Leatherface (2017) is the eighth Texas Chainsaw Massacre film, a prequel in which four escaped inmates hide which one is Jedidiah Sawyer. That is the whole engine, and it is a better one than an origin story usually gets. Four teenagers walk out of a madhouse in mid-riot with a kidnapped nurse in tow, a Texas Ranger behind them carrying a murdered daughter’s worth of grief, and the film simply declines to tell you which of the four boys is the child who will grow up to wear other people’s faces. The hulking one who barely speaks? Surely. The quiet one who is kind to the nurse? Surely not. The film knows what you are thinking, and it spends ninety minutes letting you think it — because the Sawyer family has never needed a mystery to be frightening, but it turns out a mystery makes the fright land differently. By the time the answer arrives, delivered by the lawman himself, the mask at the end of this film has been earned the hard way.
Quick Specs
- Directors: Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo
- Screenplay: Seth M. Sherwood
- Based on: characters created by Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel
- Producers: Christa Campbell, Lati Grobman, Carl Mazzocone, Les Weldon
- Executive producer: Tobe Hooper
- Starring: Stephen Dorff, Lili Taylor, Sam Strike, Vanessa Grasse, Sam Coleman, James Bloor, Jessica Madsen, Finn Jones
- Cinematography: Antoine Sanier
- Music: John Frizzell
- Production companies: Millennium Films, Campbell Grobman Films, Mainline Pictures
- Distributor: Lionsgate
- Premiere: 25 August 2017, FrightFest, London
- US release: 20 October 2017 (VOD and limited theatrical; DirecTV exclusive from 21 September 2017)
- Running time: 90 minutes
- Certificate: R — language, disturbing images, some sexuality/nudity, strong bloody violence
- Setting: Texas, 1955 and ten years later
A child used as bait
Texas, 1955. The Sawyer family uses its youngest child the way other families use a dog whistle. Little Jedidiah Sawyer — played in these scenes by Boris Kabakchief, not by the older actor you will meet later — is set out, seemingly hurt, at the edge of the road, and Betty Hartman follows the boy into the family barn, and the Sawyers waiting inside kill her. Betty’s father is Texas Ranger Hal Hartman, and Hartman answers the killing in kind, after his own fashion: he takes Jedidiah from his mother, Verna Sawyer, and commits the boy to the Gorman House Youth Reformery, a mental institution where the inmates are renamed to shield them from their own families. Whatever Jedidiah Sawyer was going to become, the state has now had a hand in it too.
Ten years later, the renamed Jedidiah is Jackson: a quiet inmate who has bonded with Lizzy White, a young nurse at Gorman House. Verna arrives carrying a court injunction that demands she be allowed to visit her son, and the facility’s director, Dr. Lang, refuses her. Her visit triggers a riot. In the chaos, four inmates get out — Jackson, the hulking and near-silent Bud, the volatile Ike, and Clarice — and they drag Lizzy along as a hostage. Four boys on the road, one nurse who knows their faces, and somewhere behind them a Ranger doing the arithmetic the audience is doing: one of these four is Jedidiah Sawyer.
The road trip from hell
The escape curdles fast. A diner stop erupts into a murder spree by Ike and Clarice, and the road trip stops being an escape and becomes a spree with a hostage in the middle of it. Hartman works out that one of the four is the boy he took from Verna a decade earlier, and he hunts them personally now — this is not law enforcement any more, and the film does not pretend otherwise. Ike is killed by Jackson, after taunting Bud once too often. Clarice is captured and then impulsively shot dead by Hartman himself. Bud is killed struggling with a deputy. And Jackson, fleeing, is shot in the face by Hartman — a wound that destroys his face and, with it, his mind.
Then the reveal, and Hartman delivers it himself: Jackson is Jedidiah Sawyer. It was never the mountain of a boy who could not speak. It was the quiet one, the kind one, the one Lizzy trusted — which is the film’s bleakest joke, because kindness was the last thing the road was going to leave intact. The Sawyers rescue him. Verna stitches her son’s ruined face and muzzles it shut, puts the chainsaw in his hands, and Jedidiah bisects the man who took him from her. Lizzy runs, is caught in a bear trap, and begs Jedidiah to remember her — and when she insults Verna, he kills her. The next morning, in the basement, Jedidiah sews the faces of Hal Hartman and Lizzy White into his first mask, and smashes the mirror when he sees himself wearing it. The Blu-ray carries an alternate ending, a disc-extra variant in which Lizzy does not flee and is kept alive in the basement while the mask is made; it is a curiosity from the home-video release, not the ending the film itself gives you.
