A camera flashes to illuminate a skull dripping with putrid flesh. A young woman walks tentatively toward an unassuming but strangely malevolent house beneath a bright blue sky. A red wall adorned in animal skulls stands menacingly through a threshold beside a staircase leading to God-knows where. A hulking brute in a mask made of human skin whacks a young man on the head with a hammer, who drops to the ground, flailing in his death throes. A young woman sits screaming in the stinking, fly blown heat of a meat-strewn dining room surrounded by a family of cannibals, who bend her head over a tub in preparation for a killing blow…
These are just a few of the unsettling and indelible images burned into the mind of anyone who has seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Images that jostle for prominence as you struggle to process what the film presents to you. When you first watch it (probably when you’re too young to be doing so) the film is an unrelenting nightmare; scene after scene of intense terror that is almost unbearable. But these images don’t just sit within the unconscious, simmering beneath your surface memory like some repressed trauma.
Instead, they reverberate and re-focus, re-shape and re-mix, they latch on to formative recollections from other films until, as you age and gain further knowledge, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre achieves new relevance beyond its origins as just a horror movie. It begins to present something deeper and more resonate. It becomes a cornerstone of the collective unconscious, a talisman of socio-cultural relevance in the shape of a chainsaw that reaches across time from 1974, to carve away any naïve belief that the nightmare was over. No, the nightmare never ended.
These impressions permeate throughout Alexandre O. Phillippe’s latest semiotic cinematic sojourn Chain Reactions, which finds five artists, filmmakers and thinkers reflecting on Tobe Hooper’s horror classic, giving a state of the union on its legacy 50 years since its release. To present the case for the defence, is a murders’ row of influential artists that they really need no introduction. Comedian and infamous cinephile Patton Oswalt, J-horror enfant terrible Takashi Miike, film scholar and historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, horror author and legend Stephen King and cult genre filmmaker Karyn Kusama all weigh in on the lasting impact of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre since its release. But the documentary goes beyond the superficial plaudits usually espoused by the celebrity talking head nostalgia trips clogging up our screens, instead relishing a deeper dive into what the film means to them personally, and how its prescient commentary on the direction of American culture is a harrowing yet inevitable necessity in navigating the current climate.
Like it’s subject matter, Chain Reactions leaves a strong impression. Moments from each section circle around the mind after viewing, some moments confirming your own thoughts about the film while other bringing some new analysis to mind which re-frames the film in a whole new light. Oswalt opining how the title The Texas Chainsaw Massacre sounds, when said aloud, like someone chewing through flesh. Miike remembering how he stumbled into a showing of the film when Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (the film he journeyed all the way into town to see at fifteen years old) was sold out, and how he would never be the same again. Heller-Nicholas recollecting her first viewing of the film on a scuzzy VHS and how connected she felt to the sun-bleached wasteland of Texas during her youth in Australia. Or King, relating his own creative process to Hooper and finding a kindred spirit, that moment when you hit upon an irresistible idea that you know is going to hit hard and relishing the knowledge the audience will not be ready for it.
But it is in Kusama’s section (the final one) which really brings director Phillippe’s thesis into focus. While having the most personal connection to the film, she also has the most universal. She posits that Hooper’s underlying theme of the film is one of class warfare. The unwitting victims of the film are a bunch of youngsters who come from privilege, having the time and the means to go on a road trip and the luck to already own property left to them by a family member. Whilst Leatherface and his family are the struggling underclass, a generation of people (in)bred to essentially be indentured servants within an industry that is maligned but which props up civilisation; the cattle industry. They exist to provide grist for the mill of society where nobody wants to know how the sausage is made. So, when the poor hapless teens become the cattle, you are appalled, disgusted and affronted by the slaughter before your eyes, but to them, it is but a means to an end for pure survival. They are only doing what comes naturally.
Kusama’s ultimate point, and one Phillppe clearly agrees with, is that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre appears in retrospect, to have prophesied, Cassandra-like, the growing divide in America that has bubbled away since its release. This divide has now most recently exploded above ground like a tectonic fault of intolerance and antagonism brought about by a generation of people who feel stepped on and passed over. When a film is called “ahead of its time” that is always good news for the film but bad news for the rest of us, because that always means that nothing has changed. In the 50 years since Leatherface first swung his chainsaw, it really is hard to present a case for change. Sure, there have been losses and gains, but it really feels like the former far outweighs the latter these days. If The Texas Chainsaw Massacre shows that there is a whole section of society who have realised it is better to be the eater than the eaten, then you better pray you don’t end up on the menu.
Director: Alexandre O. Philippe
Featuring: Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, Karyn Kusama
Writer: Alexandre O. Philippe
Producer: Kerry Deignan Roy
Music: Jon Hegel
Cinematography: Robert Muratore
Editor: David Lawrence