'Genre-defining' slasher 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' turns 50

IRVING, United States — It was shot quickly on a limited budget with unknown actors wearing the same sweat-soaked outfits for weeks on end.

So if "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" had disappeared without a trace, not many people would have been surprised.

Instead, it's celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, a half-century in which it has been the benchmark for a subgenre of horror — the slasher movie.

"There's no corner of the earth that you can go to and say the 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' title and not have somebody know what you're talking about, whether they've seen the movie or not," said Chase Andersen of Exurbia Films, which owns the rights to the franchise.

"It's become part of the modern nomenclature. It's as American as apple pie."

Just not the kind of apple pie that grandma made.

In 1974, director Tobe Hooper hit upon a formula that would inspire countless copycats: a happy-go-lucky group of young people stumble upon an isolated house occupied by a masked lunatic who proceeds to chop them up with sharp things.

Leatherface — the lunatic — wields a chainsaw and a hammer to devastating effect, cutting up one man as he sits in his wheelchair, disemboweling another as a young woman watches from the meathook he hung her on, and smashing one guy in the head.

"Michael Myers ('Halloween') wears a mask, you know, Jason ('Friday the 13th') wears a mask. I mean, Leatherface was the first guy to do it," said Josh Hazard, who had gathered with other horror fans to mark Texas Frightmare Weekend.

"It really set a precedent for how horror movies were going to go."

If it is now obvious that "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" was something special, it did not appear like that at the time.

Actor Ed Neal, whose early appearance as a wild-eyed hitchhiker presages the violence that is to come, told AFP it had not felt like a genre-defining project.

"They come in and give me the script. And I go: 'Get the hell out of here with this,'" he said. "I thought, well, nobody will ever see it.

"And here we are."

Like the recent Netflix word-of-mouth hit "Baby Reindeer," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" claims with its opening crawl to have been based on true events.

Some audiences really