Chain Reaction Review – Popular Texas Chain Saw Massacre Fans Dive into the Legendary Slashing Game | film

IIf you’re programming your own little horror film festival in the run-up to Halloween, and Tobe Hooper’s chilly classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 1974 is part of the line-up, this would make a useful follow-up to your night’s viewing. It’s not a film, although there are snippets of thoughts about the production; Nor is it meta-commentary on the same sprawling level as Room 237, the delirious doc about The Shining. Instead, the chain reaction is something in between, constructed in five chapters that include interviews with five very different, almost seemingly random, interviewers who have strong feelings about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. They are: comedian Patton Oswalt, filmmakers Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer) and Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Jennifer’s Body), academic Alexandra Heller Nicholas, and writer Stephen King.

One might wonder why these five people showed up and not, say, any other group of popular, opinionated film buffs, but at least they have interesting things to say. Each combines their personal experience of the film with more general reflections on cinema, technology, horror, horror, and that annoying conversation at every dinner party: the zeitgeist. We learn, for example, that Takashi first saw a Texas chain saw when he was 15, and only picked it up because he couldn’t see the reissue of Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights.” (He says he hasn’t seen the last one yet.)

Melbourne-born Heller Nicholas links the film’s color palette, particularly the degraded yellow that stood out in the poor video copies she first saw the film on, to the landscape close to where she grew up – as seen in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), a close contemporary of Texas Chain Saw but with a different kind of eerie effect. As you might expect, the interview with King draws on an in-depth filmography of his adaptations; There may be fewer surprises here, though King is always a good interviewer.

Nothing really groundbreaking to say, but the compilation of film clips (thanks to fair use copyright laws) is well edited and deepens one’s understanding of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and horror filmmaking more broadly.