Caroline Williams is a Texas-born actress and producer best known as Vanita “Stretch” Brock, the radio DJ in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
Quick Specs
| Born | March 27, 1957, Rusk, Texas |
| Schooling | high school in Little Rock, Arkansas (class of 1976); University of Texas at Austin |
| Film debut | Smile (1975) |
| Signature role | Stretch in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), with a cameo in Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) |
| Also | Stepfather II (1989), Days of Thunder (1990), Leprechaun 3 (1995), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), Halloween II (2009), Hatchet III (2013), Contracted (2013), Ten Minutes to Midnight (2020), Renfield (2023) |
Who She Is
Start with the audition, because she does. By her count, four hundred and fifty women read for the female lead in Tobe Hooper’s Chainsaw sequel, and Hooper wanted a Texan. Williams drove from Dallas to Austin, sat in the hallway outside the casting room and noticed two things. The pages were nearly all action, not dialogue. And every actress coming out of the room looked calm and unruffled.
So she went in the other way. She ran screaming down the hall, burst into the room and slammed the door. Then she pulled the chairs out from under Hooper and the screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson, piled them against the door, backed into a corner and played the scene: “They live on fear, they live on fear.” The two men walked right up to her and looked at each other. She was hired before she left the building that day. “It pays to be bold,” she has said since.
Williams was born in Rusk, in East Texas, finished high school in Little Rock and went on to the University of Texas at Austin. She made her film debut in Smile in 1975, and by the mid-1980s she had small parts in Alamo Bay and The Legend of Billie Jean.
The Movies, and What She Did on Them
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986): Stretch is a late-night radio DJ stuck on an open phone line with two drunk teenagers when Leatherface attacks them, so her station tape catches the killing. She takes it to Dennis Hopper’s Lefty Enright, a lawman who has spent thirteen years chasing chainsaw killings. When she plays it on air, the Sawyer family comes for her. Bill Moseley is Chop Top, and her coworker L.G. is Lou Perryman. Williams has called the film more comedy than horror, “a satire and a parody of the first film,” and calls Stretch the character she is most like. “I didn’t have to do a lot of acting for that film.” Hooper was editing Invaders from Mars at night while he shot the sequel by day. She remembers him as a multitasker, always several steps ahead.
The notorious scene where Leatherface rests his saw between her legs gave her pause at the time. Looking back, she reads it as Hooper deliberately needling the critics of the slasher film.
The name followed her. She made an uncredited cameo as Stretch in Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), and she is credited as “Stretch” in Sharknado: The 4th Awakens (2016).
Outside the saw, she played Matty Crimmins, the mail carrier and best friend who gets suspicious of Terry O’Quinn’s killer in Stepfather II (1989), and Jennie Burns in the Tom Cruise racing drama Days of Thunder (1990). She did a run of television guest spots through the 1990s and 2000s, including ER, Murder, She Wrote, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Grey’s Anatomy. Horror called her back with Dr. Maple in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II (2009), Amanda Fowler in Hatchet III (2013), and Nancy in Contracted (2013) and its sequel.
Her later indie work is where she says her pride lies. She names Erik Bloomquist’s Ten Minutes to Midnight (2020) and Graham Denman’s Greenlight as the two films she is proudest of. In Chris McKay’s Renfield (2023) she played a sassy Southern lawyer for Ben Schwartz’s gangster. Most of that storyline was cut after test audiences made it clear they wanted Nicolas Cage’s Dracula, not the mob plot.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
- She watches the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre every Christmas Day. Part of the reason is her friendship with Marilyn Burns, and part is that the film “started everything” for her.
- Halloween is her favorite holiday.
- She prefers playing what she calls “an action figure,” a character whose choices drive the plot, and she names Amy Steel, Adrienne King, Heather Langenkamp and Jamie Lee Curtis as the template.
Why She Matters
Stretch is the Final Girl who arrives in the middle of a joke and survives by being louder than it. Williams brought the same nerve she showed at the audition: physical, funny, unwilling to play small. The result is one of the most distinctive heroines of 1980s horror. Forty years on, she is still working the genre that took her in, and still taking the indie scripts she believes in.