by Damien Spiccia
Worth: $14.00
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Cast:
Patton Oswalt, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Takashi Miike, Karyn Kusama, Stephen King
Intro:
… ultimately made by and for Texas Chainsaw devotees, offering little to those without a preexisting connection to the source.
After more than 50 years of probing critical dissection, what more can be said about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, arguably the most influential American horror film ever made? Quite a bit, according to Alexandre O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions, which posits that, half a century later, Texas Chainsaw’s Vietnam-era madness is as shocking and urgent as ever.
In the vein of Room 237 or Phillippe’s own Lynch/Oz, Chain Reactions substitutes behind-the-scenes trivia for five distinct meditations on Texas Chainsaw’s impact and legacy, separated by eerie location footage and archival offcuts from Tobe Hooper’s vault.
Patton Oswalt sets the stage by drawing parallels to Nosferatu, Stan Brakhage’s autopsy short The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, and Man Bites Dog – but as he notes, where the latter film’s faux- documentary crew become increasingly repulsed by the atrocities they capture, Texas Chainsaw offers no such moral judgement, only chaos.
Takashi Miike fondly remembers being turned away from a screening of City Lights at age 15 and wandering instead into Chainsaw’s open hellmouth. Reflecting on the meaningless of the film’s brutality, he credits Texas Chainsaw for laying the foundations of his own unflinching explorations into screen violence. Stephen King, treading familiar ground from Danse Macabre, highlights horror cinema’s role as a dark moral mirror that is at its most terrifying when it blurs the boundaries between the real and imagined, while Karyn Kusama regards Texas Chainsaw as Hooper’s sinister prophecy of today’s “world on fire.”
For Australian audiences, perhaps the most resonant perspective comes from critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, for whom Texas Chainsaw is braided into memories of growing up near Hanging Rock, the site of Peter Weir’s metaphysical mystery that was later consumed by the 1983 Ash
Wednesday bushfires. When Texas Chainsaw finally surfaced on home video in Australia after being refused classification twice, it was a degraded transfer drawn from a degenerative print. In
that washed-out Texas seared with yellow, Heller-Nicholas recognised the same sunburnt, desolate Outback hellscapes from Wake in Fright, Razorback and the scorched Hanging Rock of her childhood. After all, as she reminds us, “art isn’t created in a vacuum.”
At Revelation Perth International Film Festival, Chain Reactions screened directly before a newly restored 4K 50th anniversary print of Texas Chainsaw, but its impact might have landed more forcefully as a postscript rather than a prelude. As a standalone documentary, Philippe gives each participant a wide berth to passionately excavate even the most tangential of personal observations. Yet despite this depth, Chain Reactions is ultimately made by and for Texas Chainsaw devotees, offering little to those without a preexisting connection to the source. Still, for those forever haunted by Hooper’s American nightmare, Chain Reactions affirms Patton Oswalt’s assertion that “Texas Chainsaw feels eternal.”
