How Leatherface Has Changed In Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 Reboot

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 reboot director David Blue Garcia explains how Leatherface has changed since 1974. The chainsaw-wielding mad man in a mask made from a human face first rampaged into the consciousness of horror fans in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

That raw and low-budget Hooper horror masterpiece is of course now considered one of the most important fright films of all-time. Leatherface meanwhile has made his way onto the Mount Rushmore of horror villains alongside such slashers as Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers. And like those other famed horror movie bad guys, Leatherface has over the years found his way into a lot of sequels and prequels of varying degrees of quality. Now Leatherface is back again in a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre nightmare set in modern times that sees the chainsaw man embarking on another massacre in the dusty backwaters of Texas.

Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw indeed reboots the long-running horror franchise in a very Halloween 2018 way, bringing back the original bad guy and one of his original victims in Sally Hardesty (now played by Olwen Fouéré in the absence of the late Marilyn Burns), while introducing new young characters as well. Speaking exclusively to Screen Rant, director Garcia talked specifically about the new Texas Chainsaw movie’s version of Leatherface and how the character has changed – and not changed – since 1974:

I think the most notable change is that he has aged quite a bit. People like to talk about, “Oh, he would be so old” or “How would it feel to move around or lift a chainsaw?” And I don’t think those people have been to Texas and seen these old farmers that I’ve seen. I mean, these guys are 80 years old and still hauling bags of grain and stuff over their shoulder. So, I have no doubt that Leatherface eating and living well for 50 years, not eating fast food, would be a very healthy and robust man. But he hasn’t been on the internet or anything like that. He’s basically living in the same mental time period as the first film until he walks onto that bus and it’s like he time-traveled from 1974 to 2022 and he sees all these hipsters.

“That bus” of course refers to a scene in the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre that was previewed in a recent trailer. In the scene, Leatherface boards a bus full of young people who immediately whip out their cell phones to record the spectacle of the chainsaw-wielding killer. One of the kids in the bus even tells Leatherface he’s going to get canceled for his behavior. But Leatherface surely has no idea what being “canceled” means as he’s been living out in the boonies for decades, somehow maintaining robust enough physical health to still be able to massacre people with a chainsaw despite his advanced age.

It may indeed stretch credulity a little to think that Leatherface would still be so physically strong as an elderly man, even if he has spent 50 years avoiding fast food and doing a lot of vigorous outdoor activity. But it’s worth suspending disbelief a little in order to enjoy the idea of the masked murderer, who dropped off the map entirely in the early ‘70s, suddenly and traumatically encountering Gen-Z and their technology. Whether this new take on Leatherface succeeds with fans of the long-running Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise of course is yet to be seen. There have obviously been a lot of attempts over the years to bring Leatherface back, but nothing has ever lived up to the original nightmare vision from 1974.

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