The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was shot on 16mm reversal stock in a Round Rock farmhouse in August.
Updated: Oct 27
If you're looking for where The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was filmed, the answer is the country around Austin. The farmhouse stood on Quick Hill Road in Round Rock. The gas station is in Bastrop. The cemetery in the opening is in Leander. The American Film Institute dates the shoot from July 15 into August 1973, and the cast and crew lived out at the house while they made it.
It was made by people from the University of Texas film program, many of them former students, with Tobe Hooper directing and producing and Kim Henkel co-writing. AFI records about $140,000 raised from investors that included several attorneys and relatives of the filmmakers. Bryanston distributed. It is one of the most important horror films ever made, and it came out of the farm roads around Austin on a budget a commercial would spend today.
The camera, and the light it did not have.
Daniel Pearl shot it, and his account in American Cinematographer is the best technical record of the picture.
He shot on Eastman Ektachrome Commercial 7252, a 16mm reversal stock rated ISO 25, for both day and night. Cameras were an Eclair NPR and a wind-up Bolex on a homemade crane. The Texas sun was strong enough that he could shoot the day exteriors on that slow stock with an 85 filter. At night he leaned on what he had: dust caught in headlights, shafts of backlight. He told the magazine flatly that he had no big lights, and HMIs did not exist yet.
That is the producing story in one decision. No lights unless they were needed. The dark did the work, and it worked better than a lighting package would have. The film was cut from a dupe print, the original conformed in A and B rolls, and the whole thing printed up to a 35mm internegative for theaters.
One conflict worth naming. A Texas Monthly reporter who wrote about the shoot in 1974 mentions arc lights heating the set. Pearl, decades later, says there were none. I lean on the cinematographer for what was on his truck.
The heat was the schedule.
The Austin Chronicle’s history of the dinner scene is the account people quote. It describes three weeks of twelve to sixteen hour days with one day off a week. The dinner scene began on Saturday, August 18, and ran more than twenty six hours straight, in a room sealed with blackout drapes that went past 100 degrees. The production was six or seven days behind by then.
The Austin Film Commission’s tourism page says the film shot in thirteen days. The Chronicle’s day-by-day account does not support that, and it puts the production into a sixth week by early September. I would take the longer number.
Where it is all now.
The farmhouse is no longer in Round Rock. It was cut into sections and moved in 1998 to Kingsland, out in the Hill Country, onto the grounds of the Antlers Inn. Sources disagree on how many pieces it went in, somewhere between six and nine. It has been a restaurant ever since, under several names. New owners bought it in November 2022 and renamed it Hooper’s, and they have leaned all the way into its history. Its address now is 1010 King Court, Kingsland.
The ground it came from is gone too. The Austin Chronicle reports that the old site is now the La Frontera development in Round Rock, with State Highway 45 running through what was the hay field.
The gas station at 1073 Texas 304 in Bastrop is now We Slaughter Barbeque, with a gift shop, a replica of the van out front, and overnight cabins that reopened in 2016.
The cemetery is Bagdad Cemetery in Leander, an active cemetery and free to visit. The tombstone featured in the opening was a prop. The Austin Film Commission notes that all three sites sit twenty to ninety miles from Austin and can be seen in a single day.
Who made it.
Tobe Hooper directed and produced. Kim Henkel wrote it with him and was an associate producer with Richard Saenz. Jay Parsley was executive producer. The credit reads A Vortex, Henkel, Hooper Production.
Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow and Gunnar Hansen make up the cast. Hansen, who played the film’s masked figure, later wrote a book about the shoot, Chain Saw Confidential.
AFI notes something else worth knowing. Twenty one Texas filmmakers shared in what was left of the profits.
The money.
Box Office Mojo records $30,926,225 worldwide, which places it at forty one on this list. That number almost certainly undercounts a film that played drive-ins and grindhouses for years. AFI cites period reports of about $20 million in its first two years and $50 million by 1982.
Then there is the budget, which runs from about $80,000 in American Cinematographer to $140,000 in AFI and the Austin Film Commission. The 1974 Texas Monthly piece said under $300,000. Whatever the figure, the return on it is one of the best in American film history.
Why people love it.
It is terrifying to this day. It scared one generation in drive-ins and has kept scaring every generation since, and a lot of what people think they know about horror films starts here.
The institutions caught up. It played the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in May 1975. The Museum of Modern Art took it into its collection on release. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in December 2024.
My read.
This is maybe the most iconic horror film ever made, and it was made in Central Texas, by a crew out of UT, in August.
The producing lesson is restraint. With almost no money and almost no lights, they used darkness, slow film and the Texas sun as the whole look. Nothing was lit that did not need to be. That is not a limitation the film overcame. It is the film.
What this means if you are scoping a Texas shoot.
Summer in Central Texas is a real line item. Interiors under blackout go past 100 degrees, and a crew working twelve to sixteen hour days in that heat needs water, shade, turnaround and a schedule that respects it. Plan for it the way they did not have the money to.
The previous entry in this countdown is number 42, Blank Check, another Central Texas shoot twenty years later. The full countdown lives here. For the state of crew and stages today, see stage space in Texas, honestly. If you are scoping a summer shoot in Texas and want the honest version, start here.
Next in the countdown: number 40.
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