The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

A title card frames the story as a true account of the Hardesty siblings. Sally Hardesty and her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin drive to rural Texas with friends Pam, Kirk, and Jerry to check on their grandfather's grave after news of cemetery vandalism. Along the way they pick up a Hitchhiker — a twitchy, disfigured young man who shows them photographs of slaughtered animals, slashes himself with a straight razor, then cuts Franklin's arm before they manage to throw him out. He smears blood on the side of the van as they drive off.

They stop at a gas station with no fuel and a friendly Old Man behind the counter who tells them to wait. They press on to the abandoned Hardesty homestead. Kirk and Pam wander off looking for a swimming hole, find a humming generator, and follow it to a neighboring farmhouse. Kirk steps inside and is immediately hammered dead by Leatherface — a hulking figure wearing a mask of human skin — who slams a steel door behind him. Pam enters looking for Kirk, falls into a room of bone furniture and feathers, and is dragged screaming to a meat hook, where she is impaled alive and forced to watch Kirk dismembered with a chainsaw.

Jerry comes looking for them and finds Pam still alive inside a freezer; Leatherface kills him too. Night falls. Sally and Franklin search the woods. Leatherface emerges with the chainsaw and guts Franklin. Sally flees through the trees, pursued by the roaring chainsaw, and reaches the gas station, where the Old Man feigns help before tying her up and driving her back to the house.

At the dinner table — chairs made of human arms and bones — the Sawyer family is revealed: the Hitchhiker, the Old Man, Leatherface, and a desiccated near-corpse Grandpa kept alive in the attic. They torment Sally, prick her finger to feed Grandpa her blood, and try to let Grandpa kill her with his old slaughterhouse hammer, but he is too weak to grip it. Sally throws herself through a window and runs for the highway. The Hitchhiker pursues her on foot and is struck and killed by a passing truck. The trucker tries to help her but is forced to flee from Leatherface. Sally clambers onto the back of a passing pickup, sobbing and bloodied, as Leatherface — frustrated, wounded — staggers in the road and swings the chainsaw in wide arcs at the rising sun.