The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) is an American horror film directed by Marcus Nispel, and a remake of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”. The film follows a group of young people travelling through rural Texas in 1973 after a trip to Mexico, only for their journey to collapse into violence after they encounter the disturbed Hewitt family. Jessica Biel stars as Erin, with Jonathan Tucker, Erica Leerhsen, Mike Vogel and Eric Balfour as the other travellers, while Andrew Bryniarski plays Leatherface and R. Lee Ermey appears as the terrifying Sheriff Hoyt. The remake keeps the basic backwoods-horror structure of the original, but gives it a glossier and more aggressive early-2000s style, with heavier rain, darker interiors, grimier production design and a more explicitly brutal version of Leatherface’s world.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was filmed in Texas, mainly around Granger, Manor, Taylor, Walburg and Austin. The most important location is the Hewitt family house at 901 County Road 336 near Granger, a large Southern plantation-style house that stands in for Leatherface’s family home. The same house was later used again in the 2006 prequel “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning”. The gas station scenes were filmed at Cele Store, 18726 Cameron Road in Manor, while the slaughterhouse material used Taylor Meat Company in Taylor as Blair Meat Company. Walburg was used for the mill material, adding another rural Central Texas location to the film’s decayed, isolated world. Unlike the 1974 film, where the main house was a smaller farmhouse near Round Rock that was later moved to Kingsland, the 2003 remake builds much of its identity around the larger Hewitt house in Granger. The film’s locations are central to its atmosphere: open rural roads, old stores, meat-processing buildings, mills and isolated farm property create a version of Texas that feels both recognisable and deliberately oppressive, turning ordinary Central Texas locations into a darker and more heightened horror landscape.
The Hewitt House
The Hewitt House appears in the remake, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) and it's sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006).