Interviews
Exclusive Interview: Writer Adam Marcus Reveals the Version of ‘Texas Chainsaw 3D’ We Never Got
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.”
Exclusives
‘Tarot’ – Meet the Evil Entities Designed by Creature Concept Artist Trevor Henderson [Exclusive]
A deck full of terror awaits in the new Screen Gems horror movie Tarot, which features a variety of new supernatural entities designed by concept artist Trevor Henderson.
Tarot, in theaters now, is written and directed by Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg, very loosely based on a novel by Nicholas Adams.
The plot sees a group of friends unleashing a curse when they decide to play with a mysterious box of tarot cards. One by one, they come face to face with their fate and end up in a race against death to escape the future foretold in their readings.
Trevor Henderson designed the creature concept art, which was transformed into the cursed tarot deck by artist Richard Wells. The supernatural Tarot entities were then brought to life on screen by special effects and creature effects designer Dan Martin (Possessor, Infinity Pool). Bloody Disgusting spoke with Henderson about designing the entities for Tarot, giving insight into each card-inspired creature.
As directors Cohen & Halberg previously told Bloody Disgusting, Henderson was the only artist they considered for Tarot. Henderson walks us through what drew him to the film.
“I couched it as doing a fun slumber party horror movie, like a Thirteen Ghosts kind of thing, and having the chance to do a whole bevy of different monsters in one film really excited me a lot,” he explains. “They came to me with an early draft of the script, so I was able to read and see the context with which each of the monsters has their own set piece scene and how that would work out. And just having a very vague idea of what role each monster would play and how they would look, move, and perform. I was left to my own devices, which was incredibly intimidating. But it was a lovely, lovely process getting to develop those characters up from the early script into the final versions.”
Designing eight separate entities already makes for a daunting task, but Trevor Henderson took extra care to avoid creating familiar representations from the tarot deck.
Henderson explains the process, “I definitely tried to take the specific things that popped up over and over again in different renditions of tarot cards and bring those into a slightly newer way that people hadn’t seen it before. Then, from a creature design sense, whenever I’m doing creature design, I try to avoid anything like easy touchstones. In the early designs specifically, I avoided sharp teeth. I know that they walk that back a little bit in the final. When you see a monster in a movie, and it’s got that molded angry brow, I try and avoid that kind of stuff altogether. Anna and Spenser were really great about that, especially with The Hanged Man, which is my favorite out of all the guys that ended up in the film. They were just like, ‘No, no, it’s perfect.’ I just tried to take the things that popped up over and over again and try my best to make it something maybe people hadn’t seen so much, which was difficult when you’re doing the Devil and Death. How many times have we seen Death?”
The artist also shares how he collaborated with the SFX team to further hone the creature designs and what it was like to see it all come together.
“It’s been just a chain of creatives, people I really respect and admire, just working in close proximity with them,” Henderson tells BD. “Even after the fact, seeing the Tarot art that came after I was done. So, first, there were my designs, and then, towards the end of that process, I started working with Dan Martin at 13 Finger FX. We started being on the same Zoom calls just to maximize what would work and what wouldn’t work as I was designing it, so we didn’t have to spend time going back and forth. So, I would be like, ‘Here’s this guy with a weird face.’ Then Dan would be like, ‘This can work, this cannot work, we can do this with this fake hinge jaw I have from a Possessor,’ or something.
“But it’s been really cool seeing the renditions after the fact in Richard Wells’s very distinctive style. I think he did an amazing job giving them really great character in those little paintings in the cards. I know people are asking for a full set of that tarot deck, which I think they’d be nuts not to produce at least a little bit, a few copies of. But yeah, and then just even further down the line, seeing they did a prank trailer with actors wearing the costumes that I scribbled out. It’s just been really weird and satisfying to see it transmute into these different forms.”
Trevor Henderson walked us through each entity’s design, so let’s meet the monsters of Tarot. The below images are being exclusively shared here on Bloody Disgusting.
