Tribute: Marilyn Burns (1950 - 2014)

The horror genre has lost a Scream Queen and icon today. Marilyn Burns, who played Sally Hardesty in Tobe Hooper’s classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), has passed away at the age of 65.

An early “final girl” in the 1970s horror cinema, Burns brilliantly portrayed in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre moments of true and utter terror. This is no small accomplishment, and there's nothing in Burns' performance in the film that rings false, or proves unconvincing.

Several scenes in the film focus on an extreme close-up of Burns’ wide eyeballs as Sally slips into madness and derangement, and there’s no evidence of artifice or theatricality in these raw, intimate images.  

The same observation goes for the rest of Burns’ remarkable performance in that film. Burns makes Sally into a real person, one who gets annoyed (at her brother Franklin), impatient, and -- as the terror mounts -- increasingly desperate. We root for her not because she is a superhero, or because she is beautiful, but because we recognize Sally as a regular kid, smart and resourceful, believing that life obeys a certain set of rules.

After playing Sally, Ms. Burns had many other notable roles in the horror genre, in Hooper’s Eaten Alive (1976), Future Kill (1985) -- as “Dorothy Grim” -- and in the TV movie Helter Skelter (1976).  

Recently, Burns appeared in Ti West’s film, The Sacrament (2014), a fictionalized version of the 1970s Jonestown cult murder/suicides.

I wish to express my deepest condolences to Ms. Burns’ family on this day of mourning and grief. 

Marilyn burns will be much missed in the horror community and by fans such as me because she always brought such humanity and realism to her roles, and gave every moment in every performance everything she had.  

Rest in peace, Marilyn Burns.