Somebody had to write the dinner scene. Somebody had to sit in the Texas heat of an idea — a family of unemployed slaughterhouse men, a house decorated with the dead, a boy with a chainsaw who takes his orders the way other sons take out the trash — and turn it into pages another man could shoot. The shooting is what the world remembers. The pages are Kim Henkel’s.
Kim Henkel is the Texas screenwriter who co-wrote The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) with Tobe Hooper and became the Chainsaw franchise’s rights-side producer. Half a century after the film, the franchise still runs through him: his company holds the rights, he executive-produces its future, and the saw, legally speaking, is still in the family. This is the page for the half of the partnership who wrote.
Quick Specs
- Born: 19 January 1946, Virginia, USA
- Occupation: Screenwriter, director, producer
- Known for: Co-writing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
- Years active: 1969–present
- Company: Exurbia Films, with Ian Henkel and Pat Cassidy
South Texas, then Austin
The outline of the early life comes down through reference listings rather than profiles, so take it in that register: Henkel was born in Virginia and grew up in several small towns in South Texas. His father, by Henkel’s own account, was a merchant seaman who became a small-town newspaper man — which may be the most writerly inheritance imaginable, salt water first, then ink.
He arrived at the University of Texas at Austin in 1964, eighteen years old and an English major, and graduated in 1969. The Texas Film Commission’s official biography compresses what happened next into a single line — that he met Tobe Hooper at UT Austin. The fuller published account is less tidy and more believable: mutual friends introduced them. Hooper had been at the university earlier in the sixties, and no solid record makes the two men classmates, whatever the shorthand versions say. They were Austin film people who got introduced. That was enough.
Eggshells: first, he acted
The collaboration began with Henkel in front of the camera. He acted in Hooper’s first feature, Eggshells (1969), in the role of “Toes” — a young Austin actor in a young Austin director’s hippie picture, in the same year he graduated. Keep that order straight, because everything after it flows from here: first the friendship, then the acting, then, five years later, the writing. The Tobe Hooper page on this site tells the director’s side of the partnership; this page is the writer’s.
Writing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Henkel and Hooper formed Vortex, Inc. to make the film, and the production account records Bill Parsley’s MAB putting in $60,000 for a 50% share — production structure, the unglamorous plumbing under a legend. The screenplay itself is jointly credited, to Henkel and Hooper both, and how the work divided between them is a question the two men answered differently.
Henkel’s telling: after Eggshells, Hooper asked him to develop a script, and he started going over to Hooper’s house every evening, figuring out the story structure — mainly, he said, they were working out a feel. In his account the conception began as a sinister retelling of Hansel and Gretel, and horror became the vehicle after Night of the Living Dead showed them how two nobodies two thousand miles from Los Angeles could get the world’s attention. The first draft, written across the winter of 1973 in sessions a short walk from his apartment, carried a title of beautiful ugliness: Headcheese.
Hooper’s telling runs the other way: the two wrote pages separately and traded them, and they knew they had the film when, in his phrase, “the script read funny” — the pitch-black humour that audiences mostly missed for years, sitting there grinning under the dread. Both tellings can be true of the same winter. What Henkel said he was building into it survives in his own words: “this kind of moral schizophrenia is something I tried to build into the characters” — a family that could be tender and monstrous in the same breath, which is precisely the thing that still makes the film unbearable.
One more voice, kept in its place. Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, remembered decades later that on the set Henkel functioned, credited or not, as something like a co-director as well as co-writer — “at least when we were working on it,” as he put it. That is an actor’s memory of how the set ran, and it is colour worth having. It is not a credit. The film’s direction is Hooper’s; the writing is theirs together; and Henkel was twenty-eight years old when The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released in October 1974.
The Gein question
Yes, Ed Gein is in the film’s ancestry — partly. Gein’s skin-wearing and grave-robbing fed Leatherface and the farmhouse décor, and Hansen recalled the project described to him as “a whole family full of Ed Geins.” But the plot is fiction, and Hooper’s own account complicates the lineage further: he said he heard Gein stories from relatives as a child without learning the man’s name until years after the film was made. The “based on true events” billing was Hooper’s deliberate piece of marketing — and politics — not a claim about the record. Partly inspired by Gein. Never based on his crimes. The distinction is the whole sentence.
Eaten Alive and The Unseen
The Hooper partnership continued. For Eaten Alive (1977), Henkel wrote the screenplay — an adaptation, and the credit matters: the concept came from producers Alvin L. Fast and Mardi Rustam, drawn loosely from the legend of Joe Ball, the Elmendorf saloon keeper called the Alligator Man, whose alligator-pit body count was never proven before he shot himself in 1938. Ball is this film’s source figure, legend labelled as legend — not Gein, whatever lazy summaries claim. Henkel then supplied the story concept, uncredited, for The Unseen (1980). A writer’s writer’s decade: adaptations, concepts, other men’s sets — and one classic already behind him.
Last Night at the Alamo
The credit that film-history people outside horror reach for first is Last Night at the Alamo (1983): written and co-produced by Henkel, directed by Eagle Pennell, with Henkel acting in it too, as Lionel. Shot in Houston in the summer of 1982, it played the New York Film Festival and Telluride to raves from Vincent Canby, Stanley Kauffmann and Roger Ebert, and took a Special Jury Prize at Sundance in that festival’s inaugural year. It is a bar-room elegy, not a horror film — and it is the proof, for anyone who needs it, that the man who co-wrote the saw could write people simply sitting and talking their lives away. He wrote one more Pennell film, Doc’s Full Service, which premiered at SXSW in 1994.
