Staff Writer
For those who don’t know who Kim Henkel is, he is the man behind the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Turns out that Henkel has a new project: Butcher Boys.
This film written and produced by Henkel revolves around a gang called “Bone Boys”, who run the streets and deal in human flesh as if they were dealing drugs. Conflict starts when a young woman and her friends are selected at random to be on the menu of these boys.
In an interview with FearNet, Henkel spoke about Butcher Boys and the taboo of cannibalism.
Henkel stated that his major inspiration for this film was Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, which suggest that poor parents sell their babies as food for wealthy: “What I posited was that, some time after writing A Modest Proposal, a group of individuals decided to put it into effect for whatever reason, and the Bone Boys are an extension of those individuals”.
When asked about the many references to Texas Chainsaw Massacre on this film, Henkel explained: “I originally conceived of this as a Chainsaw sequel. I looked at some basic things I was doing in Chainsaw, as well as what I was doing here, and both beg the question of what does the social entity of being a family mean? What are you entitled to do under duress, when your way of life is threatened? In Chainsaw, the family members were redneck luddites. They were victims of technological advances, and they were attempting to preserve their way of life in the face of that. The Bone Boys, whatever their origins were, they have embraced it for what it is, and made it an enterprise. In Chainsaw there was a rudimentary process of the same thing”.
Cannibalism is still taboo, but this subject doesn’t worry Henkel: “Well that is the whole idea: to violate the taboos. To me, it’s not that different from what is going on in the world today. Look at some of the supposedly “legitimate” and other “outlaw” regimes around the world, and what they think they are entitled to do. We’ve got Assad gassing his own people [in Syria]. This is precisely parallel to those kinds of choices – or looks at those kind of choices that social entities make”.
Finally, Henkel spoke about his upcoming projects: “I’m working on a documentary about Lou Perry [who played L.G. McPeters in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2]. He’s had small parts in a lot of major films. You’ll see him pop up in Poltergeist or Blues Brothers or Boys Don’t Cry, he’s an interesting character. We started shooting this documentary in 2007, and in 2009 he was murdered, right in the middle of the process. So we’ve got to find a way to pull that together and finish that up”.
You can watch Butcher Boys now on VOD.
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