Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alexandre O. Philippe
Featuring: Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, Karyn Kusama
Having previously made documentaries on Psycho (78/52), Alien (Memory: The Origins of Alien) and The Wizard of Oz (Lynch/Oz), director Alexandre O. Philippe now turns his attention to Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
On its release in 1974, Hooper's film made an immediate impact. Like Hitchcock's Psycho, it was inspired by the infamous Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, who was known for making furniture and fittings out of his victims' body parts. As shocking as Psycho had been in 1960, Hooper took things to a whole new level, largely through the remarkable work of production designer Bob Burns, who turned an unremarkable rural home into a house of horrors, filled with the repurposed remains of humans and animals. Prior to that point American horror had largely been set in the past, often in Europe, and even Psycho felt distant thanks to its American Gothic mansion setting. But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre brought American horror kicking and screaming into the late twentieth century, its nightmare narrative mostly playing out in daylight under a baking Texas sun. Where cinemagoers could usually leave their movie theatres safe in the knowledge that they're not going to run into a werewolf or a mummy in the middle of America, the very human killers of Hooper's film provided no reassurances.
Philippe hands his doc over to five distinct voices: two filmmakers, a horror novelist, a comedian and a film critic. Three are men, while two are women. Three are American, while the others are Australian and Japanese. They each have their own relationship with Hooper's film, and though there is much commonality, they all bring a unique perspective in their discussion of the movie.
First up is comedian and horror fanboy Patton Oswalt. In archive footage of an old stand-up routine we see Oswalt declare The Texas Chain Saw Massacre the greatest movie title ever. The line gets a laugh from the audience, but Oswalt is only half-joking. The comic speaks passionately about being introduced to horror as a six-year-old when some very 1970s adults decided it would be a good idea to screen the original Nosferatu at a child's birthday party. He speaks of how images from that movies stuck with him, and how when he later saw Hooper's film he noted visual and thematic similarities between the two movies. Oswalt proposes an interesting theory that the recurring motif of the sun in Hooper's film suggests that it's that very celestial body that causes the ensuing horror, and that perhaps similarly depraved acts are being carried out across the world at the same time. Kicking off with Oswalt is a wise choice, as his easy-going manner eases the viewer into the doc before we get to more academic discussions.
The prolific genre filmmaker Takashi Miike provides a Japanese perspective on the film, which was released under the title "The Devil's Sacrifice" in that territory. Miike was introduced to the film when he arrived in town too late to catch a screening of Chaplin's City Lights and decided to check out Hooper's film instead. He recalls how Japanese audiences were shocked most of all by the lack of a rationale behind the killers' actions. In Japanese horror at that point there had always been a reason behind evil, usually of a supernatural nature that allowed humans off the hook, but to see people behave in such a savage manner of their own free will was a shock to Japanese culture. It's no surprise that Miike was influenced by Hooper's film, though unlike Hooper he's never been one to leave things to the imagination.
Next up is Australian film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who provides a female perspective, recalling how the film was originally banned in her country and how she was told it wasn't for "little girls" when it was eventually released on VHS in the '80s. Heller-Nicholas draws similarities between The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Australian genre cinema, both sharing a similarly sun-baked setting. As someone who grew up in a country where Hooper's film was banned for a long time, I identified with Heller-Nicholas's experience of first seeing the movie on a yellowed, multi-generation VHS transfer, and how its degraded state only served to add to the feeling that you were watching something forbidden.
The biggest name involved is Stephen King, and while he's always interesting to listen to I'm not sure he was the wisest choice for this doc. Rather than focus on the subject at hand, King rambles off into a more general discussion of the horror genre. His segment is a little too self-promoting, and if you're familiar with the writer you'll have heard his anecdotes multiple times before.
Wrapping things up is The Invitation director Karyn Kusama. She's in the unfortunate position of coming last, so some of her segment rehashes themes already brought up by the previous contributors. But Kusama does focus more on the class politics of Hooper's film than the others, even admitting to feeling a tinge of empathy for the villains who, like so many in rural working class America, have been left behind by progress.
There's an argument to be made that the five segments here might function better as individual extras on a bluray release rather than consumed all at once as a feature documentary. By the fifth and final segment there's little left to say, and more casual viewers might run out of patience before that point. But for most of its runtime this doc will prove riveting to Chain Saw fans, who might even be exposed to new thoughts and ideas about one of their favourite movies.
Chain Reactions plays in New York and Los Angeles from September 19th and across the US from September 26th. A UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
