Trailer
Plot summary
In 1955 rural Texas, the Sawyer family hands its youngest member, Jedidiah, a chainsaw at his birthday party and orders him to torture a captive man. He refuses. Months later, Betty Hartman and Ted Hardesty drive through the family's territory, and Betty follows a wounded boy to a barn where the Sawyers kill her. Her father, Sheriff Hal Hartman, finds her body and, over Verna Sawyer's protests, takes Jedidiah into custody, sending him to the Gorman House Youth Reformery. Ten years later, a nurse named Lizzy White joins the facility and bonds with a patient, Jackson. Verna arrives with an injunction for visitation, and when the director, Doctor Lang, turns her away, she forces her way in, setting off a riot in which nurses and patients die. Jackson gets Lizzy outside, where escapees Ike and Clarice seize her.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Leatherface (2017)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In January 2017 a United Kingdom direct-to-video release titled Leatherface, from Lightning Pictures, was not the Texas Chain Saw Massacre prequel at all but a re-packaging of the unrelated Playing With Dolls: Bloodlust, and the press criticized it as an attempt to mislead consumers.
- Before the film came out, the producers held the rights to make six more Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, but producer Christa Campbell said Lionsgate and Millennium Films lost those rights in December 2017 because of how long the release took.
- Maury and Bustillo asked for rewrites: nearly every death scene was altered, and the original ending, a mass murder in which Leatherface killed at least thirty people with his chainsaw, was changed as too over-the-top and out of character.
- Shooting in Bulgaria made Leatherface the first film in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre series shot outside the United States: five of the previous seven were shot in Texas, one in California and one in Louisiana.
- In the screenplay, Jedidiah Sawyer was adopted by a family that wanted a little girl and made to wear drag clothing, foreshadowing his gender ambiguity in the 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre; the plot point was cut from the finished film.
- Two chainsaws were built for the shoot: an electric one and a rubber one kept for the actors' safety, with computer-generated effects used only when they were needed.
- Sherwood wrote some of the film's locations into the script as homage to Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, and the fictional Sawyer farm was rebuilt to match its appearance in the first Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
- Lili Taylor was publicised in May 2015 as the replacement for Angela Bettis, who had dropped out because of a scheduling conflict.