The cast
Stephen Dorff plays Texas Ranger Hal Hartman, the lawman hunting the escapees to avenge his murdered daughter; Dorff, 41 during the shoot, called the film “a survival and retribution film” for Hartman, and he is right — Hartman’s grief runs on rails straight into atrocity. Sam Strike plays Jackson, and Strike was 21 during principal photography, playing a teenager. Vanessa Grasse is Elizabeth “Lizzy” White, the young Gorman House nurse taken hostage — Lizzy, whatever any stray listing tells you. Sam Coleman plays Bud, the escapee built to be suspected: the biggest, the quietest, the most obviously a young Leatherface — which is exactly why he is not. James Bloor is Ike, Jessica Madsen is Clarice, Finn Jones plays Deputy Sorells, Chris Adamson is Dr. Lang, and Julian Kostov plays Ted Hardesty — Sally and Franklin’s father, a connection the credits carry even where the dialogue never announces it. Dejan Angelov appears as Nubbins Sawyer, the Hitchhiker in his younger form, and Lorina Kamburova plays Betty Hartman, the girl whose death starts everything.
Lili Taylor plays Verna Sawyer, Jedidiah’s mother — but she was not the first woman cast, and she was not the first woman to play Verna on screen. Angela Bettis was cast first and dropped out over a scheduling conflict; Taylor replaced her, announced on 5 May 2015. And the older Verna had already appeared in Texas Chainsaw 3D, played there by Marilyn Burns — Sally Hardesty herself, in a franchise homecoming. Taylor, 48 during the shoot, said the directors pitched her the film as “a cross between Terrence Malick, like Badlands, and The Virgin Suicides” — which tells you what kind of Chainsaw film they thought they were making.
Shot in 2015, shelved, then released in 2017
Keep the dates apart, because this film’s biography depends on it: it is a 2017 release and a 2015 production. After Texas Chainsaw 3D made money, Millennium briefly announced a sequel in January 2013 — then rights holder Carl Mazzocone publicly slapped the announcement down as unauthorised and premature, and the sequel died. The prequel replaced it. Seth M. Sherwood pitched the idea to Millennium precisely to escape the franchise’s tangled continuity: a story about a mentally competent young Jedidiah whose trauma makes him the killer of the later films, built on Tobe Hooper’s and Gunnar Hansen’s account of Leatherface as a personality defined entirely by mask and family orders. Sherwood was announced as writer on 13 August 2014, and Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo — the French duo behind Inside (2007) — were hired to direct on 31 October 2014, drawn by how unlike the previous films the script was. With Sherwood’s blessing they rewrote: nearly every death was altered, and an original ending in which Leatherface massacres some thirty people was scrapped as over-the-top and out of character.
Principal photography began on 18 May 2015 and ran 27 days through June, entirely in Bulgaria — Millennium had studio facilities there and the budget demanded it, with locations and period cars dressed to pass for 1960s Texas. It is the first Chainsaw film shot outside the United States. The Sawyer farmhouse from 1974 was rebuilt to match the original and promoted, at the directors’ insistence, from background dressing to the third act’s centrepiece. The gore was practical first: the production spent heavily on a lifelike cow carcass, worked with two chainsaws — a rubber safety variant and an electric one — and kept CGI minimal, in deliberate answer to fans who had found Texas Chainsaw 3D too tame.
Then Lionsgate shelved the finished film. Slated for 2016, it sat through that year and into the next; Sherwood has said he never got a concrete reason. While it sat, a warning worth repeating for collectors: a DVD sold in the UK in January 2017 under the title Leatherface is not this film at all, but a retitled repackage of an unrelated picture whose own director apologised for the switch. The real film surfaced at last with a world premiere at FrightFest in London on 25 August 2017, reached American screens through a DirecTV exclusive on 21 September 2017, and opened on VOD and in limited theatres on 20 October 2017. Blu-ray, DVD and digital followed on 19 December 2017.
