A diverse ensemble of creatives including Stephen King, Takashi Miike and Karyn Kusama illuminate the enduring cultural legacy of Tobe Hooper’s low-budget 1974 slasher The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
A love letter to horror, art, influence, and how Tobe Hooper and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre changed cinema forever, whether you can stomach it or not.
Chain Reactions 2024
Banned from these shores for many years, yet hailed as the greatest horror film ever made, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre allows few to walk away from it unscathed. Alexandre O. Philippe, who has previously explored subjects such as David Lynch, The Exorcist and The Shining, gathers five iconic artists to discuss their interpretations of Tobe Hooper’s masterwork. Among the admirers are legendary horror writer Stephen King, filmmakers Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer) and Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body, Destroyer), actor and comedian Patton Oswalt and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
What emerges is a portrait of Chain Saw that emphasises, like all great art, the flexibility and fluidity of interpretation. As the creatives narrate, scenes from the film are played and replayed, sometimes intercut with deleted or behind-the-scenes footage, sometimes textured differently according to the print they were copied from – a nod to the many bootleg formats that extensive censorship ensured were circulating for decades. All interpretations are welcome in Chain Reactions, because no single one is definitive. — Tom Augustine