WRITER-SLASH-ACTOR: Hangin' with the original Leatherface, Gunnar Hansen


EDITOR'S NOTE: This story also appears here, in last Friday's Oregonian.




It's Saturday night, Oct. 16, and Gunnar Hansen -- better-known as "Leatherface" in 1974's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" -- is signing a rusty hatchet.

The tool was produced by a reverent, punked-out kid who took a bus from north Portland and stood in line to meet him tonight at the Valley Theater in Beaverton. "It's gonna go on my wall," the star-struck lad says, grinning. The actor and writer, who looks like nothing so much as a professorial Santa Claus, barely bats an eyelash; he'd already signed a chainsaw blade tonight, along with the usual DVD boxes, t-shirts and 8x10 glossies of himself dressed as he was in Tobe Hooper's classic horror film -- as a gigantic, chainsaw-wielding lunatic wearing a butcher's apron and a mask of human skin.

Mr. Hansen is one of a very tiny subset of actors who are internationally beloved for their work as masked maniacs. He counts among his friends Kane Hodder (Jason from the "Friday the 13th" series) and Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger from "A Nightmare on Elm Street"), and connects with fans through his Web site, GunnarHansen.com. He supplements his income as a writer, documentarian and occasional actor with four or five appearances a year at horror-fan conventions; he's at the Valley to sign autographs, introduce tonight's screenings of the indie horror flick "Malevolence," and then head on over to the Bullpen Tavern to mingle with fans around midnight. Then he's back on the road to his New England home sometime around 7 a.m.

"After 'Chainsaw,' I was asked to be in 'The Hills Have Eyes,' and I turned it down," he says. "I was out of the business until 1987." He'd moved to an island off the coast of Maine to jump-start a writing career; he's the author of "Islands on the Edge of Time," a well-reviewed nonfiction book that explores the ecology of the Barrier Islands from Mexico to North Carolina. "I heard a rumor that I went into hiding to write poetry and build stone houses." He smiles. "I did write some poetry." He says he lives 55 miles from the nearest major cineplex.

Hansen was lured back into the world of horror in the late '80s with a part in "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers" -- and he saw an opportunity: Now he subsidizes his books and documentaries by interacting with fans and being periodically splattered with blood in films like "Chainsaw Sally," "Sinister" and "Wolfsbane." He's even co-written a screenplay, "The Last Horror Picture Show," that would bring him, Hodder and Englund together as a family of killers. It was just re-optioned, he says, and may still find financing.

"In 'Wolfsbane,' I play a gypsy elder," he says, laughing. "That's where my career is going. I was the killer, then I played the killer's father, and now I'm the gypsy."

He praises "Malevolence"'s straightforward, old-school approach to the slasher genre, and had some harsh words for the newer breed of self-referential, snarky horror movies: "When I saw 'Scream,' I was very disappointed," he says. "It was all very postmodern…. If you think stringing together a bunch of clichés is clever because we all know they're clichés, it's not."

"Horror fans are some of the nicest people I've met," he says, "but I don't want it to be the central focus of my life. I think you can get so into it that you get caught up in the context of it; you can get too used to people hanging on your every word."

Writer-slash-actor (The Oregonian, Oct. 29, 2004)


Posted: Mon - November 1, 2004 at 11:31 AM        

|

©