If you’re programming your own little horror film festival in the run-up to Halloween, and Tobe Hooper’s stone-cold classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 1974 is part of the lineup, then this would make a handy follow-up for a night’s viewing. It’s not a making-of movie, although there are snippets of insight into the production’s process; nor is it a meta-commentary at the same sprawling level of Room 237, the delirious doc about The Shining. Instead, Chain Reaction is something in between, constructed in five chapters featuring interviews with five very different, almost random-seeming interlocutors who have strong feelings about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. These are: comedian Patton Oswalt, film-makers Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer) and Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Jennifer’s Body), academic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and writer Stephen King.
One may wonder why these five people are featured and not, say, any other bunch of opinionated famous movie buffs, but at least they have pretty interesting things to say. Each quilts together their own personal experience of the film with more general musings on cinema, technique, horror vo terror, and that annoying conversation stopper at every dinner party: the zeitgeist. We learn, for instance, that Takashi first saw Texas Chain Saw when he was 15, and chose it only because he couldn’t get in to see a rereleased print of City Lights by Charlie Chaplin. (He has still not seen the latter, he says.)
Heller-Nicholas, born in Melbourne, links the film’s colour palette, especially the degraded yellows that came to the fore in the crappy video copies she first saw the film on, to the landscape near where she grew up – as seen in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), a near contemporary of Texas Chain Saw but with a different kind of chilling effect. As you might expect, the interview with King draws on the deep filmography of adaptations of his work; there are perhaps fewer surprises here, though King is always a good-value interviewee.
No one says anything truly groundbreaking, but the bricolage of movie clips (thank fair use copyright laws) is well edited and deepens one’s understanding of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and horror film-making more widely.
• Chain Reactions is on digital platforms from 27 October.
