The Saw is Family. But the Saw is also America. It saws in half the old reality and stitches together the new one into something darker and much more frightening. That was the what late, great Tobe Hooper’s all-time 1974 masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre did and still continues to do so powerfully.
Buy The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Steelbook Blu-rayFilmmaker/essayist Alexandre O. Phillippe (78/52, Lynch/Oz, Memory: The Origins of Alien) once again shows why he is one of the new masters of film education with Chain Reactions, which depicts the legacy and relevance of Hooper’s disturbing, primal classic from the viewpoint of five artists in entertainment: Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicolas, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama. It also depicts how the film remains etched in memories, from youth to now.
In just 1 hour 43 minutes, the doc adds a fresh twist to the ongoing fascination with Texas Chain Saw and why it continues to be a maddeningly sensory and visceral experience, where you feel the film more than just seeing it.
Each of the five participants have amazing things to say about level of craft, technique, grittiness, and nightmarish beauty that the film still possesses. Oswalt compares it to Nosferatu and Silence of the Lambs, and talks about seeing and being unsettled by its imagery before seeing the film; Miike talks about its expression of pain when discussing his own films, including Audition and Ichi the Killer and their depictions of it; Nicolas discusses the point where Australians (being one herself) believed and thought that Texas (or America itself) is not a place for an outsider to be (which isn’t fictional now); King talks about the film’s ferocious realism and his personal relationship with Hooper; and Kusama explains how the villains (especially Leatherface) are not as outright villainous as they seem to be. She suggests that they are victims of society, laid-off blue-collar workers that have to survive the only way they know how.
They don’t just wax poetically about the film itself; they express how the horror genre is always the most misunderstood one. The genre dares to show how messed up society really is and how the people who hate it the most tend to deny what really goes on behind humanity.
To deep dive into Chain Reactions is to go even further into the film and Hooper’s madness, but it’s the type of madness that feels genuine, and the type of madness that is obviously America itself. Thank you, Chain Saw and Hooper for getting under our skin and staying there.
Chain Reactions opens in NY (Regal Union Square) and LA (Laemmle NoHo) on September 19 and expands nationwide on September 26.
