Horror fans will recognize Adam Marcus as the director of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and the co-writer of Texas Chainsaw, two divisive but oft-discussed entries in their respective franchises. He recently returned to the genre to helm Secret Santa, a holiday horror-comedy streaming exclusively on SCREAMBOX.
The second installment in our three-part interview with the raconteur focuses on Texas Chainsaw, the 2013 direct sequel to 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, including glimpses at how the original screenplay differs from the final movie.
“When you see the line ‘Do your thing, cuz’ and people are angry at you for writing it, and you didn’t write it, you just start getting really frustrated about the state of modern filmmaking and the voice that filmmakers have,” Marcus confesses.
The Grudge scribe Stephen Susco wrote the first draft, but as Marcus tells it, “Lionsgate did not want his script because it was about cannibals. In Stephen’s defense, so was everything about Texas Chainsaw. That’s the point! But Lionsgate had put out The Midnight Meat Train and it was a big disaster, so they didn’t want any more movies about cannibalism.”
After Susco was let go, Marcus and his writer partner/wife Debra Sullivan were hired based on their pitch. The couple met at an industry networking event while Marcus was in post-production on Jason Goes to Hell. “Deb and I work together, we live together, we do everything. We have spent, collectively, less than one month apart since we started seeing each other, which will be 31 years in January. Every morning I wake up like, ‘Wow, I won the damn lottery!'”
They wrote “a $20 million horror-action extravaganza in 3D” with Lionsgate attached to both finance and distribute. A producer later proved so difficult to work with that Lionsgate exited as the production company, instead opting to distribute if financing was found elsewhere.
Only $8 million was raised, and the project was further hobbled when the writers were asked to do free rewrites. “I was happy to do it, but I asked for guaranteed box office bumps, because our bonus on the movie was based on the amount of money they made the movie for. He was asking us to cut our financial throats by asking us to write a movie for less money, so pay us if the audience awards the film. Literally, we were told to go fuck ourselves.
“He took our first two drafts, Frankensteined them together — which he’s not allowed to do, by the way; that’s against WGA — and got [director] John Luessenhop involved. John loved our script and wanted us to come back to work on it, but the producer wouldn’t let him hire us. He then brought on Kirsten Elms, who he wrote through since he’s not a WGA writer. That’s how they did it, fine. No harm, no foul. The problem is, we wrote a movie for $20 million and they only had $8 million.”
Marcus confirms that their version was definitively set in 1993. “Heather, our lead character, is taken from the Sawyer house the day that Sally Hardesty disappears [in 1973]. She is now 20, so go 20 years from the original events. And the movie playing in the town square is Jason Goes to Hell, which came out in 1993. That’s what’s in our script.”
He continues, “There was no smartphone! We didn’t have something from the future in our movie. The sequence we wrote took place in a hardware store, because Leatherface loses his chainsaw at the carnival when he throws it at Heather. There’s this great scene where he finds this giant, brand-new chainsaw, and there was a tactical squad of police officers who come in. It was this action scene in a hardware store, with Leatherface using everything at his disposal to dispatch these cops.”
The slashed budget diminished multiple major set pieces. “When the van overturns and Heather’s boyfriend is killed, they cut his throat with a window in the movie. So lazy! We had the van flip over so the top of the van is now the wall. Her boyfriend’s against the roof and they hear the chainsaw outside. Suddenly the saw comes through his chest, and he grabs it and all of his fingers get launched into Heather’s face in 3D. That’s the difference between our screenplay and the movie they made.”
The finale was altered considerably as well. “In the finale of the movie, Heather has been taken hostage by a dozen men who are left from the original siege at the house in the ’70s. Bubba has been killing the people who killed the Sawyers one at a time throughout the last 20 years; this is the last 12 people who were in on this thing.
“They’re all at a meat-packing plant, and the meat-packing plants in Texas are at the same place where all the animals are, so these cows are smelling their own death their whole life. We had a scene where Leatherface, with chainsaw running, is walking through a stampeding herd of cattle in 3D. We had 12 guys who were beating Leatherface with bats and chains, not two overweight dudes. When Leatherface gets his saw back and starts cutting through these 12 guys, it was amazing.”
In addition to booking several jobs based on their original script, a career highlight came from Marcus’ Texas Chainsaw experience. “Tobe Hooper called me at home to say we had made the first actual sequel to his film. I said, ‘Tobe, you made Part 2!’ He said, ‘I know.’ You could put me in the ground right then. Life goals have been hit. I’m good.”
