So, onto the point of this post.
I don't remember when I first saw this film, I do remember which part I first saw. I was young at the time and my sisters and brother and I went to the movie theater closest to where we lived at the time. Since my brother and I were too young to watch this type of film we had to watch something else. I don't even remember what we had watched, only what we were not supposed to watch. What I do remember was our film had ended and we had to wait for my oldest sister and maybe her boyfriend or some shit like that. we started to wait in the hallway outside the screen this film was being played in. My other sister that was with my brother and I may have gotten restless so the three of us went just inside the door of said theater. I will never forget what I saw on that screen. There was a fuckin' huge man with a jacked up face standing in the middle of the road swinging a chainsaw around, meanwhile a girl in the most hysterical state I can think of sitting in the back of a truck, then the credits. That was all I saw, but it was enough, I was hooked. It wasn't until a few years later when I met my best friend that I would even find out the name of the film. His parents owned a video store and we were able to take any movie for any amount of time. So we were looking through the shelves of horror movies when I came to Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I knew at that moment I would finally be able to see the film that haunted (in a good way) my dreams. This is what I found on the shelf covered with VHS tapes...
After watching it I knew that I had found the holy grail of horror movies. I am now 36 years old and this movie has stayed with me longer then any other that I've seen. Today being 2014 and we now have a handful of sequels and the ultra-violent remakes of a few years back, but none have ever come close to the original!
Now I am gonna go into a little story that happened to me in the year 2006.
I had been living in southern California for about 10 years at the time and I decided to move back home to a small town in Maine. I got a job at a restaurant as the kitchen manager on Mount Desert Island, in a town called Northeast Harbor. I had gone for a walk one day just to see the sights that surrounded me and I happen to be walking by a house and I noticed a Ford Focus. Now normally I wouldn't have taken a second look but it just happened to be the same as mine just different color. So, I looked a bit closer at this vehicle and I have a little problem in my brain that if I see a license plate cover I have to read it. This car had one that read "What Would Leatherface Do?". Naturally I thought to myself, wow, that's pretty weird!
A few days had passed and I was talking with the owner of the restaurant and she was telling me all the famous people that live or lived on the island. She went over a ton of names but one stood out, Gunnar Hansen! I got excited! She noticed my excitement and she asked if I knew who he was. I said "Ummm, Yeah!". It's weird to me that someone that has lived there their whole life didn't know what a famous person living there, also for along time, was famous for. I schooled her. My last day on that island I made a decision to do what I had been trying to get the courage to do the entire time since I found out he lived there. That decision was to knock on his door and annoy the shit out of a famous person at their own home. So, on this day I took a couple things with me and I stood on his porch outside his house for what seemed like hours but it was actually about a minute. I was just hoping that he didn't freak out and tell me to get off his property and stop bothering a man at his home. I knocked. The door opened and my heart skipped about 12 beats at that very moment. This man took up the entire doorway, he is a mountain of a man! Or maybe it was just celebrity status that made him seem like it, but I think he is just a big ass dude.
He says to me, "Can I help You?".
I come back with, "Are you Gunnar Hansen?".
He answered with a simple "Yes".
I then asked, "As in Leatherface-Gunnar Hansen?".
He then answered with another "Yes".
"I know this is very annoying to have someone come to your house like this but I gotta know if I could get your autograph?"
"Sure, come on in." I follow him into his house and we go into his, what looks like an office/library room. "What ya got for me?" he asked.
I opened my bag, "I got my copy of Texas Chainsaw on DVD and Leatherface #1 comic book." I hand them both over to him and he just looks at the comic and says,
"I've never seen this before!"
"I've had it for years." I replied.
He signed both things for me and I apologized to him for coming to his home and all he said to me was, not a problem. To him, I can only imagine, the memory of the guy showing up at his house is not even a memory. I can almost guarantee, that he does not remember that, but to me, that is one of my all time favorite memories and now 2 of my favorite pieces of film memorabilia I own.
I would like to thank Gunnar Hansen again for even answering his door that day and I want to leave this post with a picture of the DVD he signed for me.
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