After nearly 50 years of hiding, Leatherface returns to terrorize a group of young friends who disrupt his carefully shielded world in a remote Texas town in the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre, out on Netflix now. Elsie Fisher stars as Lila, who follows her sister to the town of Harlow, Texas, to start a new business venture.
After the group’s arrival, things go haywire when Leatherface starts his latest rampage. Nearly everyone in the movie dies, save for Melody and Lila. In the final moments of the film, the sisters are heading out of Harlow in their Tesla. Suddenly, Leatherface grabs Melody out of the car and decapitates her in front of Lila, who is left screaming and crying as the self-driving Tesla takes her out of Harlow. In our EXCLUSIVE interview, Elsie revealed her initial reaction to that last-second twist.
“When I was reading the script, everything terrible had happened. I think I got to page 109 of 110. It’s like, okay, wrapping up, everything’s great. They get in the Tesla, and then I flip to page 110 that says Leatherface grabs Melody in the car. And then it’s like, the end, smiley face. So really, it’s just traumatizing again. I think that’s the karmic destiny of horror movie protagonists. There can never be two,” Elsie told HollywoodLife.
When asked if she thinks Lila got out of Harlow alive, Elsie said, “I don’t know. That car didn’t seem like it was going so fast. It was a little bit of a slow Tesla ride. I mean, my hope is that Lila gets out of there and gets into some serious therapy and connects with her parents. There should be a sequel film years and years later where she’s a well-rounded adult who’s dealt with it all, and then 60 minutes in Leatherface kills everyone.”
The 2022 version also brings the story full circle with Sally Hardesty’s return. Sally, played Olwen Fouéré, confronts Leatherface in the film, wanting revenge on the man who killed her friends in the original film. Elsie weighed in on Sally passing on the final girl baton to Lila.
“I loved the parallel, personally. I think it’s really fun to tie that in and show the similarities between the two,” Elsie noted. “I think it ties into the ending going back to karmic destiny. Lila in some ways makes the wrong choice by not just grabbing her sister and getting out of there. She falls back into this cycle of terrible things. Symbolically, she picks up Sally’s hat at the end, and then, of course, she has to face the same destiny as Sally and scream in the back of that car.”
The 2022 remake is full of jaw-dropping kills to make any horror fan happy. One of the most shocking moments in the film features Leatherface slaughtering an entire party bus filled with people. Melody and Lila manage to escape, but they’re left covered in blood.
“It was pretty intense,” Elsie told HollywoodLife about filming the party bus scene. “I think part of scariness too, and thankfully we had a very good COVID department on our set, no one got sick. But also, we shot this in the midst of 2020. I hadn’t been around that many people in so long. But everyone was great. I think we spent maybe two or three days pretty much dedicated to shooting the bus. There was a lot of beforehand choreography and just walking through everything. So by the end of it, I was so sick of it. I was like, enough with the bus.”
Elsie, who rose to fame in the critically-acclaimed film Eighth Grade, was drawn to Lila’s “backstory and being a survivor of previous trauma, and then being thrust into the scope of a horror movie. I just thought that was really interesting and real because a lot of survivors of trauma and other bad experiences often tend to be drawn to darker genres. It’s interesting to just see them maybe represented in something they might watch. Also, she’s just saying the things that people yell at the screen. That was very fun to speak for the audience.”