Texans love to be scared by Leatherface. What can we say? Credit: Courtesy Image / Everette Collection

Texans are passionate about our state. We love to embrace its music, its food, its culture and imagery.

Turns out, we also love being scared shitless by it.

How else to explain a new study by game-hosting site Host Havoc, which used Internet data to determine each state’s most-watched horror movie. Texans, as it turns out, just can’t get enough of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that 1974 fever-dream of a shocker about a cannibal family terrorizing a group of young hippies.

To get the rankings, researchers reviewed online search data from each state for 100 “popular and classic” scary movies. They identified the movie with the highest search volume in each state, and to account for population differences, each film was ranked by searches per 100,000 people.

That noted, Texans aren’t just kinda fond of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they’re so deeply into the cult classic that they searched for it 87,350 times per 100,000 people — that’s more than any other horror film in any other state.

For those curious what kind of horror residents of other states crave, here’s a quick breakdown:

  • California: Get Out
  • Florida: Jaws
  • New York: It Follows
  • Illinois: Halloween
  • Ohio: The Silence of the Lambs
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This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 15, 2024.

Sanford Nowlin is editor-in-chief of the San Antonio Current. He holds degrees from Trinity University and the University of Texas at San Antonio, and his work has been featured in Salon, Alternet, Creative...