Chain Reactions (2024) Review

If you’ve seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, you’re likely to have plenty to say about it. I certainly do. However, Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary has gathered five more interesting folks than I to reminisce about when they first viewed Tobe Hooper’s landmark movie, to delve into what effect it had on their psyche and to examine its influence on both them and the wider genre.

The fact that this documentary is neither a making of nor a straight up examination of Chain Saw’s artistic and technical merits lends Chain Reactions a different approach which creates an intimate, convivial atmosphere, each interviewee giving their specific, often personal take on a title which clearly has a special place in their heart. The choice of contributors – actor/writer Patton Oswalt, film critic Alexander Heller-Nicholas, author Stephen King and directors Takashi Miike and Karyn Kusama – guarantees varying perspectives and experiences.

There are anecdotes along the way which chime with the unforgettable, unrelenting terror of seeing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the first time in a cinema or grabbing the forbidden fruit from a video rental store shelf and squinting in an attempt to pick the detail from the dreadful transfer on to tape. For Heller-Nicholas, the washed out colours and predominantly yellow hue of the VHS action gave the proceedings an outback feel, whereas theatre goers such as Kusama stumbled out of the screening in a daze, stunned at what they’d just seen.

As always, Stephen King is good value here, not only homing in on the salient points of the subject matter but also linking it to his own writing techniques and, by extension, his filmography, complete with pointed comment on the creative process of many a Hollywood committee. There’s also a lovely clip featuring King and Hooper in a scene from Sleepwalkers, which more or less sticks to Chain Saw Massacre’s ethos of getting in there, scaring your audience and getting out in under ninety minutes (Sleepwalkers runs just one minute over that hour and a half).

Elsewhere, there’s the revelation that Miike, who wasn’t really into horror at the time, only decided to see the movie when he wasn’t able to get into a showing of City Lights and didn’t want to go home. Oswalt taps into nostalgia for top loading VCRs, gets his hands on the Wizard Video release of the flick and drops Belgian spoof serial killer doc Man Bites Dog into your watchlists. Heller-Nicholas matches the Hitch Hiker’s photos to paintings, shouts out the classic Antipodean nightmare fuel that is Wake In Fright and mentions the classification issues the movie caused in Australia (for those of us in the UK in that era, we feel you!). There’s a beguiling mix of facts and feelings across the piece.

It’s Kusama who looks at Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s portrayal of damaged masculinity, showing a group of males in a sad but scary light, chiefly Leatherface with his childlike tantrums and inability to express himself in a way that doesn’t ultimately involve violence. There’s also space given to the story’s undercurrent of certain planetary alignments causing chaos and the use of reliable American motifs to conceal the horrors within.

As the aforementioned subjects advise – more than once – the film is a difficult one to watch but the enthusiasm with which they speak shows that the tension and terror of such an undertaking is all worthwhile. Interspersed with clips from the hallowed item itself, including some of the material which gave the BBFC an attack of the vapours, Chain Reactions wanders close to familiar ground without being lured back on to the obvious path. For anyone wanting more behind the scenes information or academic rigour, those treatments are out there. This has passionate comment in abundance and many insightful glimpses into the myriad reasons that so many of us are fans of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And, yes, Stephen King does mention The Evil Dead.

Movie Rating:

Chain Reactions trailer