I don’t know what I expected from an interview with Gunnar Hansen.
I didn’t expect to ask him, seriously, if he would dance with me sometime.
The man could twirl like few others.
Hansen, the Icelandic-born American-trained actor, played the fearful masked figure, “Leatherface” in the horror film Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The movie was a cheapie, with the crudest effects. Yet it changed filmmaking and blew the doors off what anyone expected from “exploitation flicks.” Critic David Hogan wrote, “the driving force of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is something far more horrible than aberrant sexuality: total insanity.”
It was horror yes, but people couldn’t stop talking about the social commentary.
At age 66, Hansen wrote a memoir about his on-set experience: Chainsaw Confidential. It’s quite the tell-all!
I recorded his narration for Audible,1 and at the urging of the book editor— “Gunnar’s the most charming man you’ll ever meet”— I said, “Yes,” to their proposal to interview him while Hansen was just finishing up his last chapter.
I boned up on my horror cinema bonafides before we began. Little did I know he had so much to say about classic literature, the Icelandic origins of horror, and of course, making cinema with no cash in the broiling Texas sun.
Our topics:
“The first time I got really scared at the movies”
The origins of horror — let’s go waaaaaaay back
“Leatherface was kind of a surgeon, at heart”
“Someone was going to have to pay the price and it was going to be Marilyn.”
Director tried to separate us; not to good effect
The famous finger-sucking scene
British factory workers in Manchester are not to be trusted to see this movie!
Will we ever see a “Final Boy” —A surviving male ingénue?
Nordic mythology is the darkest — a resonance in modern American horror themes is the ghosts. Ghosts in Icelandic culture are the walking dead. Not Vapors. “The original zombies.”
“I always loved to dance.” — From baton twirling to ballroom dancing to Leatherface’s ecstatic pirouettes.
On groupies: “Kane Hodder (who played Jason) and I, we used to joke that the average Jason fan is a 19-year-old girl. The average Leatherface fan is a 13-year-old boy
Gunnar and I spoke at the end of 2013, at the time of his memoir release. Much to our sorry he died in 2015, pancreatic cancer, at age 68.
What a special fellow he was. The last few minutes of our hour, after he told me about his dancing love, I asked him if we could cut a rug sometime.
At first, nothing. He ignored my brazen overture.
Then, just as we were hanging up: “Yes, we can cut a rug sometime . . . Or a body.”
May his memory, and his humor, be a blessing.
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At the height of the feminist sex wars, a lurid X-rated slide show toured college campuses, designed to alarm its audiences to the perils of pornography. It was produced by self-described feminists.
The audio edition is gone! The original Chronicle edition is gone. Now the print book and ebook are distributed by a publisher called Dark Sky. Gosh, I hope they get that licensing mess straightened out. His vocals are irreplaceable.
