‘Chain Saw’ Sally – Celebrating 50 Years of Horror’s First Final Girl

When we think about iconic final girls, it’s usually Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, Halloween), Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp, A Nightmare on Elm Street), and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell, Scream) who come to mind. These fantastic female characters have become horror movie legends, celebrated for their strength and resilience while inspiring a generation of girls to take back their power. Horror historians will also note the flawless Jess Bradford (Olivia Hussey) from Bob Clark’s Black Christmas while sci-fi fans will suggest Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, Alien). But before them all was Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns). The star and sole survivor of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre burst onto the scene in October of 1974 and forever changed the way we view women in film. On a road trip through Texas, Sally crosses paths with some of the most depraved villains in the history of horror and manages to live through a night of sheer hell. Though Hooper’s gritty masterpiece has stood the test of time, spawning five decades of sequels and imitators, Sally never seems to receive the love bestowed on her final girl peers. But given the atrocities she survives and the epic way in which she escapes, Sally Hardesty is arguably the strongest female character the genre has ever seen. 

We first meet Sally enjoying a road trip with her brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain), boyfriend Jerry (Allen Danziger), and friends Pam (Teri McMinn), and Kirk (William Vail). Recent reports of local graverobbing have left the teen concerned that her grandfather’s remains may have been disturbed and they’re driving out to the Texas countryside to ensure that everything’s still in order. After a disturbing run in with a local Hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), the group swings by the old Franklin house, a family estate now left to the elements. Having run out of gas, Kirk, Pam, then Jerry each wander into the house next door and meet an enormous man wearing a mask made from human skin. Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) butchers them each in turn like livestock headed to the slaughter. When Sally and Franklin try to track their friends down, Leatherface bursts through the moonlit trees and brutally murders the screaming man with his trademark saw. This kicks off just over 30 minutes of terror in which the masked giant and his cannibalistic family chase and terrorize Sally, intent on making her their next meal.  

When The Texas Chain Saw Massacre premiered in 1974, Sally was the primary heroine and star of the film, but she would soon become something more. In her book, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol J. Clover names Sally as the first final girl, a term bestowed on the sole remaining protagonist at the end of a slasher film and a conduit through which the audience perceives the story’s unique horror. “The one who would not die,”  the final girl is cursed with the knowledge of her friends’ deaths and must survive long enough to be rescued or defeat the slasher killer on her own. This archetype would continue to evolve through 50 years of genre filmmaking while essentially defining one of its most popular iterations.

Not only the first, Sally arguably suffers more than any of her peers and carries this iconic film through its jarring final act. Surprised while pushing her brother’s wheelchair through the dark forest, she watches a maniacal killer rip him to pieces. With branches tearing at her long hair and clothes, she runs to a nearby farmhouse for help, inadvertently entering Leatherface’s home. Upstairs, she finds two rotting corpses posed in arm chairs, then jumps out the second story window rather than face the monster currently chainsawing through the front door. Struggling to her feet, Sally continues to run and takes refuge in a familiar gas station. Unfortunately, the Old Man (Jim Siedow) she finds closing up shop offers only the illusion of safety. He binds Sally in a burlap sack, dumps her body on the floor of his truck, then drives back to the terrible farmhouse, giggling as he pokes her with the handle of a broom. We learn that he, the Hitchhiker, and Leatherface are all members of a depraved family of former slaughterhouse workers who have been selling human meat disguised as barbeque to oblivious patrons who stop by the gas station. 

Once inside this nightmarish home, Sally is forced to attend a dinner from hell. Tied to a chair outfitted with dismembered human arms, she watches this heinous family bring down one of the attic’s presumed corpses. To feed and revive the man they call Grandpa (John Dugan), Sally’s finger is sliced open and placed in his slack mouth. The ancient man begins to suckle like a baby, finally coming alive with the taste of her blood. Having passed out during this mind-breaking scene, Sally wakes up just in time for a family meal. Under a chandelier made from a human head, the cannibalistic men mock her screams and fondle her hair while dining on meat likely cut from her friends. Hooper zoom’s in on Sally’s terrified eyes, moving the camera ever closer as they dart around in panic. Clover describes the final girl as, “abject terror personified,” while noting this abjection as distinctly female. In this revolutionary moment, Hooper captures the audience’s empathy by aligning us with his frightened protagonist and regendering our collective understanding of strength and endurance. We’ve been conditioned to accept the suffering of women in narrative art and everyday life, but Sally becomes the blueprint for female empowerment through survival.

