The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) is an American horror film directed by Jonathan Liebesman and written by Sheldon Turner. The film is a prequel to the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, showing the origins of Thomas Hewitt, later known as Leatherface, and the wider collapse of the Hewitt family into murder and cannibalism. Set in 1969, the story follows two brothers and their girlfriends travelling through Texas before they are taken captive by the Hewitts. Jordana Brewster, Taylor Handley, Diora Baird and Matt Bomer play the young travellers, while Andrew Bryniarski returns as Leatherface and R. Lee Ermey again dominates the film as Sheriff Hoyt. The film keeps the remake’s darker, grimier visual style, but places more emphasis on the family’s backstory, the closing of the slaughterhouse and the violent transformation of ordinary rural spaces into Leatherface’s world.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning was filmed in Texas, using several Central Texas locations to continue the same visual world established in the 2003 remake. The Hewitt family house is the same large property used in the previous film, located at 901 County Road 336 near Granger. This Southern plantation-style house gives the prequel its main family setting and is again central to the film’s version of Leatherface’s home. The slaughterhouse material was filmed at Lee Bros. Meats in Martindale, while Taylor Meat Company in Taylor is also connected to the 2003 and 2006 productions’ meat-processing locations. Other filming took place in Elgin, Manor, Johnson City, Austin and Martindale, with the motel material connected to Johnson City and roadside/rural scenes spread across the surrounding Texas area. The film’s locations are deliberately dry, open and oppressive: isolated farm property, small-town roads, old meat-industry buildings, motels and rural highways all contribute to the sense of a Texas landscape where the Hewitt family’s violence has grown out of economic decay and isolation. Like the 2003 remake, the prequel is visually tied to the Granger Hewitt house rather than the original 1974 Sawyer farmhouse, making it part of a separate Texas Chainsaw location tradition within the same franchise.
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).
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