probably remember named Elmer Wayne Henley. He was a young man who recruited victims for an older homosexual man. I saw some news report where Elmer Wayne… said, ‘I did these crimes, and I’m gonna stand up and take it like a man” Well, that struck me as interesting, that he had this conventional morality at that point. He wanted it known that, now that he was caught, he would do the right thing. So this kind of moral schizophrenia is something I tried to build into the characters.”
Kim Henkel
The concept for the film arose in the early 1970s while Hooper worked as a college professor at the University of Texas at Austin and as a documentary cameraman. He had previously developed the idea of a film centering on isolation, the woods, and darkness, and continued to explore these ideas as he thought up the concept of the film. He also credited the local San