‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’

Tim Harden, a Round Rock resident and owner of Texas Chainsaw Massacre Tours, lives 5 miles from the Round Rock home in the original film. Harden conducted extensive research on the film and became friends with many of the cast members, who were integral in helping identify Texas locations and providing other information about the movie for his tour business, he said.

“It all happened because I am a big fan of the first film,” Harden said. “My first website, texaschainsawmassacre.net, was to solve the myth of where this house was.”

Convicted murderer Ed Gein was part of the inspiration for the film’s plot. However, Hooper said in a 2004 interview with Texas Monthly that the inspiration came from crowd fatigue while holiday shopping at Capital Plaza in a hardware department that carried chainsaws.

“I know a way I could get through this crowd really quickly,” Hooper said during the interview.

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2,” released in 1986, included a scene that was shot at a then-chainsaw repair store, which is now the Mean Eyed Cat bar in downtown Austin.

Dennis Hopkins, former band director at Leander High School, said the LHS band played “The Eyes of Texas” in one of the film’s nonviolent scenes on the railroad tracks behind the store.

“They offered to pay us $1,500, which at that time in the 1980s, that was a lot of money,” Hopkins said. “It would be something that we could buy some equipment with. … They gave all the band kids [a] prime rib dinner. We ate on-site with the [movie] stars. … It was something the kids could do to bring notoriety to them in a positive way. And it turned out to be a lot of fun to say, ‘Hey I’m in a movie.’”