High Priestess
“The crown was really the centerpiece of that. [Cohen & Halberg] always wanted to have just an ornate magisterial crown and an almost like royalty thing happening with her. Then everything else shifted in. The weird blindfold she has was a very late addition. We went through a ton of different stuff just to see what stuck in a design sense. There was very little in terms of calling back to the meanings of the cards just from the design. I think a lot of that came through in the script and the writing more than playing back to the actual meanings.
“But for the character designs, I just tried to make something that would look interesting and distinctive and hopefully a little bit iconic on screen. Especially with the ones that had less screen time, you really want to have something that sticks. We just tried a million things, and then that was the one that just like, this is cool with the weird black tears and the blindfold.”
The Hermit
“Well, the idea behind the Hermit is he’s supposed to be a hermit in the context that he is a hermit, like the card, the tarot card. But he’s also a hermit, like a mountain man, someone who’s been sequestered away for a long time. So he has all these rags. And then also he’s a hermit, like a hermit crab, and he’s wearing skin – somebody else’s skin.
“So that was the idea, which I thought was fun. Originally, you didn’t see anything underneath this drooping mask, almost like the one Krampus has in the Krampus film. But they put little hints of a creature underneath in the final, which I enjoyed a lot more. I really liked the scene. His scene and the Magician are my two favorite parts in the movie.”
The Hanged Man
“A lot of the scurrying that he does is after my involvement. Not that I don’t approve of it; I think he’s great. He was the one that actually was the smoothest. I think I did one little page of just really rough sketches and then a couple of days of fine-tuning and rendering a little bit. Then they were like, boom, that’s it, that’s the one.
“That design feels like the most like the things I look for. It feels like maybe the most ‘me’ out of everybody. Just by having what he does in the scene, he had to be more of a CG thing. But I still like how you get that face reveal, which is the important part.”
The Fool
“In the beginning, he was a much more body horror guy. I think he was always going to have a jester outfit. But in the script, initially, he had just a mouth, just a blank face with a big smiley mouth. So we played with that for a while and then decided to go in some slightly different directions.
“The biggest thing with him was that we locked down his look pretty early because he has these different masks that change expressions. But we went over a lot at the end when he’s supposed to do a big reveal at the end, and we were going over all these different things about what could be under the mask. At one point, it was just a howling void, like a black emptiness that sucked there. Getting the general look was easy, and then it was the fine-tuning the details that were more tricky.”
Magician
“Originally, he was more of a skeletal figure. I wanted to really play up this really weird stage magician. That’s actually my favorite scene in the movie. I think it’s so weird and scary. But it also had one of the shortest turnarounds. I think that was just a one or two-day sketch session, and they were like, yeah, this is perfect. Though, I do like that they keep him as this is very underlit, in-the-dark figure. I think it works really well for that one specifically.
“I was just doing different sketches and seeing what stuck. And just this really worn old vaudevillian magician outfit really struck a chord.”
Death
“The brief for him was that he’s supposed to be like the film’s Michael Myers. He’s very slow, methodical, and precise. I really wanted this intimidating figure that had no mouth. He has this sinewy thing going on. Even in the original, I think he has eyes in the final version, but the original was just empty sockets, too. I wanted to just make them very alien.”
The Devil
“Between Death and The Devil, they get a lot of screen time. The way we worked was that we tackled the ones that had the most screen time in the beginning when we had the most time to play around. Then, as we got to the shorter and shorter scenes, there were fewer and fewer days we could spend fooling around and spitballing. So, we started with Death. Then right after that was The Devil because their scenes are intertwined. We really wanted a juxtaposition between Death and the Devil where Death is a slow, tall, stooping thing that’s stalking you, like an It Follows monster.
“The Devil is supposed to be this more animalistic, stopping and starting, like flying on a wall, crawling, bestial thing. So, it was important to get that juxtaposition happening. We spent the most time maybe on that one out of all of them. I think it was just a week straight, doing different horns and trying different versions of the horns over and over again. But I think we ended up in a really good place with that one.”
Trevor Henderson did design an eight entity for the film, a mastermind behind the cursed deck. You’ll have to watch Tarot to see it in action. The film is now playing in theaters nationwide.
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