Leatherface is "trying to be a good person" in new film that's still called Texas Chainsaw Massacre
If he's such a good guy, why isn't it the Texas Chainsaw Picnic, instead?
What makes a good person? Is it charity? Compassion? Empathy? Choosing not to don a mask made out of human skin, the better to murder people with a chainsaw and then feed them to your cannibalistic family? Philosophers remain unsure about the proper resolution to these nitty-gritty moral distinctions even centuries after they were originally posed.
Such heady ethical questions are set to be addressed, though, by Netflix’s new Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel, which will apparently depict Leatherface, the series’ iconic killer, as a kinder, gentler Texas Chainsaw Massacre-er. One who’s been hiding out sans masks since the events of the original film, and, in the words of producer Fede Álvarez, “trying to be a good person.” (This, per a new Entertainment Weekly profile on the film, due out on the streamer on February 18, 2022.)
Sadly, all these efforts to volunteer at his local butcher’s shop or do chainsaw-cut ice sculptures for the kiddos go awry, when a bunch of “millennial hipsters from Austin” arrive in his small town, attempting to gentrify it away from its bucolic values of simplicity, decency, and eating the long pig, that profane and wondrous flesh. “Why,” we imagine decent folks remarking, “it would be practically amoral for our hero to not then pick up a chainsaw and start a-massacrin’, wouldn’t it?”
To be fair, portrayals of Leatherface have always skewed a little more sympathetic than his more consciously malevolent family members; creator Tobe Hooper has described the hulking killer as a “big baby” under his relatives’ thrall, and the utterly bizarre Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 goes so far as to give him an actual redemptive moment.
Still, it’s definitely a weird spin to position one of horror’s most iconic killers as a regular fella minding his own business, only to have a bunch of Austin hipsters come wandering in to practically impale themselves on his chainsaw. (See also the weirdly redemptive, Álvarez co-written Don’t Breathe 2.)
The new TCM is being directed (from a story by Álvarez and regular producing partner Rodo Sayagues) by David Blue Garcia, from a screenplay by Chris Thomas Devlin. Mark Burnham will star as Leatherface, while Eighth Grade’s Elsie Fisher and actor Nell Hudson will star as potential prime victims. Fisher gave a pretty fantastic synopsis of the entire premise of the franchise, actually: “It’s about a group of people who come to this town and things don’t quite go as planned.”