Leatherface is a 2017 American horror film directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, written by Seth M. Sherwood, and starring Stephen Dorff, Vanessa Grasse, Sam Strike, and Lili Taylor. It is the eighth installment in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (TCM) franchise, and works as a prequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013), explaining the origin of the series' lead character.
Following the financial success of Texas Chainsaw 3D, a sequel went into development from director John Luessenhop for a planned shoot in Louisiana, but failed to receive the greenlight to move forward. In favor of avoiding the convoluted continuity of the previous films while going in an unexpected direction, Seth M. Sherwood pitched Leatherface to Millennium Films as a prequel that would follow the titular character in a mentally competent state, enduring trauma that transforms him into the intellectually disabled murderer seen in the previous films. Maury and Bustillo signed on as directors after reading the screenplay, impressed with what they found to be a unique take on the long-running franchise.
Principal photography commenced in Bulgaria in May and June 2015, with locations and sets chosen for their resemblance to the Texas terrain and as homage to the series' previous films. After being temporarily shelved by Lionsgate Films in 2016, the film was made exclusive via DirecTV on September 21, 2017, before receiving a wider release on video on demand and limited theaters, simultaneously, in North America on October 20, 2017. It received generally mixed reviews from film critics, and garnered $1,476,843 worldwide. Lionsgate and Millennium Films lost the rights to produce future Texas Chainsaw Massacre films because of its delay in release.
Plot In 1955, a couple, Betty Hartman and Ted Hardesty, are driving down a country road when they come across the seemingly wounded child Jedidiah Sawyer. In an attempt to help him, Betty follows him to a dilapidated barn, where his murderous and sadistic family promptly kills her. Her father, Sheriff Hal Hartman, is called to the crime scene, where he is shocked to find his daughter deceased. Despite the efforts of matriarch Verna Sawyer, Hal responds by taking Jedidiah into custody as retribution against the Sawyers, sending him to a mental institution known as the Gorman House Youth Reformery.
10 years later, at the Gorman House, where inmates are renamed to avoid their dangerous families, nurse Elizabeth "Lizzie" White forms a bond with a boy named Jackson. Verna later shows up at the institution with an injunction to allow family visitation, only to be rejected by the director of the facility, Doctor Lang. On the way out, she violates security, causing an escape riot in which many of the nurses and patients are killed. Lizzie is saved by Jackson, who gets her outside with fellow inmate Bud, where crazed escapees Ike and Clarice take them hostage.
The group arrives at a rest-stop diner after ditching their Gorman House uniforms. In an altercation with waitress Tammy, Ike and Clarice begin a murder spree within the diner, which forces them to flee. Hal arrives on the scene and pieces together that one of the escaped inmates is Jedidiah Sawyer. That night, the escapees take refuge in an abandoned mobile home. Believing that everyone is asleep, Lizzie tries to escape, but Ike stops her from doing so. He then becomes engaged in a fight with Jackson and insults Bud, leading to his demise. The next morning, Clarice notices Ike is missing and heads off to find him. She searches the woods and is consequently apprehended by a patrolling Hal. Upon disparaging both him and his dead daughter, he impulsively kills her as the others watch from a distance. Horrified, Lizzie flees with Jackson and Bud in tow. As a police car passes, she screams for help, causing the deputy to notice them.
The deputy attempts to call for backup, resulting in the killing of Bud in the ensuing struggle. An enraged Jackson kills the deputy. Panicking, Jackson and Lizzie steal his vehicle and try to reach safety, but are pursued by the deranged Hal. He opens fire on them, and one of the bullets strikes Jackson's face, while another injures Lizzie, causing the vehicle to careen off the side of the road. Later that night, Lizzie regains consciousness at the barn where Betty was murdered, discovering that she and Jackson are being held hostage by Hal. Planning to kill them, he gleefully tells Lizzie that Jackson is Jedidiah Sawyer. However, the Sawyer family arrives to save the helpless Jedidiah, beating Hal into submission and taking Hal and Lizzie into captivity.
Back at the Sawyer home, Verna stitches the remnants of Jedidiah's face and applies a muzzle to hold them together. She then leads him into a room where his siblings are holding Lizzie and Hal captive. Verna gifts Jedidiah with a chainsaw and Lizzie watches in horror as he bisects Hal to death. As the family celebrates, Lizzie flees into the woods while the Sawyers give chase. She nearly escapes, only to be caught in a bear trap. Lizzie attempts to appeal to Jedidiah's sympathy, while Verna encourages him to kill her to protect their family. Unable to recall events before his injury, Jedidiah begins to listen to Lizzie's pleas, but kills her after she insults Verna. The next morning, Verna burns the evidence of the prior night's events, and the other Sawyers feed the remains of their victims to the pigs. In the house basement, Jedidiah crafts the faces of Hal and Lizzie into a mask, donning it in front of a mirror as he applies lipstick. The film ends with him smashing the mirror at the sight of his reflection.
