Major spoilers below for anyone who hasn't yet watched Netflix's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so be warned!
Such as it goes with most horror movies, everyone's mileage will vary when it comes to the overall value of David Blue Garcia's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which quickly rose in the streaming service's Top 10, despite a general lack of glowing reviews. (Our own review was perhaps more forgiving than others’.) Still, I think just about anyone would agree that the film's final few moments create quite the shock, as the siblings and presumed "final girls" Melody and Lila have their victorious escape from Harlow interrupted by one final kill for Leatherface, who very quickly pulls Melody through a car window and decapitates her in the street as Lila rides away in horror. It’s quite the punctuation mark (though stick around for the post-credits stinger).
When Texas Chainsaw Massacre cast members Melody Yarkin, Elsie Fisher and Nell Hudson spoke with CinemaBlend and other press ahead the horror requel’s release, I asked Yarkin whether she wished Melody would have joined her school-shooting survivor sister in making it through the end of the film alive. To my surprise, she was all-in on bidding her character a gory farewell. In her words:
I think my death is the best part of the movie. So of course, I was disappointed when I read the script and learned my fate. But I think it's a much better movie that I die, because it's shocking. I mean, it happens in the last, like, 10 seconds in the movie. It was shocking to me, and I knew I died when I was watching it. So no, I don't wish I lived. I love it.
Poor, poor Melody. Throughout Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Yarkin’s character faced several moments where a feel-good moment was immediately followed by something horrific. I’m speaking largely of the scene where she was under the house, and any hopes about escape were temporarily interrupted by a sliced sewer pipe emptying onto Melody’s face. To survive all of that just to get savaged in the end is unfortunate at best, but the actress stands by the decision to kill her off.
Given that this is a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, and one that revealed the franchise’s original lone survivor has been obsessed with vengeance for the past 50 or so years, it would probably have been asking for too much to have both Lila and Melody survive the horrors of Harlow’s deadliest resident. Still, it managed to catch me totally off-guard in the moment, and I spent at least the first 30 seconds of the credits thinking about how awful and awkward that slow auto-driving retreat must have been for Lila.
During the interview, I also asked Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Sarah Yarkin if she got to see the faux version of her decapitated head, and here's what she said:
Well, I did get to see a corpse version of my head. One of the first things we did when I got to Bulgaria was they did a whole body and face mask of me to recreate my head. And people loved taking pictures of the baby doll head that I don't think I looked like, but everyone really thought it did - the hair look just like mine. And I joked about taking it back with me in my suitcase, which I don't think would have worked. So that was scary.
I cannot truly tell whether being found with the prosthetic head of something that looked like me is more or less supsicious than being found with a head that didn't look like me. All a matter of perspective, I guess, and Melody doesn't have one anymore.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre is currently available to stream in full on Netflix, and you can also check out where to stream other Texas Chainsaw films from the franchise. Don’t lose your own head over wondering what other movies are hitting the streaming service soon, as we’ve got you covered with our 2022 Netflix movie release schedule.
