Three Stops on the Ultimate Texas Chain Saw Marathon
Who says Leatherface only gets one day? The original, the remake, and the documentary are ready when you are.
August 18 may officially be Texas Chain Saw Day. But honestly, why limit Leatherface to one day a year?
With Terror on Tubi, you can celebrate whenever the mood for chainsaws and spectacularly bad road trips strikes. Start with Tobe Hooper's sweaty, grimy 1974 original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Jump forward nearly 30 years to watch Jessica Biel take on a new version of the nightmare. Then go behind the screams with Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth to find out how the movie that started it all became horror history. Consider your Leatherface marathon officially cleared for any day on the calendar.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Five friends. One Texas road trip. A farmhouse they absolutely should have kept driving past. Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre drops a group of young travelers into the path of Leatherface and his deeply inhospitable family, then spends 84 minutes making the Texas countryside feel like the last place on Earth you'd ever want your car to break down.
More than 50 years later, the movie still feels startlingly raw. Marilyn Burns' increasingly desperate Sally and Gunnar Hansen's hulking, unpredictable Leatherface make the whole thing feel less polished than experienced, like somebody found footage of the worst road trip imaginable and decided we all needed to see it.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Nearly three decades later, Leatherface got a 2000s makeover and Jessica Biel got the worst road trip of her life. Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre sends another group of friends through rural Texas, where a seemingly ordinary drive leads them straight toward Leatherface, the Hewitt family, and several increasingly convincing reasons to never leave the interstate.
Biel's Erin gives the remake a determined final-girl center, while R. Lee Ermey's Sheriff Hoyt somehow manages to make Leatherface feel like he has competition for “person we'd least like to encounter in Texas.” Slicker, darker, and unmistakably 2000s, the remake takes the original's nightmare and gives it a brutal new coat of paint.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth
How do you make a movie this grimy, chaotic and unsettling enough to still have people talking more than 50 years later? David Gregory's Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth goes behind the scenes of Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic, bringing together cast and crew to unpack how the low-budget production became one of horror's most infamous films.
For anyone who finishes the original with approximately 47 questions, consider this your next stop. The documentary digs into the production, performances, and stories behind the movie, giving horror obsessives the kind of behind-the-scenes details that make you want to immediately watch the whole thing again with new eyes.