The Bloodsucking Finger Scene Was Real

In the iconic dinner scene, Grandpa Sawyer (played by 18-year-old John Dugan in prosthetic makeup) sucks blood out of Sally’s (Marilyn Burns) cut finger. Turns out, that was actually happening in real life, because Gunnar Hansen, who plays Leatherface, secretly cut Burns without telling anyone.

“The prop knife they used, which contained a tube of fake blood that Hansen was to squeeze onto Burns’ finger, had malfunctioned,” Joseph Lanza writes in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Film That Terrified A Rattled Nation.

“They tried many takes, and finally, Hansen grew so impatient that he surreptitiously sliced her finger for real before exposing her to Dugan’s saliva.”

What’s even worse is that neither Burns nor Dugan realized the blood was real until years later. “I didn’t find out until years later I was actually sucking on her blood, which is kind of erotic really,” Dugan later said, according to Lanza.