In one such scene, Hansen cut her index finger with a razor due to the crew being unable to get theatrical blood to come out of the tube of a malfunctioned prop.

[3] The character has become a pop culture figure and is commonly referenced by film scholars when discussing the final girl theory; a trope for which Hardesty is credited for being the catalyst.

In the opening, the narrator states that Sally describes her traumatic encounter with Leatherface and his family as feeling like she had "broken out of a window in hell" and that she became catatonic after revealing her ordeal to the police.

[6] In the intro speech for Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), the narrator states that Sally died in a private health care facility in 1977.

[3] Within two days after filming finished, she received a call to come back on the set and reshoot Sally's escape in the truck as something went wrong with the original footage.

[11] The original script for the 2003 remake was in flashback format, featuring an aged Sally recounting her experience with Leatherface to authorities; Burns had several conversations with the studio about reprising her role although this version of the film got scrapped.

[12] Olwen Fouéré was cast as Sally in David Blue Garcia's Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), a direct sequel to the original film, following the death of Burns in 2014.

[13] In preparation, she studied Burns' expressions and physicality, although she wanted to create her version of a character living fifty years after a traumatic event.

[13] Hardesty was a featured character, alongside Leatherface, in Universal Orlando's 2012 Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Saw is the Law Halloween Horror Nights amusement park attraction—appearing during a reenactment of the dinner table sequence from the 1974 film.

The juxtaposition of her terrible plight but eventual survival seemingly reconfigured the genre and created, as Clover has termed it, the character of the Final Girl.

Yet, for all her endurance, Sally is not the first Final Girl but more a survivor who stands alongside Halloween's Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis); for as much as both survive, each, in the end, requires male intervention to fully save them from the narrative's male antagonist: Sally is rescued by a passing driver, while Laurie is saved by Dr Loomis (Donald Pleasance [sic]).