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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a film featuring uncanny violence. The film features an eerie set of camera sounds that is enough to make anyone jump off their seat with the sound of the music alone. While the OG film is hyper-realistic in its portrayal of the story, the story of the movie is not based on a true event.

Directing the latest installment of the film now falls to David Blue Garcia, who recently talked with Screen Rant, explaining how he landed the directorial role for the film. The director opened his interview with Screen Rant sharing how he felt when he saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time. 

"I would say it's one of the main cinema memories I have," the director began. "There's certain movies that you watch throughout your childhood that really stand out. One of them is Jurassic Park, for me, but one of them is Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which came on cable late at night, and I turned the TV on. I was watching it, 30-40 minutes in, Leatherface pops out, and I was so terrified. I turned the TV off."

Yet the gory story is so intriguing and fascinating that the young director did have to switch back the TV on so that he could see how things ended for the rest of the story. He admitted that 

" It was just so dark and scary, and I'd never seen anything like it." Now, he got the opportunity to shoot the same gory horrifying, and terrifying tale as the latest director of the franchise. 

 Sharing that his Texan roots are the reason he landed the directorial role, the director exclaimed, "I'm a native Texan I grew up in Texas, still live here. My first film is called Tejano, which means Texan in Spanish. So I think the studio saw me and was like, "That's the guy. That's the perfect guy to helm this movie.” 

The director is the first Texan creator to come across the series in a while, and hence, it was almost natural to allow in a native talent who knew more about the authenticity of the action than other options. The previous Texan directors for the franchise were Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel. Once the director received the opportunity, he was not going to let it go. 

Now, the latest film installment in the series is set to continue the storyline as an immediate sequel to the original Texas Massacre film. Sharing the chronology order for the latest movie, the director explained, "We like to call this a direct sequel to the original. Not that it ignores all the other films in between, but those aren't as important to the story. You can pick and choose what you want to from those other films. We're picking the movie up 50 years later, and Leatherface has kind of been lying low in this orphanage and is disturbed by these millennial protagonists who come to town."

Sharing how he fit in the work with the original and ensured originality, the director explained, "I don't like to watch movies while I make movies. So I watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original, and then I didn't watch anything else for two months while I shot this. To me, it just kind of gives me an idea for what I want to do. But I'm not actually directly copying anything from the original."

"Something that stood out to me about the original that not a lot of people talk about is how darkly funny it is. So I made sure to bring a little bit of levity into this film as well," he added. "You might have seen it, the bus scene when Leatherface walks on and all the characters raise their cell phones. That's one of the first things I added when I came on."

Doing everything with raw originality also means that there will be greater challenges and while the director managed to overcome many of those, an integral part of the film traumatized him. It is not so easy to shoot something so surrounded with "blood and gore" after all. 

"It's so easy for a director to just be like, "Oh, it's easier. We'll just add some blood in post. We'll add some CGI blood in post. We'll just shoot it and move on." But, really sticking with that discipline and trying to get it right in-camera takes a lot of patience," shared the director. "That was hard to learn. But I had Fede Álvarez helping me, guiding me through that process. He's done that many times before. So it was a great learning experience."

And while the audience might barely register that there are different samples of the blood being used to create the film, the director revealed that the makeup department, the special effects department, and the mask department all used different blood mixtures for the film. Though the director himself didn't know how to distinguish between these or what the different mixtures are made of, it is fascinating to know that so much goes behind creating the gory scenes in horror films. 

Another part of the story which will be fascinating for the audience is to see Leatherface, who has grown older over all these years, still able to pick up a chainsaw and work his way around with it. While many people can't imagine how an old person can manage to do it, the director referred to the concerned audience and explained, "I don't think those people have been to Texas and seen these old farmers that I've seen. I mean, these guys are 80 years old and still hauling bags of grain and stuff over their shoulder. So, I have no doubt that Leatherface eating and living well for 50 years, not eating fast food, would be a very healthy and robust man."

Still, the old man does have some trouble adjusting to the new world of the sequel. "He hasn't been on the internet or anything like that," said the director about Leatherface. "He's basically living in the same mental time period as the first film until he walks onto that bus, and it's like he time-traveled from 1974 to 2022, and he sees all these hipsters."

The film also brings in Sally so that she can help on the new character of the film head the story along while she processes the trauma that she has faced in the world of the franchise, "I think Sally was important to bring back because we wanted to sort of pass the torch from her character to the next group of characters, and it quite literally happens in the film," said Garcia.

"In 50 years, she's been dealing with her own past, her own trauma, something she ran from initially. But now she's trying to fight. She wants to get her revenge, but she just hasn't been able to find Leatherface. It's nice to be able to tell and complete her story, continue her story."

Apart from the OG characters, the film will also use one of the original chainsaws from the first movies for the sheer "reverence" that would hold for the franchise.