Texas Chainsaw 3D was supposed to be set in the 1990s

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Somehow it has already been five years since the release of TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D, a film that ignored all of the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE franchise's sequels and reboots so it could connect directly to the original film. Five years later, there is still one issue that is addressed every time the movie is discussed: "What the hell was up with the timeline?"

Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE made a point of saying that it was set on August 18, 1973, but even though TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D picks up directly after the ending of that film, a character who is seen as a baby in the opening scene is only in her twenties when the story jumps forward to late 2012. For me, it was easy to let that slide and go with the idea that TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D had moved the events of the original up to the late '80s, as the film mostly avoids giving a date to the events. (There is a date on a newspaper prop.) For others, this continuity issue really bothers them.

TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D was co-written by Adam Marcus, who had directed and co-written JASON GOES TO HELL twenty years earlier. Speaking with Agony Booth, Marcus addressed the timeline issue in CHAINSAW and revealed that the continuity problem wasn't in his script.

For Texas Chainsaw, the studio wanted a direct sequel to the original film, so my lifelong writing partner Debra Sullivan and I started from that idea. We wanted to adhere more to the first movie. I love the first movie. Tobe Hooper loved our script, which was exciting. There was a certain reverence to what came before. I also loved the Jason character and the hockey mask, but there was no real mythology for Leatherface, and we wanted to create a mythology. With Leatherface, there was a really broken psychology there, like Frankenstein’s monster. For Debra and me, we wanted to tell the story of Leatherface’s imprisonment and his reverence for family.

Shooting in 3-D added another challenge, in that how the killings could be more in your face. It was more figuring out all the mechanics before we wrote the kills. And although we enjoyed the end product, we wrote a $20 million movie, but they shot it for less than half that budget. There are a lot of cool sequences they couldn’t afford to shoot.

Our draft took place in the early 1990s, but the finished film took place now, which makes no sense. The original film was in the 1970s, and the main character is in her twenties, which is why the script took place in the ’90s. It didn’t make any logical sense, and it’s frustrating. I was also trying to make the date in the script coincide with the release of Jason Goes to Hell."

JASON GOES TO HELL was released on Friday, August 13, 1993 – a day I remember well, because I was at the theatre to see that movie on opening day. It definitely would have made more sense if TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D had been set in '93, at which time the lead character would have been twenty, no timeline trickery required…