The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper's 1974 verite slasher. Leatherface, sledgehammer dinner, fifteen-thousand-dollar budget.
Marilyn Burns played Sally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the dinner sequence took twenty-seven hours to shoot in a room full of rotting animal remains in extreme heat. Her screaming in the film is genuine exhaustion. She appeared in Eaten Alive for the same director and became a fixture of horror conventions.