Cast and characters
Stephen Dorff as Texas Ranger Hal Hartman Stephen Dorff portrays Hal Hartman, an unhinged Texas Ranger who pursues Leatherface and his family for revenge for the murder of his daughter. Dorff described Leatherface as a survival and retribution film for his character, but that "you want to stay clear away from the Sawyers and not confront them." He was given reign by the directors to develop the character the way he envisioned him from reading the script. Vanessa Grasse as Elizabeth "Lizzy" White a nurse working at the Gorman House Youth Reformery who shares a close bond with Jackson. Sam Strike as Jedidiah Sawyer / Jackson Sam Strike plays Jackson, born Jedidiah Sawyer, as one of the four inmates that escape the mental institution, before ultimately becoming the eponymous Leatherface after enduring tragedies that destroy his cognitive stability. Leatherface is a mentally disabled serial killer seen throughout the TCM franchise, known for wearing masks made of human skin, and using a chainsaw and mallet as his signature weapons. Strike joined the film after reading the script, which he opined was, for a horror film, very character-driven. He felt that there needed to be a contrast between the two sides of the character, to show how a somewhat kind person can become such a killer: "It could happen to anybody. He had it in him because of his mother, but was at the mercy of his environment." Strike integrated aspects from the original film into his performance out of respect, but wanted to give his own interpretation instead of imitating what came before. To make the character's transformation more believable, Strike intentionally tried to gain physical body weight before filming to look physically menacing. He said, "I was trying to eat as much as I could to just feel physically capable. Chainsaws are very heavy, especially ones that are manufactured back in the '50s and '60s." Strike believed that the character's bursts of rage throughout the film contributed to his final permanent state as a monster. He developed a "battle cry" for whenever Leatherface lost his temper. As a character who was taken from his biological family and put into foster care at an early age, Jedidiah Sawyer was written in the screenplay to have been adopted at an early age by a family wanting a little girl, forcing him to wear drag clothing as a child and foreshadowing his gender ambiguity in the 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This plot point was absent from the final cut of the film. Lili Taylor as Verna Sawyer Verna is Jedidiah's mother and the matriarch of the Sawyer family, a bloodline of killers from which Leatherface was spawned. According to Taylor, "What attracted me to Leatherface was really talking with the directors... They wanted to do something that was a cross between Terrence Malick, like Badlands, and The Virgin Suicides, I thought 'I'm there' because what I love is this stuff that's happening with people pushing a genre as far as they could push it." Taylor chose to concentrate more on Verna's maternal instincts for her family than her murderous ways, with the character having a denial or compartmentalization about her motherhood and the murder. The film reunites Taylor with Stephen Dorff, who both starred in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol. Chris Adamson as Doctor Lang Chris Adamson's renewed interest in the horror film genre stemmed from his viewing of 1931's Frankenstein. To prepare for his role in Leatherface, he watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the 2003 remake, preferring the former: "It seemed to have an innocence somehow compared to some of the chopped up limb movies which I have sometimes worked on." The character Doctor Lang is the director of the mental institution from which Jedidiah Sawyer and the other inmates escape; the Gorman House Youth Reformery. Finn Jones as Deputy Sorells Hal Hartman's fellow law enforcement officer. James Bloor as Ike Jessica Madsen as Clarice Clarice is one of the escaped inmates and was originally intended to be an homage to Chop Top Sawyer, a character from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, but was later developed into her own character. Sherwood stated that the "DNA" of Chop Top is present in Clarice, describing him as his favourite Sawyer. A revisionist take on Chop Top was added due to the diminished role of the family in earlier drafts of the script, but was removed when the filmmakers began to feel that she was more of a "rip-off" than a genuine tribute. The version of Clarice that appears in the final film emerged when Sherwood imagined "an image of this little girl in pigtails burning down her house with her parents inside". Out of all the performances in Leatherface, Sherwood called Jessica Madsen's the most accurate of what he envisioned while writing. Deciding that Clarice is "much more than just a pyromaniac", Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo removed scenes detailing her backstory, such as her weaponising fire for the first time, her addiction for watching moving flames, and exposition on her family's disappearance. As the film begins, it remains ambiguous as to which inmate is actually Jedidiah Sawyer, the eventual Leatherface. Maury and Bustillo even considered leading the audience to believe that Clarice could become the titular character, "It wasn’t a so crazy idea to have regarding the passion Leatherface had for dresses and makeup in the previous movies." Sam Coleman as Bud Sam Coleman portrays Bud, a hulking mental patient that escapes the institution with Jackson, Clarice, and Ike.
Additionally, Julian Kostov portrays Ted Hardesty in the film, the father of Sally and Franklin Hardesty, the final girl and her brother from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Although his role is brief, there was going to be an additional scene exploring his family that was removed for budgetary reasons. Nubbins Sawyer, the older brother of Leatherface known simply as "The Hitchhiker" in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, is played by Dejan Angelov. Lorina Kamburova fills the role of Hal Hartman's daughter, whose death sets the plot into motion, while Boris Kabakchief plays Jedidiah Sawyer in his child years. Other acting credits include Dimo Alexiev, Nathan Cooper, and Nicole Andrews.
Production