Fondly remembering their days on the slaughterhouse floor, the family assures Sally that Grandpa is the best killer in the business and that her imminent death “won’t hurt a bit.” In this abhorrent yet strangely comedic scene, the Hitchhiker holds the screaming woman over a bucket on the floor while Leatherface assists Grandpa in trying to smash her head with a hammer. But the decrepit man can barely hold the weapon and makes feeble attempts to land a killing blow. In the midst of this chaos, Sally fights her way free and jumps through a second window, landing on all fours like a wounded animal. Limping down the farmhouse’s long driveway, she’s once again attacked by the Hitchhiker who slashes into her back while Leatherface retrieves his trusty chainsaw. Though she is injured, Sally runs to the road and watches as a truck pulverizes the depraved murderer directly on her heels. As Leatherface approaches, the truck’s driver attempts to help her into the cab, but panics when the chainsaw’s blade hits the driver’s side door. Sally must ultimately flag down a second truck and hop into the bed. She screams in a mix of terror and triumph as a frustrated Leatherface waves his chainsaw in the early morning sun. 

Because of this ending and the meager assistance she receives, Sally has frequently been called a passive final girl. Like Laurie Strode in the original Halloween, she requires male intervention to survive and does not fight the killer off on her own. While this may be technically true, the word “passive” seems to undercut Sally’s impressive physicality and many feats of survival. Setting aside the fact that she jumps through two windows, Sally must endure thirty-one minutes of mind-bending terror, completely carrying the second half of the film. Not only does she fight her way out of certain death, she evades three separate killers and forces two truck drivers to stop and come to her aid. The first would-be savior buys her precious minutes by throwing a literal wrench into Leatherface’s plan, but Sally must adjust in the moment and force another truck to pull aside. Though injured and stunned, she climbs aboard all on her own and commands the driver to speed away. The truck and its male driver may physically move her away from Leatherface, but Sally has reached salvation all on her own. 

Adding verisimilitude to this cinematic ordeal, the working conditions on Hooper’s set were also reportedly horrific. Due to a miniscule budget, the cast and crew worked 12-16 hours seven days a week for more than a month in the Texas summer where temperatures would routinely break 100 degrees. The poorly ventilated house was filled with rotting animal carcasses causing the actors to vomit or lean out the windows for fresh air between takes. By the end of filming, Sally’s costume was drenched in so much blood–some of it real–that it could stand up on its own. Hansen’s own attire could not be washed for fear that it would change color or shape and smelled predictably terrible by the time filming wrapped. The set was also reportedly quite dangerous and the special effects were unreliable. When a blood tube could not be fixed, Hansen solved the problem by simply slicing into Burns’ finger to “feed” Grandpa with her actual blood. A real hammer was reportedly used during some takes of the bucket scene, which could easily have caused a devastating injury. Considering these stories and many more, It’s safe to assume this was one of the most grueling behind the scenes scenarios in horror history, adding weight to Sally’s impressive performance. 

Despite this heroism, Sally has not become a franchise mainstay. An introduction to the third film, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III tells us that she died three years later in a mental institution. Burns makes a brief reappearance in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation as a catatonic patient wheeled past the film’s own final girl, symbolically passing the torch to Leatherface’s newest survivor. Eight years after Burns’ death, actress Olwen Fouéré would take on the iconic role in the 2022 sequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Taking a nod from Laurie Strode, who’s continuing story helms a trilogy of modern Halloween sequels, this Sally has become a hardened Texas Ranger still searching for the masked man who murdered her friends. She does eventually track down Leatherface (Mark Burnham) and bravely diverts his attention long enough for two new heroines to escape. However, the beloved survivor dies at the end of her enemy’s chainsaw and falls into the street among bags of garbage–an egregious end to her harrowing story.  

But Sally’s legacy will reach far beyond her cinematic death. Not only does she anchor one of the greatest horror films of all time–a symphony of depravity unlikely to ever be reproduced–she is the first official final girl and helped create a trend that would go on to redefine the genre. In addition to this distinction, Sally is unique in one other aspect of the now-famous trope: she never turns to face her attacker, instead only fighting her way towards freedom. Later final girls would go on to pick up then “drop up the knife,” a trope that describes the masculinizing effect of using the killer’s phallic weapon against him. Clover describes this phenomenon as seen in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 which concludes with final girl Stretch (Caroline Williams) wielding a chainsaw atop a high hill, mirroring Leatherface’s own grotesque dance at the end of Hooper’s film. Over time, this element of the final girl’s legacy has become contentious and could be interpreted to mean that a feminized victim can only find empowerment by adopting the distinctly masculine strength of her attacker. But Sally escapes on her own terms. Not only does she survive a grueling thirty minutes of sheer torture, she fights her way out of a seemingly impossible trap and orchestrates her own miraculous rescue. She never loses her sense of self and survives by remaining precisely what she has always been, an empowered survivor with an unrivaled will to live, and one of the greatest characters in the history of horror.