Chain Reactions
It is now more than fifty years since director Tobe Hooper shocked and appalled America with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre which has endured and influenced far beyond any reasonable expectation of a cheaply produced independent film, the script and acting basic and the narrative minimal, the whole production primitive, yet perhaps it is the primal instinct which simultaneously connects with and repels audiences?
Director of the documentaries The People vs George Lucas, Doc of the Dead, Lynch/Oz and Memory: The Origins of Alien, Alexandre O Philippe has turned his attention to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with Chain Reactions, its structure different from his previous work in that it takes the form of five separate chapters of extended interviews with individuals who have a strong personal connection with the film, offering their insights and how it has shaped their own work.
Mystery Science Theatre 3000’s Patton Oswalt a man indoctrinated into horror as a child when Nosferatu was shown at a Hallowen’en party, he justifiably proclaims The Texas Chain Saw Massacre “the greatest movie title ever,” recalling how his first experience of the film, the opening composed of what looked like crime scene photos, struck him as something “primitive and forbidden” and offering theories as to what the film means, madness under the sun.
Audition‘s Takashi Miike having gone in blind when a planned Charlie Chaplin screening was sold out, unlike the formal structure of Japanese cinema, horror such as in Kwaidan, he reflects that “up until that point movies had been something safe,” while film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas drew visual parallels between Texas and her native Australia, in particular Picnic at Hanging Rock and news reports of bush fires as a child, fascinated by what had been withheld from her as “the province of friend’s older brothers, very gendered, not for little girls.”
“Horror is easy,” muses Stephen King, who should know, “Terror is a finer emotion.” A latecomer, seeing the film almost a decade after release, they are still connected, the adaptation of his novel ‘Salem’s Lot directed by Hooper and sharing a cameo scene in Sleepwalkers, his suggestion that “morality and art don’t really go together” leading to The Invitation’s Karyn Kusama’s observation that it offers “the saddest, scariest depiction of (broken) masculinity that might exist on film.”
Five different voices, five different viewpoints, the same number of people who travelled together on August 18th, 1973, their experiences of life and the film are different yet they have in common an enthusiasm, even an affection, for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a depiction of America not as it was but as it was doomed to become as industry closed down and the outliers of society were abandoned by their government, forgotten people whose livelihoods were stolen scrabbling to survive in the dust under the burning sun, the repercussions Chain Reactions indeed.
Chain Reactions will be available on DVD and digital download from Monday 27th October
