The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Hooper has said the idea came from standing in a hardware store during the 1973 oil crisis, in a crowd, looking at the chainsaws.

The shoot was 16mm, in Texas, in a summer that hit 38 degrees, with one costume per actor that was never washed and a real slaughterhouse's worth of animal remains dressing the house. The cast came out of it hating each other and hating Hooper. That exhaustion is the film's actual texture, and no remake has reproduced it because no remake was made under those conditions.

There is very little blood in it. The BBFC banned it for years anyway, correctly identifying that the effect has nothing to do with what is shown.

The dinner sequence took 26 hours in a room full of rotting material with the windows sealed. Marilyn Burns' screaming is not acting by that point.