Sally Hardesty

Sally Hardesty is a fictional character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. She was portrayed by actress Marilyn Burns in the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and was later featured in a cameo appearance in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995) as a patient in a mental hospital. After a series of grave robberies, Hardesty, her paraplegic brother Franklin, and their friends travel across Texas to investigate upon hearing reports that her grandfather's grave may have been vandalized, and are forced to face Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and his cannibalistic family.

Sally Hardesty
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre character
Marilyn Burns portraying Sally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
First appearanceThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Last appearanceTexas Chainsaw 3D (2013)
Created byTobe Hooper
Portrayed byMarilyn Burns
In-universe information
Full nameSally Hardesty
GenderFemale
FamilyUnnamed grandfather
Ted Hardesty (father)[1]
Lefty Enright (uncle)
Franklin Hardesty (brother)

Filming was particularly challenging for Burns as she endured numerous injuries throughout the notoriously difficult shoot. In one such scene, Hansen cut her index finger with a razor due to the crew being unable to get theatrical blood to come out of the tube of a malfunctioned prop.[2] Burns's stage clothes were so drenched with fake blood that it was solid by the last day of shooting.[3]

The character has become a pop culture figure and is commonly referenced by film scholars when discussing the final girl theory; a trope of which Hardesty is credited for being the catalyst. Outside of film, Hardesty is featured in merchandise based on the films and is referenced in the 2017 video game Dead by Daylight.

Appearances

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Sally and her paraplegic brother, Franklin, travel with three friends—Jerry, Kirk, and Pam—to visit the grave of the Hardesty's grandfather after reports of grave robbing in the area. Afterwards, they decide to visit the old Hardesty family homestead. Along the way, they pick up a hitchhiker. He borrows Franklin's pocket-knife and cuts himself, then takes a Polaroid picture of the others and demands money for it. When they refuse to pay, he burns the photo and slashes Franklin's arm with a straight razor. The group forces him out of the van and drive on. They stop at a gas station to refuel, but the proprietor tells them that the pumps are empty. They continue toward the homestead, planning to return to the gas station on the way back when it has received fuel delivery. When they arrive, Kirk and Pam find a swimming-hole dried up but hear a generator running. They stumble upon a nearby house. Later, Leatherface appears and kills Franklin with a chainsaw and Sally runs to the old house. She runs upstairs and finds the desiccated bodies of an old couple. She jumps out of the second story window to escape Leatherface and runs to the gas station.

The proprietor—Leatherface's brother Drayton Sawyer—ties Sally up, gags her and forces her into the back of his truck and drives to the house. Sally is tied to a chair at a dinner table and Leatherface and the hitchhiker bring the desiccated body of the old man downstairs. They decide that he should be the one who should kill her. After several failed attempts of the old man trying to hit Sally with a hammer, she manages to escape and jump through the window and flee. She reaches the road and a semi-truck stops to help her but Leatherface attacks the driver. She jumps into the back of a pickup truck that stops to help her, escaping Leatherface. She is last seen laughing and screaming hysterically as she escapes.[4][5]

Other

Although she does not physically appear in the sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), Sally's aftermath from the first film is mentioned in the introduction. The narrator states that Sally described her traumatic encounter with Leatherface and his family as feeling like she had "broken out of a window in hell", and it is revealed that she had went into catatonia after her revealing her ordeal to the police.[6] This film identifies her as Sally Hardesty-Enright. In the intro speech for Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, the narrator states that Sally died in a private health care facility in 1977; this is contradicted in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995) where Sally is briefly shown being wheeled through a hospital on a gurney while still in a coma. Marilyn Burns reprised her role for this film.[7] Sally appears in a flashback scene in the 2013 film Texas Chainsaw 3D, which serves as a direct sequel to the 1974 film.[8]

In other media

In 2017, Fright-Rags released a T-shirt featuring a design of Sally and Leatherface.[9] Although not playable, Hardesty is referenced in the video game Dead by Daylight.

Development

While studying at the University of Texas at Austin, Burns auditioned for the role of Sally when a casting call was held for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Burns previously met Hooper when he was kicked off the set of Sidney Lumet's drama film Lovin' Molly (1974), in which Burns worked as a stand-in for Susan Sarandon and Blythe Danner. Burns did most of her own stunts during filming such as jumping through the window during the ending and during the dinner scene, her finger was actually cut by a real knife with no fake blood being used.[10][11] Originally, the 2003 remake was intended to be told in flashback format with an aged Sally recounting her experience with Leatherface to authorities. Burns was set to reprise her role. Ultimately, this version of the film was scrapped.[12]

Reception

In Shocking Cinema of the Seventies, author Xavier Mendik writes that "blonde Sally survives, and she's still intact. Bruised and cut, but still intact. Her hair is matted and dirty now, her tight vest is torn, her hip-hugging jeans no so white, but she's still alive. Whether this is a good thing, she does not yet know. For now, tied up, face to face with maniacs she thought she'd never see again (Hitchhiker: "I thought you was in a hurry?!"), it is all too much. Her eyes go wide before she blacks out. And then she wakes, from one nightmare into another".[13]

In Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To?, David Roche contrasts Sally to Laurie Strode from the Halloween series stating: "All in all, Sally Hardesty and Laurie Strode have very little in common, apart from the fact that both characters survive the horror they have witnessed" and goes on to say that "Sally, the hippie, is very "feminine" and not especially heroic: she undergoes intense suffering, attempts to sell her body, and seems to lose her mind. Sally is, in effect, the most resisting body. As such, the character of Sally simultaneously enables the Family to attempt to assert its masculinity in the face of the abject female and contributes to the discovery of the instability of sexist patriarchal values by bearing witness to the way the Family's mimicry of patriarchy reveals its constructiveness; these two functions coalesce in the shots of Sally's eyes. I would, thus, argue that the character of Sally by no means represents a feminist development, but her resilience does enable an anti-essentialist subtext to emerge to some extent".[14] However, James Rose[15] believes that Sally and Laurie have a lot of similarities, describing:

"Possibly the most significant impact Hooper's film has had upon the horror genre is its sustained trauma of Sally Hardesty. The juxtaposition of her terrible plight but eventual survival seemingly reconfigured the genre and created, as Clover has termed it, the character of the Final Girl. Yet, for all her endurance, Sally is not the first Final Girl but more a survivor who stands alongside Halloween's Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis); for as much as both survive, each, in the end, requires male intervention to fully save them from the narrative's male antagonist: Sally is rescued by a passing driver, while Laurie is saved by Dr Loomis (Donald Pleasance [sic]). Despite this, both Sally and Laurie combine to make manifest the key attributes of the Final Girl as both struggled, endured and, in Laurie's case, attacked their aggressor until they could escape and be saved. In the slasher films that followed in the wake of Chain Saw and Halloween, the Final Girl steadily gains in strength until she herself vanquishes the male antagonist".

He goes on to state the difference between the two:

"It is this that prevents Sally from being a true Final Girl, for she (unlike Laurie and all the others that followed) never turns upon her aggressors and attacks them. Instead, she simply endures, runs from them and, by chancem seizes an opportunity to escape. However, this is not to disagree with Clover's positioning of Sally as a Final Girl, as she does indeed endure and it is this that makes her so noteworthy".

Editor Stefano Lo Verme compared Burns's performance as Sally to the performances of Sandra Peabody as Mari Collingwood in The Last House on the Left (1972) and Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in Halloween (1978).[16]

References
  1. Squires, John (February 8, 2017). "[Exclusive] We Will Meet Sally and Franklin's Father in 'Leatherface'". Bloody Disgusting. Retrieved February 8, 2017.
  2. Hansen, Gunnar (Actor) (2008). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre audio commentary (DVD). Second Sight Films. Event occurs at 1:08:17. we couldn't get the blood out of the tube onto the knife edge and so after the fourth or fifth take... I turned away from everybody... and just cut her
  3. Jaworzyn 2004, pp. 8–33
  4. Risnes, Matt (March 12, 2013). "Foraging For Subtext: 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' (1974)". Coming Soon. Retrieved October 1, 2016.
  5. "The Series Project: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Part 1)". Crave Online.
  6. "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The (1986)". oh-the-horror.com. Retrieved October 1, 2016.
  7. "HL Exclusive: Writer/Director Kim Henkel Reveals Secrets of 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation'". Halloween Love. Retrieved July 29, 2017.
  8. Goldman, Eric (July 3, 2013). "Texas Chainsaw 3D Review". IGN. San Francisco, California: j2 Global. Retrieved May 9, 2019.
  9. "VHS INSPIRED BOX SETS FROM FRIGHT-RAGS". Haddonfield Horror. January 26, 2017. Retrieved December 26, 2017.
  10. "Lady of the Chainsaw: An Interview with Marilyn Burns". The Terror Trap. January 2004. Retrieved May 20, 2018.
  11. Yapp, Nate (October 30, 2010). "Marilyn Burns ("Texas Chain Saw Massacre") Interview". Classic-Horror.com. Retrieved May 20, 2018.
  12. "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Mania. Archived from the original on August 26, 2014. Retrieved June 13, 2018.
  13. Mendik, Xavier (2002). Shocking Cinema of the Seventies. Hereford, England: Noir Publishing. p. 191. ISBN 0-95365-644-6.
  14. Roche, David (2014). Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To?. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1-62674-246-4.
  15. Rose, James (2014). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Columbia University Press. ISBN 9781906733995.
  16. Lo Verme, Stefano (June 25, 2016). "SCREAMING ACTRESSES: FROM VERA FARMIGA TO JAMIE LEE CURTIS, THE GREAT SCREAM QUEEN BETWEEN CINEMA AND TV". MoviePlayer (in Italian). Retrieved January 5, 2018.
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