It has now been some 50 years since one of the most terrifyingly titled of American horror films – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – both shocked unsuspecting audiences and thrilled horror fans, who grew to appreciate they were experiencing a rather special piece of cinema.
Its impact on popular culture has been huge – though it may well have hampered Texas tourism for a while – and so it seems appropriate that insightful and astute Swiss documentary maker Alexandre O Philippe (who has already made films about Psycho, Alien and The Exorcist) should be the perfect person to delve into just why Tobe Hooper’s low-budget 1974 film hit the horror zeitgeist.
Screening in Venice Classics at the Venice Film Festival, Chain Reactions charts the film’s profound impact and lasting influence on five artists—actor/comedian Patton Oswalt; Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike; Australian writer and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas; best-selling novelist Stephen King, and filmmaker Karyn Kusama—through early memories, sensory experiences, and childhood trauma, with each providing a film chapter that offers thoughtful, personal and often profound analysis on different aspects of the horror classic.
The documentary cleverly blends the new interviews with never-before-seen outtakes, and intriguingly delves into personal impressions triggered by distinct audiovisual formats (16mm, 35mm, VHS, digital) which allows for different timeline entrance points to the film and varied recollections based on where and when the original film was experienced.
First up is Patton Oswalt, introduced via a clip of him doing stand-up where he talks about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre being the film with the best title ever. He recalls the period in the 1980s when he first saw the film on a grainy VHS tape, with the film’s box cover as thrilling as the film itself.
Takashi Miike recalls how he went to see a revival of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights in Osaka aged 15, but when he couldn’t get a ticket ending up seeing Hooper’s cult film. “Without doubt my life would have been different,” he says. I likely wouldn’t be a film director now.”
He adds: “Even now, 50 years later, it hasn’t lost any of its vividness. I’d like everyone to continue to understand its value. It’s a film of that importance. We must hold Texas Chainsaw dear and continue to nurture it.”
Australian writer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas recalls that she was born the same year The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released. “I grew up 40 minutes away from Hanging Rock, so that film [Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock] was[already] a connection of fear to the cinematic.” She didn’t actually see Chainsaw until the early 1990s, watching a beaten-up VHS version with colours that had yellowed over the years – reminding her of Australian chillers such as Wolf Creek and Wake in Fright. She adds: “It’s a home invasion film from Leatherface’s point of view – we don’t pay enough attention to him.”
Stephen King tells how his first movie experience was a horror film, called Bambi. “I was three years old and I remember Bambi’s mother saying man had been in the forest,” he says, as the documentary cuts from a clip of Bambi to Leatherface running through the forest waving the chainsaw. He compares Chainsaw Massacre to the literary work of Cormac McCarthy (and his novel Blood Meridian in particular) adding that the film “puts us all in touch with our primal fears – you can’t ever get comfortable”.
Filmmaker Karyn Kusama saw it on the big screen for the first time aged 19, describing it as offering the saddest depiction of masculinity on film. “Leatherface is a child,” she says, “and the chainsaw is another device in production to playing. The family has an inability to modernise. It is touching and maddening…they are stuck in an America that does not exist for them anymore and has made then insane.”
Director Alexandre O Philippe himself writes: “The timeline of Chain Reactions matches the timeline of Chain Saw, each chapter lit for a different time of day—starting at high noon, taking us through a long night (with Stephen King making a special appearance as the mystery man hiding in the basement at the hour of the wolf), and ending with the ever hopeful sunrise, as Sally escapes Leatherface yet again – as she always will – while cinema’s saddest monster waves his chainsaw at the sky in rage and despair.”
Philippe’s cleverly structured format allows for plenty of thoughtful and balanced analysis of the film – ranging from emotional and intellectual responses through to discussion of how it was made and Tobe Hooper’s impact on subsequent generations of filmmakers, with appreciation growing over the years. It remains – even through a series of extracts – as terrifying as ever, half a century after it changed, arguably, the course of cinema and pop culture history.
US, 2024, 103mins
Dir/scr: Alexandre O Philippe
Production: Exhibit A Pictures, Exurbia Films, Dark Sky Films
International sales: MPI Media
Producer: Kerry Deignan Roy
Cinematography: Robert Muratore
Editor: David Lawrence
Music: Jon Hegel
With: Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, Karyn Kusama
