It’s been 40 years since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre hit theaters and shocked moviegoers with its violent scenes. Texas Monthly has resurfaced their story from 2004 by John Bloom about the making of the film, which was made on a budget of $60,000 (about $290K, adjusted for inflation). Here, Bloom describes the injuries the cast members suffered through while making the film, especially by Marilyn Burns, who had the lead role:

Almost every cast member suffered some sort of injury. Neal had his face burned by hot asphalt. Partain had a bruised and cut arm after rolling down a hill in one of the early scenes. For Partain’s dying scene, Hooper and makeup artist Dottie Pearl stood on either side of the camera lens, spitting red Karo syrup into the air, attracting flesh-devouring mosquitoes. Hansen had no peripheral vision while wearing his mask and had a heart-stopping near miss when his boots slipped while he was running and the chain saw flew up in the air and crashed to the ground, inches from his body. But no one was beaten, cut, and bruised more than Burns. By the end of production, her screams were real, as she’d been poked, prodded, bound, dragged through rooms, jerked around, chased through cocklebur underbrush, jabbed with a stick, forced to skid on her knees in take after take, pounded on the head with a rubber hammer, coated with sticky stage blood, and endlessly pursued by Hansen with his chain saw and Neal with his constantly flicking switchblade. “I was afraid to hit her at first,” Siedow told me. “I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t hurt her. But they kept telling me it looked fake and I needed to really hit her. It took me several tries, but by the end of it, I was really hitting her. It actually got to be kinda fun.”

In retrospect, there’s reason to believe that Hooper was manipulating many of the details, to an almost obsessive degree. The heat, the miserable conditions, and the sheer pain of it all undoubtedly added to the atmosphere Hooper was trying to create. He wanted the actors to feel irritable and off-balance. He probably knew $60,000 wasn’t enough money to finish the film but didn’t want Parsley and the other investors to know that. He was doing whatever he could, day by day, moment by moment, to get as many images on film as possible, because he knew that Chainsaw, like any successful horror film, would be perfected in the editing room. “Tobe really did have a vision,” says Bozman now. “He knew exactly where we were at all times. But the rest of us were flying blind.”

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