Texas, 1973, the height of summer. Sally was tied to a chair, howling like mad with bloodshot eyes. Insanity might be the only reasonable response to her situation. Her friends and brother were dead, carved up by backwoods cannibals. The strong implication was that the sausage presented to her on the plate was long pork. The killers mocked her screams from the other end of the weather-beaten dinner table. The gibbering Hitchhiker scrunched his face in cruel mockery, his associate, The Cook, guffawed in good humor, the brother, whose identity was epitomized by the poorly-fitting mask of human flesh pulled over his head, Leatherface, hooted and pounded the table, and all the while the decrepit, corpse-like Grandpa slumped in his chair at the head of the table.
The fact that this was just a movie, that Marilyn Burns — playing Sally — was supposedly not in any real danger, was no comfort as the cameras kept rolling, take after take, hour after hour on into the night with the nerves of the cast and crew wearing raw, ever closer to the edge. Tobe insisted on capturing the perfection of his vision for the six minute scene, shooting it from every possible angle. A bevy of reasons meant this pivotal scene that the movie hinged on had to be put in the can tonight.
A dreamlike stupor came over the actors as they went on and on, hysteric, exhausted, bordering on psychotic mania.
The hammer that Grandpa was supposed to bludgeon Sally to death with, an impossible task for his withered, feeble form, had its iron head replaced with foam but the shaft was still made of solid steel that hurt as Marilyn was repeatedly whacked with it. The blood in her hair was real.
"Hit that bitch!" The Cook said, and the Hitchhiker parroted it, cheering on the old man to do it, to bring an end to the excitement and with it all their frustration and torment. "Kill her! Kill that bitch!" Gunnar heard Ed say. The mantra of it infected the air. "Yes. Kill. The. Bitch." he said to himself as he stepped forward. All perspective was lost as he succumbed to his surroundings. In that moment, he wasn't an actor. He was Leatherface, and this could all be over, they could all go home if he would just solve their problems by making the squealing stop. Gunnar was going to put an end to it, to