Chain Reactions 2024

From documentaries on Star Wars fandom and zombie films, the Alien franchise and the works of auteurs like David Lynch, William Friedkin and Stanley Kubrick, Alexandre O. Philippe has emerged as a major disseminator of cultural cinematic understanding. Following a similar format to Philippe’s Lynch/Oz documentary, Chain Reactions gathers five iconic artists – writers, filmmakers, critics – to discuss their interpretations of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Reviled by polite society, banned around the world, including from these shores for many years, yet hailed as the greatest horror film ever made by those in the know, few walk away from Chain Saw unscathed.  

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.  

For Oswalt, the film was a gateway to horror-centric nerddom; for Miike, a chance viewing led to a lifelong conversation with the slippery interplay of love and sadism; for Australian Heller-Nicholas, a beaten up VHS viewing at a young age inextricably tied the film to the yellowing landscape of Outback cinema. For King, who briefly knew Hooper, it’s the only ‘film about psychopaths made by a psychopath’. Most rewarding is Kusama, who links Chain Saw to the warped ideals of masculinity, patriarchy and ‘traditional families’ that still hold sway in America. All interpretations are welcome in Chain Reactions, because no single one is definitive. — Tom Augustine