Texas Chainsaw 3D Writer Spills His Guts Regarding Screwy Timeline

With so many long-running franchises enduring, it’s safe to say that continuity in various series is getting screwier than ever. Granted, part of the reasoning is that these intellectual properties need to be made accessible for moviegoers who weren’t yet alive in the 1970’s or ’80s, but we can thank the horror genre for doing its generous part in allowing remakes and such to be a regular thing these days.

Now, studios could’ve just left it as building off original timelines and going forward, but, as of late, we’ve seen a return to originally established continuities with disregard for sequels that followed. Prime examples of this would be Blumhouse’s upcoming Halloween reboot that follows only the original flick and a newly gestating RoboCop movie that adheres to that very same formula. Really, it’s about time that studios release guides that bring the general public up to speed.

Of course, a certain horror icon loosely based on serial killer Ed Gein isn’t immune to this practice, as some of you have no doubt called into question the bizarre timeline given by Texas Chainsaw 3D. As you may remember, it picked up right after the events of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 1973, and then leaped forward to 2012. But somehow, Heather Miller wasn’t 39 years of age!

Well, according to co-writer Adam Marcus, the movie was originally set in the early 1990’s. Here’s what he had to say in a recent chat with Agony Booth:

“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.

“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.”

As we said earlier, sometimes tales become modernized to make them more accessible to today’s audiences, so maybe that was the reasoning behind this. Still, we’re sure not many would’ve complained had Texas Chainsaw 3D been a “period peace,” as it were.