Interview by Paul Salfen
In the pantheon of slasher cinema, few films cast as long and jagged a shadow as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—a 1974 fever dream of sweat-soaked terror that turned a low-budget indie into a visceral landmark. Now, over half a century later, one of its original survivors, Allen Danziger, emerges from the shadows not as the hapless van driver Jerry but as the grizzled Sheriff Danzinshoos in The Weedhacker Massacre, a gleefully unhinged horror-comedy that swaps chainsaws for garden tools and asks: How many remakes of a bad horror movie can you make before the killer comes back for real? Co-created with filmmaker Ray Spivey, this blood-spattered romp proves that even in the overgrown weeds of genre filmmaking, lightning—or perhaps a whirring blade—can strike twice.
It’s a balmy September afternoon in 2025, and Danziger and Spivey are beaming via video chat with Paul Salfen of AMFM Magazine, their enthusiasm as infectious as a well-timed jump scare. The film, which world-premiered at the Golden State Film Festival and has since racked up accolades like Best Comedy at the New York International Film Awards and Awards of Merit for Best Song and Best Actor at IndieFEST, is finally hacking its way to digital platforms on October 17 via Buffalo 8. Unrated and unapologetic, with a runtime of 1 hour, 35 minutes, and 36 seconds, The Weedhacker Massacre follows a hapless cast and crew filming on the site of past gruesome murders, only to awaken a masked maniac wielding a weed whacker. Think Scream meets Shaun of the Dead, but with more mulch and meta-mayhem.
“We’re excited beyond belief,” Spivey declares, his voice crackling with the kind of glee reserved for directors who’ve just survived their own production apocalypse. Danziger, ever the wry veteran, chimes in: “It’s blowing my mind how much fun people are having with this movie—and the laughs that they’re getting, and they’re getting a lot of the stuff that I didn’t even get on the first scene.” Indeed, the film’s secret sauce lies in its precarious balance of gore and guffaws, a tightrope walk that Spivey attributes to rigorous “joke testing” and a cast that plays to their strengths. “We had such a good cast,” he says, “and we just played to their natural abilities. I think you just kind of gravitate to the characters, and that’s kind of what makes the humor work.”
The ensemble is a mix of fresh faces and genre nods: David Treviño (Rent Free, Storage Locker), Molly Sakonchick (Storage Locker), Bobbie Grace (Fear the Walking Dead, Velocity Girl), Sean Reyna, and Parrish Randall (Circus of the Dead, The Goldilocks). But it’s Danziger’s presence that anchors the film in slasher lore, his Sheriff a knowing wink to fans who remember him dangling from a meat hook in Tobe Hooper’s opus. Spivey, who wrote and produced, with Danziger executive producing and Jody Stelzig directing, recalls the chaos of indie filmmaking with a survivor’s grin. “We had gotten rained out a number of days, so we’re really behind,” he recounts of the climactic fight scene. “We’re shooting our biggest scene at 2:00 in the morning… 15 stunt people, most of the cast, everybody’s tired. It’s cold, they want to go home.” Yet, under Stelzig’s choreography, it coalesced into something magical—or at least mercifully coherent.
For Danziger, the parallels to Chain Saw are inescapable, and deliciously so. That infamous shoot, filmed in the sweltering Texas July of 1973 with a budget scraping $45,000 (later ballooning to around $140,000), was a trial by fire: “It was like Africa, filming Chain Saw,” he quips. “In that van with the windows up, no AC… It was awful.” Birthdays passed amid rotting animal props and cigar smoke; Danziger, a social worker by trade, even had his schedule accommodated around a summer camp gig. “None of us thought the movie would come out,” he admits. When Hooper showed him early rushes, Danziger’s feedback was blunt: “Have the seats facing away from the screen.” Hooper didn’t laugh, but Quentin Tarantino later hailed it as “a perfect movie.” The Weedhacker Massacre channels that same DIY grit, with Spivey praising Danziger’s “equanimity, his calmness, his ability to laugh at stuff” amid setbacks—a far cry from the stoned freak-outs on the Chain Saw set.
Anecdotes flow like fake blood: Danziger riffing on a Spike Lee-inspired monologue (“We were bamboozled!”), the terror of a 6’5″, 292-pound actor (dubbed “Poker Face”) swinging a gas-powered weed whacker with metal blades on a slippery set. “People were parting the Red Sea to get away,” Spivey laughs, noting the constant safety tweaks to avoid real carnage. What elevates it all is the soundtrack, courtesy of Brittany Cannon (runner-up on The Voice), a horror aficionado who penned originals like “The Ballad of Weedhacker” and “Hammer to the Head.” “It could be a number one hit,” Danziger enthuses, revealing Cannon’s cameo alongside nods to other genre gems, including a voiceover tie-in to Cannibal Comedian featuring Chain Saw‘s hitchhiker, Ed Neal.
Their advice to aspiring filmmakers? Perseverance, naturally. “You just got to persevere,” Spivey says, echoing the Murphy’s Law of sets: “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.” Danziger adds a nod to the Coen brothers’ savvy—hire on Thursday, fire on Friday—and stresses unshakeable belief: “Don’t let anybody dissuade you.” Their “Hail Mary” moments? For Spivey, mustering the guts (and funds) for his debut Writer’s Block; for Danziger, saying yes to Hooper’s trippy Eggshells in 1969, which led to Chain Saw four years later. “I guess that’s a Hail Mary moment,” he reflects, tying it to a success mindset that puts family first and stays calm under pressure.
As for what sets Weedhacker apart in a crowded field of horror-comedies? “Our cast—they were so good,” Spivey insists, while Danziger highlights the music and meta-flourishes. With cameos, documentaries like My Dinner with Leatherface (celebrating Gunnar Hansen), and Chain Reactions (featuring Patton Oswalt on the film’s life-altering impact), Danziger is in the midst of a renaissance. His parents once caught Chain Saw in a Florida porno theater double-billed with Deep Throat—a detail too absurd not to cherish.
Teasing a sequel (notes already scribbled), the duo hopes fans embrace the madness. “It’s all going to count on the fans,” Spivey says. “Allen’s got a million [ideas].” Follow the frenzy on social: Facebook (@weedhackermovie, @chainsawjerry), Instagram (@weedhackermovie, @chainsawjerry, @pokerfacerules), X (@weedhackerm), and TikTok (@whackermassacre). In a genre choked with remakes, The Weedhacker Massacre proves that sometimes, the best way to honor a bad horror movie is to make a better, funnier one—and pray the killer stays fictional.
