Chain Reactions

When the film in question is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that’s an especially tall order. Tobe Hooper’s endlessly influential proto-slasher has been written about, analyzed, and dissected to death in the half-century since it was loosed onto the world, and yet it’s a testament to the house that Leatherface built that there’s still more to be said about it. It’s also a testament to documentarian/essayist Alexandre O. Philippe, whose engaging Chain Reactions succeeds in offering new perspectives on an old saw.

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The setup couldn’t be more straightforward: five interviewees offer their thoughts on the film, with one chapter devoted to each and no cross-cutting between their segments. The subjects are actor Patton Oswalt, Japanese horror luminary Takashi Miike, Australian film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, author Stephen King, and filmmaker Karyn Kusama, whose own resume includes the excellent (and underseen) psychological thriller The Invitation. Miike and Heller-Nicholas’ insights prove to be the most compelling, largely because of their international frames of reference on a uniquely American work of art.

Though it will be news to fans of Audition and Ichi the Killer that Miike “originally didn’t enjoy horror movies,” the story of his serendipitous first viewing of Chain Saw is truly a butterfly-effect moment. How many subsequent classics wouldn't exist if Hooper’s shoestring all-timer had never been made?

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“Up until that point, movies had been something safe,” Miike adds of his experience seeing the film at 15. “For the first time, I felt that movies could be something dangerous.” (Anyone who’s seen his own work would agree, just as it’s difficult to take issue with Oswalt’s claim that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the “great movie title ever” — simply saying it aloud, he adds, feels like chewing on flesh.) That’s partly because Japanese horror is largely rooted in folklore, which has an established internal logic, whereas Leatherface’s exploits have none. There’s something desolate, even nihilistic, about Chain Saw that makes emerging from your first viewing of it especially fraught.

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Most of Philippe’s prior work has likewise been about movies. 78/52 examines Psycho’s infamous shower scene, Lynch/Oz explores The Wizard of Oz’s influence on David Lynch, and the title of Kim Novak’s Vertigo, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, tells you everything you need to know about it. He doesn’t interject via voiceover or title cards, instead letting his subjects speak for themselves, but you get the sense that he’s also speaking through them.

Chain Reactions succeeds in offering new perspectives on an old saw.

There’s a kind of hangout quality to Chain Reactions, which has the easy feeling of a group of cinephiles gushing over a film that deserves nothing less, but there’s no shortage of insight. Take Heller-Nicholas’ observation that, growing up in Australia, the movie was the province of “friends’ older brothers” insofar as it was “very gendered and very forbidden for little girls.” But because she first saw it on a worn-out VHS tape that made the Texas landscape appear like that of Australia, she connected to it on a deeper level than she might have if she’d seen it on a pristine 16mm print.

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Unspoken in this celebration is a sense of loss, however, as the often happenstance manner in which so many first discovered The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is increasingly rare. When nearly everything is instantly available to stream, there’s less opportunity for hard-to-find movies’ reputations to precede them while you wait for one of those scratchy VHS tapes to come back in stock at your local video store. Heller-Nicholas remembers hearing about the film long before she had a chance to watch it, giving it the feel of “something that you weren’t meant to see.” As great as recent classics like The Witch and Talk to Me might be, none of them evoke that same sense of danger.

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Upon first seeing the abattoir of a house where most of the film takes place, one of the soon-to-be victims says it “looks like something out of a dream.” Fifty years later, that dream has been shared by countless viewers — only some of whom consider it a nightmare.