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| Robert A. Burns |
Austin American-Statesman columnist John Kelso made the announcement in his column:
Joe O’Connell is doing his part to promote Austin’s eccentricity.
O’Connell, an old newspaper guy who has written about film for several Texas papers, is shooting a documentary about the late Robert Burns, the man who put the gore in the original “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movie.
In case you haven’t been keeping up with your blood and guts horror classics, Burns did the macabre artwork for the film. Although you wouldn’t guess he’d head in that direction if you met him; Burns was a real sweetheart, a soft-spoken guy with what I suspect was a genius IQ.
There’s never been another one like Robert Burns. They didn’t throw away the mold, because there was no mold. Although his South Austin home was a bit moldy.
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| Rondo Hatton |
Burns lived in a two-story dust-collector in South Austin furnished with props from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” There was the arm chair, so-called because of the prosthetic arms Burns attached. When I visited Burns, a battery-powered rubber hand was crawling across the floor upstairs with a knife run through it, a prop Burns put together for an upcoming film project.
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| Burns made these masks. |
What project? Who knows? But I’m betting it wasn’t “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”
During my visit Burns sat me down and showed me the massacre movie on a small TV. His review? He had one complaint: All that screaming from characters being hacked to pieces made the film extremely loud.
Read the rest here.
