Scripting the Story: Texas Chainsaw Massacre Franchise

Good Day Crewmembers and welcome to Scripting the Story: Texas Chainsaw Massacre!

As a franchise, TCM is pretty tangled. It's comprised of sequels, remakes, soft reboots, prequels, multiple timelines, and now a legacy sequel which makes figuring out how to watch the franchise pretty confusing. Tobe Hooper's original 1974 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is generally considered required viewing for horror fans, but where do you go from there? Glad you asked because we've created some infographics to help you create complete storylines out of the existing movies!

We do our best to avoid spoilers and just try to provide a foundation for you to work with.

Let us know what other series you'd like to see get the Scripting The Story Treatment, or if we missed something.

Thank you, and enjoy the show!

The Original Trilogy features The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), and Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990). While their connections can be loose and at times contradictory, none of them outright deny the existence of the others. You'll have to give some concessions while watching this for a complete story, but it's doable.

The "Stories of the Saw" storyline brings in the 4th movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995), and things definitely get weird. If it weren't for the opening prologue tying the 4 films together as accounts of "related incidents," there really wouldn't be much left.

There are some hints dropped in the movie that do tighten the connections a bit more, which actually brings us to our next slide.

Part of the Next Generation's plot is to explain an origin or reasoning to the Massacres, so you can cut out TCM2 and L:TCM3 and still get the full explanation intact.

2003 would bring us a remake of the original movie followed by a prequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning in 2006. While in the 1974 original, the majority of the blood and gore was left for our imaginations to fill in, these two movies were dripping with red. Getting the complete/contained story from these is pretty straightforward. Since this is a remake timeline, you can watch the two films the way they were released or.....

...you can watch them the way they would happen chronologically.

After the remakes, Lionsgate came along and decided to ignore the remakes and make a legacy sequel really before "Legacy Sequel" was even a term. They released Texas Chainsaw 3D in 2013, when it made it to home media it was referred to as Texas Chainsaw. This movie served as a direct sequel to the original TCM and ignored all other sequels and remakes.

4 years later, in 2017, Lionsgate came along with their own prequel simply called "Leatherface." It offers a very interesting take on Leatherface's and the family's origin while tying in nicely to TCM and TCM3d.

Like the Remake Duology, the first way to watch this trilogy is in release order. But there's always......

...the chronological timeline!

Finally (for the time being?), there's the Legacy timeline. A Legacy Sequel is defined as "a work that follows the continuity of the original work(s), but takes place further along the timeline, often focusing on new characters with the original ones still present in the plot." Basically, it's just a churched-up way of saying, "This sequel took a while to come out, but we're ignoring those other things, OH! And, look who's back!!"

So for this full story, all you need is the original TCM and this year's Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Oh yeah, Legacy Sequels have been taking on the annoying habit of using the exact say name as their original. At least here they dropped the "The".