Nubbins Sawyer, also known as "The Hitchhiker" is the secondary antagonist in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Biography[]
In the Early 1950s, the Sawyer Family are celebrating Jedidiah's birthday. They give him a chainsaw to use it against a pig thief as Nubbins claps in joy. But Jed drops it after slashing the thief's leg with it. As Verna gets disappointed at Jed for not killing the sacrifice, Grandpa gets up from his chair and kills the thief with his hammer and the he smiles.
In 1955, couple Betty Hartman and Ted Hardesty are driving down a country road when they come across Jed, wearing a pig head mask. In an attempt to help him, Betty follows him to a dilapidated barn, where she falls through a trap where she impaled through the back with spikes. As she looks up at Jed and his older brother, Drayton, stare down at the dying woman. Drayton then looks at Nubbins and has Nubbins drop a car engine on top of Betty, killing her instantly.
Her father, Hal Hartman, is called to the crime scene, where he is shocked to find his daughter deceased. Despite the efforts of matriarch Verna, Hartman responds by taking Jedidiah into custody as retribution against the Sawyers, sending him to a mental institution known as the Gorman House Youth Reformery.
A decade later, Nubbins and the other Sawyers plan to get Jedidah back. They hire a young deputy named Sorells, who Verna pays to find Jed. After telling her that Hartman has Jed at the barn along with Nurse Lizzy, he is attacked by Drayton and Nubbins since Verna tricked the deputy into working with the Sawyers. He is stabbed a few times by Drayton and is thrown into a pig pen by Nubbins and Drayton where the Sawyer pigs eat him alive.
Later that night, Elizabeth regains consciousness at the barn where Betty Hartman was murdered, to find that she and Jackson are being held hostage by Sheriff Hartman. Planning to kill them, he gleefully tells Elizabeth that the now mentally-damaged Jackson is really Jedidiah Sawyer. However, the Sawyer family arrives to save the helpless Jedidiah, beating Hartman into submission and taking all three of them.
Back at the Sawyer home, Verna stitches the remnants of Jedidiah Sawyer's face and applies a muzzle to hold them together. She then leads him into a room where his siblings are holding Elizabeth and Hartman captive. Verna gifts Jedidiah with a chainsaw and Elizabeth watches on in horror as he bisects Hartman to death. As the family celebrates, Elizabeth flees into the woods while the Sawyers give chase. She nearly escapes, only to be caught in a bear trap. Elizabeth attempts to appeal to Jedidiah's sympathy, while Verna encourages him to kill her to protect their family. Unable to recall events prior to his injury, Jedidiah begins to listen to Elizabeth's pleas until she insults Verna. This causes him to decapitate her out of spite. The next morning, Verna burns the evidence of the prior night's events and the other Sawyers feed the remains of their victims to the pigs. In the house basement, Jedidiah crafts the faces of Hal Hartman and Elizabeth into a mask, donning it to a mirror as he applies lipstick. The film ends with him smashing the mirror at the sight of his reflection.
On August 1973, Nubbins walks down along a road, until he gets picked up by a group of friends who are traveling through the area, who feel sorry for him having to walk in the heat.
The group asks him what he was doing out there and he tells them that he was "over at the slaughterhouse" where he and "his brother" and "his grandfather" used to work. He shows them pictures of he and his family killing the cattle while telling them a story about how head cheese comes from the cows there when their heads are melted, all the while attempting to get them to drop him off at his home and even inviting them to dinner. He soon begins acting erratically after being given back the photographs by the disgusted travelers. The Hitchhiker suddenly pulls Franklin's Hardesty's pocket knife out of his grasp after he sees the crippled teen picking his fingernails with it. The group is shocked and appalled when the Hitchhiker uses Franklin's knife to cut open the palm of his own hand. Shortly after, the Hitchhiker shows-off the straight razor he keeps in his boot and then takes a picture of Franklin using a camera he pulls out of his satchel. After Franklin refuses to buy the picture, the Hitchhiker sets the photo on fire and slashes Franklin's arm with the straight razor before being kicked out of the van. The Hitchhiker briefly chases after the van, kicking and yelling as he smears a bloody handprint onto the side of the vehicle but soon relinquishes his attack on it. The smeared blood on the van was a symbol for Drayton to see which marked the teenagers' van as a target for murder.
The film later identifies the Hitchhiker as the brother of the two other main villains of the film, Leatherface and Drayton, as well as the middle son of a family of mentally unstable and murderous cannibals. It's also revealed that he was the one responsible for the grave robbings mentioned at the beginning of the film. He was taking photographs of decomposed corpses and making horrific art and statues out of them at the cemetery. Together, they torment Sally Hardesty, Franklin's sister whom Drayton had captured. Eventually deciding to kill Sally, the Hitchhiker, Drayton and Leatherface are at first content to allow their highly-regarded Grandpa to do so, but when Grandpa proves unable to kill Sally with a hammer, the Hitchhiker and his brothers become impatient and over-eager with trying to help him.
Death[]
Nubbins' Death
The Hitchhiker forgets to keep a hold on Sally when he tries to take the hammer from Grandpa, allowing her break free of their his and jump out a nearby window; as Sally flees, the Hitchhiker and Leatherface give chase to her, with the Hitchhiker catching up to her on a road. While slashing Sally with a knife, the Hitchhiker meets his demise when he is run over by an 18-wheeler.
Nubbins' Decomposed Corpse
In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, the Hitchhiker appears only as a macabre puppet-like corpse: his family has reassembled him after the events of the first film, and his twin brother, Chop Top (Bill Moseley) carries him around and treats him as if he were still alive. At one point, Drayton refers to him as Nubbins, indicating that that is his real name. The Hitchhiker's corpse is presumably destroyed when a hand grenade, accidentally set off by Drayton and the film's secondary protagonist, Lieutenant "Lefty" Enright, blows up the family's hideout with the Hitchhiker's body in it.
Killed Victims[]
- Betty Hartman - Impaled w/ spikes in trap, crushed w/ car engine
- Deputy Sorells - Fed alive to pigs