After horrifying and enthralling us in equal measure with their debut feature Inside, French filmmakers Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury are now set to bring their unique sensibilities to a more mainstream project – Leatherface, a prequel to Tobe Hooper’s 1974 slasher classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that will chart the origins of the titular killer.
Millenium Films has struggled to turn the Texas Chainsaw property into a bankable franchise, and the studio’s seventh attempt, 2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3D, didn’t seem to know whether or not it wanted to be a gruesome, full-blooded horror pic or a more tongue-in-cheek entry. As a result, it succeeded at being neither. With this prequel, however, Millenium has a chance to hit the reset button and launch a new franchise around everyone’s favorite chainsaw-wielding psycho.
Bustillo and Maury, who also helmed Livide and the upcoming Among the Living, have strong ties to the horror genre that make them extremely solid candidates for Leatherface. In particular, considering their work on Inside, a straight-up classic of the slasher genre, should excite fans of the Texas Chainsaw franchise to no end.
Leatherface will be set in the ’70s, before Hooper’s original, and chart Leatherface’s origins and blood-stained teenage years (perhaps à la Bates Motel?). We don’t know too much more about it than that, but Seth M. Sherwood (a scribe who landed on the Blood List – for most-liked but unproduced horror scripts – with Interstate 5, about a serial killer’s son going on the hunt for him with the daughter of one of his victims) is scripting.
Though some may be disappointed that the period setting of Leatherface would seem to negate any appearance by Texas Chainsaw 3D lead Alexandra Daddario, one prequel does not mean that the actress is out of the franchise for good. Once Millenium Films lays a solid foundation for the series with Leatherface, there’s nothing to say that Daddario can’t come back into the fold for what would be then the ninth film.