Lena Headey's Favorite Movie Is Not What You'd Expect | Sorry Not Sorry
Some people's favorite movies will genuinely make you stop and question everything. That's exactly what happened to this writer when Lena Headey revealed her go-to films to JustWatch while promoting the 2026 action thriller, Ballistic. Her choices are extremely hard to watch and are the furthest thing from (what I consider) something that can be re-watched.
WATCH: Lena Headey's Favorite Movie Is Not What You'd Expect
"There are two films that spring to mind," Headey shared. "But they're both f*****g excellent, so I don't think you'd need to defend them, which is the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre and A Woman Under the Influence. Two of my north star movies." When asked why she picked the 1974 indie horror, the actress was very forthcoming with her reasoning.
"Because it's brilliant," Headey explained. "I can watch it every day, and there's something new in it. And I love the fact that it was small, fast, crazy… done with a group of mates for no money. And it just stands the test of time. And the sound design. I mean, I could just nerd out about that forever. You can just find so much depth in it. And Leatherface is misunderstood for me."
Although it has a few very disturbing gender based violence elements, A Woman Under the Influence (1974) sort of makes sense as an actor's favorite movie pick since a lot of industry folk are drawn to Gena Rowlands' performance as downtrodden housewife Mabel Longhetti. But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is something else entirely.
A Film Defined By Violence
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre follows a group of young people who, while traveling through rural Texas, end up looking for help at the wrong house and are picked off one by one by a family of cannibals, including Leatherface, a masked killer who uses tools from a slaughterhouse to hunt them down. It's extremely grim, and the brutality doesn't ease up once the story gets going.
And this is where it gets difficult to follow Headey's logic. Yes, it's well made, and the sound design is effective. But calling it something you can watch every day is a stretch. But the violence in the film is extremely problematic because it disproportionately focuses on the torture of its female characters. One woman is impaled with a meat hook and left to die a slow death in a freezer.
The film's protagonist, Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), spends an extended amount of time being chased, captured, tormented, and psychologically broken down. Unlike modern slasher movies, the horror is built around prolonged fear and suffering, not just the act of killing. That's not a side detail. It's the core of the entire film.
So when you frame Leatherface as "misunderstood," it risks smoothing over the fact that he and his family are monsters who seem to get a kick out of killing men and torturing women before killing them. He is part of a system of sustained, sadistic violence sold as entertainment. You can appreciate the filmmaking, but there's nothing "brilliant" about the normalization of that kind of imagery.
Why To Watch 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' (And What To Watch After)
Despite its problems, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre holds a place in the horror genre because it does things structurally that new films are still borrowing from. Although the setup is simple, the execution is what gives it staying power. The use of sound, pacing, and the way it creates terror in broad daylight, rather than hiding everything in the dark, all contribute to its appeal.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is worth watching if you're interested in how horror evolved over the years, or if you want to see where a lot of modern tropes started. If you're looking for something that carries a similar sense of threat, The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024), The Strangers: Chapter 2 (2025), and The Strangers: Chapter 3 (2026) trilogy is a solid follow-up.
Chapter 1 begins when Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and her boyfriend Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) arrive at a remote house and are targeted by masked strangers for no clear reason. The lack of explanation is where the biggest horror comes from. Chapter 2 expands the scope slightly but keeps that same underlying idea intact. Chapter 3 closes things out without trying to over-explain what's been happening.
The Strangers trilogy operates on the idea that not every horror story needs a neat resolution, which works in its favor. Taken together, these movies offer a more controlled version of fear and torment. They just don't feature the same emphasis on prolonged, graphic suffering that defines The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