The Next Generation: one film, three dates
Henkel’s only feature directing credit took more than twenty years to arrive, and then took three more years to escape. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation was developed with producer Robert Kuhn as a deliberate return to the source material — the family again, but the characters pushed toward caricature, with a secret-society organisation called Rothman threaded through it. It was shot in rural Bastrop and Pflugerville, Texas, under the title The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. On the production year, accounts conflict: the film’s standard cataloguing says 1994, while a detailed retrospective dates the launch to the brutal Texas summer of 1993 and remembers Henkel as forty-eight and reportedly reluctant. He was forty-seven in the summer of 1993 and forty-eight in the summer of 1994, so his age settles nothing.
The rest of the timeline is firm, and it is a saga. The film premiered at SXSW on 12 March 1995, Henkel then forty-nine, under its original Return title. CFP Distribution test-marketed it that September; it was recut and sat. In 1996 Columbia TriStar acquired it, re-edited it and retitled it The Next Generation; the release slid into 1997 amid legal disputes in which Henkel and Kuhn alleged the studio was deliberately withholding the film while its unknown leads, Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey, became stars. A stronger version circulates — that the stars’ agencies pressured the studio to bury it, one story among several. The film finally opened in August 1997, in twenty-three theatres, cut to eighty-six minutes, with cameos from three of the 1974 original cast: Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain and John Dugan. Any filmography that hands you a single year for this movie is handing you a third of it.
The long staircase: producing the franchise
After that, Henkel’s franchise role changed floors — from the set to the rights side, where he has stayed. The credit staircase is specific.
He was co-producer, with Hooper, on the 2003 remake, where he also holds a writer’s credit for the 1974 screenplay. He was producer on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006). He was executive producer on Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013) and on Leatherface (2017), with a “based on characters created by” credit on both. And on Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), the Netflix film produced through Exurbia Films by Henkel, his son Ian Henkel and Pat Cassidy alongside Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, he is a producer — full producer, not executive, whatever the listings that demote him say. He was seventy-six when it reached Netflix in February 2022, and he introduced its Austin premiere screening himself.
Just as important is what is not on the staircase. He has no producer role on Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) at all, and on Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) he carries a “characters” credit only. His franchise return began with his own film, and everything since has been built on the original material he co-created. David Blue Garcia, who directed the 2022 film, described a Henkel who “agreed to return as a producer” and consulted on Leatherface’s behaviour throughout — available, and generous with it. The full film-by-film map lives on the franchise hub.
The teacher and his students
Alongside all of it, Henkel taught. The solid post is lecturer in screenwriting at Rice University in Houston. His own verdict on the classroom is pure Henkel: “I’m not really a 9-5 type person, and I never was a very good school teacher anyway.” His students, fortunately, graded the experience differently.
Two of them, Duane Graves and Justin Meeks, made their debut with The Wild Man of the Navidad (2008), which Henkel co-produced. Then came Butcher Boys (2012), written and produced by Henkel and directed by his former students — developed under the title Bone Boys, and grown, by Henkel’s own account, out of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” read against the Irish famine, until eighteenth-century satire had become a Texas cannibal world. He stocked it with faces from the original film in small roles, Teri McMinn among them, and Ed Guinn — the cattle-truck driver from the 1974 film’s ending. He also produced Graves and Meeks’s Found Footage 3D (2016), released through Shudder in 2017. The teacher’s filmography, it turns out, has a syllabus.
The A24 era
The franchise’s ownership story turned one more time. After Legendary’s hold on the rights lapsed, the rights were auctioned by Verve, and on 4 February 2026 A24 was reported to have won both the film and television rights. Henkel is an executive producer through Exurbia Films on both sides of the slate, with Ian Henkel and Pat Cassidy producing. Television comes first: a series with JT Mollner attached to direct, and an executive-producer roster that runs from Glen Powell and Dan Cohen to Roy Lee and Steven Schneider alongside Henkel himself. A separate feature reimagining, to be written and directed by Curry Barker, was announced on 21 April 2026. Both projects were in development at announcement; no casting or dates have been sheeted.
Henkel’s own words on the choice: “It was a difficult decision, but A24’s embrace of boundary testing genre film, and its record of working with artists who are inclined to test boundaries made them a compelling choice.” And, on what the backstory still holds: “There’s an epic tale lurking in the Chainsaw backstory.” Eighty years old, and still talking about the tale as something lurking — present tense, unfinished.
Where he stands
He has been a longtime resident of Port Aransas, Texas — that is the last hometown record, from February 2022, and no later one has replaced it. His son Ian is his producing partner at Exurbia; in Henkel’s own words in interview, “I have a total of five children” — a family detail offered here only because he offered it himself. In October 2024 he stood in Austin as a guest speaker at the Texas Film Commission’s fiftieth-anniversary screening of the film he co-wrote at twenty-eight, and talked about it with the people who made it with him.
Tobe Hooper died in 2017, and the partnership’s surviving half is easy to overlook, because writers usually are. But the arithmetic of this franchise runs through Kim Henkel: he co-wrote the original, directed its strangest sequel, produced or executive-produced every major return since 2003, teaches the craft in Houston, and holds the rights that A24 now rents. The saw is family. The family, on paper, is his.
Keep it locked on Think Horror.