's no real surprise when he immediately starts acting like a lunatic.
• One-Eyed Shot: There are several shots of Sally's eye while she freaks out during the dinner scene.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: None of the murderers are named in the film. They are called "Hitchhiker," "Old Man," and "Leatherface" in the credits. The sequel establishes that their names are Nubbins, Drayton, and Bubba, respectively.
• Opening Scroll: The film begins like an old documentary with talks about the gruesomeness of the film they are about to show. This actually caused a lot of people to mistake this film for being a true story.
• The Patriarch: Grandfather is treated as one even though he's clearly not lucid.
• Please, I Will Do Anything!: Sally says this almost verbatim at the dinner scene, presumably offering sex as a way to avoid being killed. The family just laugh in her face.
• Promotion to Parent: The Old Man is not the Hitchhiker and Leatherface’s father, but he acts like it, holding a steady job and beating them when they mess up.
• Red Is Violent: The introduction of Leatherface has the killer standing in front of a vividly red hallway, and his appearance is quickly followed by the movie's first human death.
• Sexy Backless Outfit: Pam wears a completely backless tank top. Due to that, it's made clear that Leatherface hooked her up on a meathook by impaling her back with it.
• Screaming Woman: Sally spends the final third of the film screaming her head off. It's amazing she had any voice left.
• Serious Work, Comedic Scene. This film is a serious and often bleak horror movie, but it has some subtle black comedy eagle-eyed viewers often notice, like in the climax when Grandfather, who is said to be the best at killing, fails multiple times to hit Sally in the head with a hammer.
  • "Look what your brother did to the door!"
• Sickening "Crunch!": Kirk's death by sledgehammer.
• Slasher Smile:
  • Leatherface pulls these a few times. It's a little hard to see thanks to the mask, but if you look closely when he licks his teeth, you can see that he smirks while doing it.
  • The Hitchhiker pulls off a few doozies, too.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: In the Hitchhiker's first scene, an upbeat showtune ("Fool for a Blonde" by Roger Barlett) plays on the radio. The music is very emphasized when the Hitchhiker starts slitting into his palms. Since this song is now known for being from this film, it's clear that it left that kind of impact of the audience.
• Spiders Are Scary: Kirk notices a cluster of Daddy Long-Legs in a corner of a room and is spooked.
• Staggered Zoom:
  • Used to visualize the fear in Sally's eyes as she looks around and screams in terror.
  • Also used to emphasize Pam looking around in the room of feathers and bones.
• Stock Slasher: Leatherface is the Trope Maker, though he's notably only The Heavy to the rest of the Sawyer family rather than operating alone, and isn't nearly as invulnerable as some later examples would be.
• Stout Strength:
  • Leatherface is huge, with a corpulent build. He picks up a struggling Pam and hangs her on a meat hook with ease.
  • Also the truck driver, who has clearly had too many diner meals, but can still throw a wrench hard enough to knock Leatherface down.
• Super Window Jump: Sally escapes the maniacs' house twice by jumping through a window.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: Kirk and Franklin are both ambushed and killed almost instantly by Leatherface in two of the slasher genre's earliest jump scares.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: At the end, the Hitchhiker chases Sally out into a street and tries to stab her to death. One familiar with horror films would think he'd either succeed or she would need to fight him off. Instead, he winds up being run over by a truck because he didn't look both ways and the driver couldn't slow down in time. Road safety applies to everyone, even serial killers.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Leatherface cuts into Franklin with the chainsaw five times, once would have been fine.
• Too Dumb to Live: Arguably subverted, unlike most slasher films; the first of the group to die displays a morbid curiosity about the house, and tentatively enters not knowing about the killer inside. The rest understandably follow in search of their missing friends as each one disappears.
• Torture Porn: On top of being one of the earliest slasher films, this film also was a prelude to the genre long before it started gaining traction in the mid-2000's, considering it displays many similarities.
• Typo on the Cover: Or rather, a typo in the film itself: The film's title screen and the opening crawl misspell "chainsaw" as two words. As such, this is the way the film's title is officially written. The narrator even emphasizes both syllables, clearly reading the text as two words. However, much of the marketing, such as the film's poster, correctly spells it as one word.
• Unbuilt Trope: This film and Black Christmas (released the same year) are often regarded as the first slasher films, and even has many elements of a torture horror film. But like that movie, Texas Chain Saw Massacre had no previous slasher films from which to draw inspiration or copy, so it does not actually follow many of the standard conventions of slasher films. Some divergences include:
  • It avoids a Cold Open where the villain is established.
  • There's a family of killers instead of one singular slasher.
  • The main physical antagonist is very strong but otherwise a normal human who isn't Made of Iron and reacts realistically to pain.
  • There's no Sorting Algorithm of Mortality among the characters, as there's very little Developing Doomed Characters since little about their personalities is fleshed out, and as a result, there are no archetypes among them.
  • The very first kill that reveals Leatherface has no Scare Chord, and the carnage is mostly bloodless.
  • Final Girl Sally Hardesty loses her brother and all her friends before the third act, and she has no final confrontation with them. The film just ends with her escape, and that's it.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: This story is actually an amalgamation of three different elements. The famed not-quite-Serial Killer Ed Gein, the legendary Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean and his clan (who probably never really existed) and Tobe Hooper's fantasies of mowing down shoppers at K-Mart with a chainsaw while he was trapped in the hardware department by the crush of the holiday crowds.
• Villain Ball: The family giving the centenarian, mummy-like Grandpa the chance to bludgeon Sally to death screws the killers over, as Grandpa is too weak to land a killing blow, giving Sally a chance to escape.
• Villainous Breakdown: Leatherface twirling around, waving his chainsaw in frustration as he realizes his victim Sally got away.
• Visual Pun: The killers' household has a chair with human arms making up part of its structure: an arm chair!
• Weapon Title: The chainsaw of the title gets a lot of screen time.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Sally is helped by the driver of an 18-wheeler who leaves his vehicle behind, smacks Leatherface with a wrench, and runs down the road, never to be seen again.
  • The Old Man has an employee at his station, a silent, vaguely creepy window washer. He appears in one scene only, and it's never made clear if he's aware of or complicit in what his boss is doing.
• Wrench Whack: A truck driver throws a wrench at Leatherface which knocks him down and makes him cut himself with his chainsaw.