Where it sits in the family
Count the films and be careful, because this franchise’s prequels do not share a timeline. Leatherface is the eighth film in the series — after the 1974 original, the 1986 sequel, the 1990 third film, The Next Generation, the 2003 remake, The Beginning and Texas Chainsaw 3D. It is the second prequel the franchise produced, but it is not a prequel to the remake: The Beginning (2006) belongs to the remake’s continuity, while this film precedes Hooper’s original and Texas Chainsaw 3D. Sherwood’s stated line of canon runs, chronologically, Leatherface, then The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), then Texas Chainsaw 3D — and he distanced the film from the remake line on purpose, while borrowing from the original’s own sequels: the Sawyer surname and the names Drayton and Nubbins come out of the 1986 film. Hal Hartman, Sherwood has said, was modelled partly on Lefty Enright, the Texas Ranger of that sequel, and written as the father of Burt Hartman, the vigilante of Texas Chainsaw 3D — a deliberate bridge, stated by its builder. Clarice began as a deliberate homage to Chop Top before Sherwood and the directors backed away from it as more rip-off than tribute, cutting her backstory and leaving only the character’s DNA. One scripted childhood beat — a foster family forcing the adopted Jedidiah to wear girls’ clothes, seeding the 1974 film’s mask-and-makeup imagery — was written and does not appear in the finished film; it is production history, not plot. Sherwood himself described his script as “Badlands with gore,” and the full map of the series is kept on the franchise hub.
The money
No production budget for this film has been published. The worldwide gross is reported as both $1,476,843 and $1,629,173. Either way, every tracked dollar was international, with no North American theatrical gross at all — Italy was the film’s largest market — and no figure exists for the DirecTV, VOD or home-video revenue where this film’s real commercial life actually happened. The honest summary is under $1.7 million in reported worldwide theatrical grosses, all of it from outside North America, for a film whose audience mostly never went near a cinema. On the franchise’s box-office tables, that still leaves it the second-lowest theatrical earner in the series, ahead of only The Next Generation’s token release.
What the critics made of it
The aggregates were poor and the named reviews were genuinely divided, and both halves of that sentence matter. Rotten Tomatoes’ critics consensus reads: “Leatherface may wear the skin of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel, but it proves gutless as an origin story and finds little invention in the horror tropes it’s cannibalizing.” Circulating snapshots of the Tomatometer put it between 27% and 30%; Metacritic has it at 40 out of 100, from 12 critics. Stephen Dalton called it “a respectful origin story,” praising Dorff and Taylor. Benedict Seal found it a mixed bag, but a well-made, story-driven attempt to course-correct the franchise. William Bibbiani ranked it the worst film in the franchise, too predictable, adding nothing. One horror outlet gave it three and a half out of five and called it the best Chainsaw film in quite some while; one festival review concluded that some stories just don’t need telling, and this was one of them; another judged it made more for profit than passion, yet above average for a film in this series. Jennie Kermode gave it four out of five, finding it less gory than fans may expect and carried by its story. Dorff and Taylor were praised even in several of the negative reviews — which, for a film shelved for two years and then released into a DirecTV window, is not nothing.
The afterlife
The delay cost the studios the franchise. Producer Christa Campbell confirmed in December 2017 that Lionsgate and Millennium Films had lost the rights to make further Texas Chainsaw films because of how long this one’s release took — so Leatherface stands as the last film of that regime, and the 2022 Netflix film that eventually followed belongs to a different regime and a different timeline, not this one. There is a sadder date in the margins. Tobe Hooper, co-creator of the original and an executive producer on this film, died on 26 August 2017 — the day after its FrightFest premiere. And the audience, given time, was kinder than the release was: in September 2023, six years after it slipped out, the film reached number 8 on Netflix’s official global Top 10 film chart for the week of 10–17 September, with 4.3 million hours viewed. The boy in the barn had to wait a while. He is patient. It is, the film argues, rather the point of him.