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Chain Reactions: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Updated: 6 days ago

Documentary retrospective review filmed at the BFI Film Festival 2024

| by Ria Woodburn


Film crew captures a scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a bloody actor leaning on a blue Chevrolet truck on a rural road. Trees line the road under a blue sky.


“The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths”

When did you first set eyes on Tobe Hooper’s 1976 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or

should I rephrase - what was your instinctive primal reaction? Is the film a blur, with flashbacks of dread burnt into your nervous system or is it an intoxicating triumph of madness? Either way here we are, as we unravel Alexandre O. Philippe's retrospective documentary with a twist - Chain Reactions (2024). The viewer is in for a treat, with testimonies from Patton Oswalt,Alexandra Heller-Nicolas, Takeshi Miike, Stephen King and Karyn Kusama. These industry heavy weights probe into how Texas Chainsaw left an eerie imprint on society, and how it shaped not only their subconscious but their individual creativity. Few films have the power like Texas Chainsaw to get right under your skin and crawl up your skeletal system, clinging on to it for dear life. A creeper of a film, that exists to plunge us into the deepest depths of an untamed humanity, where survival only equals pain. And guess what? We are about to do it all over again on 18th August, with the release of the film’s 4K cinema restoration worldwide, 49 years after the alleged events. Texas Chainsaw Massacre day is upon us, and I will be

returning to London to watch it, in the manner it deserves at The Prince Charles Cinema.


Now if you're reading this, let's assume that you have watched Texas Chainsaw at least once but allow me to start from the very beginning. Cue the infamous opening credits, a brief written account of the dire upcoming events, settling you right in, and giving the film the permission to be notorious. Then for the clunky visual prologue, grotesque but brilliantly crafted and saturated with clips of the sun’s raging hot surface, a star with power to sustain life and destroy it. However, concealed within these solar storm footage and grimy Polaroids, lies a far more unsettling fact. Despite the opening credits being compiled long after the film was made, Hooper in true maverick director style didn’t skip on their authenticity. To create the macabre soundtrack, he locked himself away in a room of meat carcasses, cutting tools and powered up machinery (Texas Cinema 2022). His heavy breaths and butchery, confirming that destruction was fated to be imprinted onto the film from kick off. Layered over this carnaged backdrop, is the voiceover of John Larroquette as he stoically reads the day’s news, a morning of grave robbing, oil explosions, cholera epidemics and suicide. Here we are starting to see flickers of how Texas Chainsaw will play with perception. The disastrous nationwide events are as traumatic as what is about to transpire in the film, but in this format they have been reduced to a tick list. Lost in a void of information, tragedy is reduced to daily news, and without the visual sensation for our eyes to feast on, our compassion is sparse.


Group in van, woman talking, man filming with camera, another seated. Casual setting, earthy tones, focused ambiance. Behind the scenes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The rush of adrenalin doesn’t start until 40 minutes in, that’s when the palpitations start. Before then it’s a wonder through the remote Texas country landscape, by five teenagers fueled by youth’s curiosity. Scorched by the oppressive summer heat, the siblings of the group Sally and Franklin have the only agenda of revisiting their ancestral home. After a few brief encounters with the locals of the unsettling kind, they are finally left with the dilemma of no gasoline. Now from the title we have a pretty strong idea that it isn’t going to end well, and as the two lovers Kirk and Pam stumble through the sunflower field and onto the property, the final scene is set. The characters up until this point have been unintentionally submerging into another world, where the rules of mainstream society don’t reach. The Chainsaw house is waiting, with its white chipped timber paint and harsh front triangular gables - devoid of its former Edwardian grandeur. The first of half of our couple Kirk slyly enters, then thump, an immediate strike of violence, a rush of convulsions, a dragging, then a slam of a door. Leatherface our villain has been teased out, and with it an eruption of terror that will last all night.


“Travel in the country, long-range plans, and upsetting persons around you, could make this a disturbing and unpredictable day.”

Back to the documentary in hand, Chain Reactions, where American director Karyn Kusama (The Invitation 2015, Destroyer 2018) makes one of the most significant observations of all of the contributions. Rather than a senseless horror, Texas Chainsaw is actually a home invasion movie. The rage of Leatherface and his trope of mangled brothers, is not one that is lurking in the shadows ready to pounce, it is a consequence of the teens trespassing into their home. Their violence is reactive not predatory. Remember our Texas Chainsaw family isn’t functioning in society at all, they are not even on the fringes of it, so when the teens wander into their environment like stray animals, extermination is the only option. Leatherface’s first scenes are an emotional downward spiral, distressed and chaotic. Could we even go as far as saying……he is terrified? Not to say the violence can be justified, however it is simply how this family operates. Along with their in-built cruelty is also a strangeness, a resistance to act in societies projected norm, and it is this mix that reinforces the disturbance. From the brothers warped humour, the skull and bone decor, family corpses and a cancer ridden father still barely functioning at the head of the family - who knew that laughter in the wrong context is truly terrifying. Whilst filming, the teenage cast had very little interaction with the Texas Chainsaw family, with Gunnar Hansen who acted as Leatherface choosing not to mingle with them at all (Texas Cinema 2022). This separation naturally intensifies the victims scenes, embroiling them in a satire of horror that is playing out almost in real time.


“I told you to stay away from that graveyard”

For Stephen King’s contribution he applauds Texas Chainsaw with the same nerve wracking respect, and signals The Blair Witch Project (Sanchez and Myrick 1999) as its natural successor. Heralded as the origins of the ‘found footage genre’, Blair Witch would go on to make almost £250 million world wide, from a 60K budget (Box Office Mojo 2025). Reviving the conceptual lore of Texas Chainsaw into a new internet and reality TV era, as well as also surpassing the standardised Hollywood whitewash. But as King demonstrates it’s the use of terror over horror that firmly weaves them together. In Texas Chainsaw the infamous meat scene only tickles with the sensation of violence, and at no point do you see any graphic mutilation. But what a scene! In The Blair Witch, there is an absence of a witch. Even in the last tentative panic fuelled minutes, she makes no appearance but by then it is irrelevant, as an overwhelming wave of fear has taken hold. Done correctly terror is deeply uncomfortable, tormenting your senses at the deepest cerebral level, defying all reason and logic. A doorway to all that frightens us and once open anything can come seeping out. When the horror of the violence ends, terror is left lingering. After its first year run in London Theatres, Texas Chainsaw, was banned by the British Board of Film Censors on the grounds it exhibited “the pornography of terror”. However this was later retracted in 1999, with the board noting that “there is no explicit sexual element in the film, and relatively little visible violence” (Brooke 2003 - 2014). Indeed, Hooper’s greatest achievement is to have created an insidious atmosphere of extreme dread, chiefly through insinuation.


“there is no explicit sexual element in the film, and relatively little visible violence”

Mention the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, to most and watch their faces squirm in repulsion. As a writer, horror is my genre of choice, an obsession that has been with me since a child. A truth when disclosed shocks people, as apparently I don’t look like the type. But what is it about the horror genre, and films that leave you feeling like you have been stunned like an animal in an abattoir? Horror is deadly right in front of your face, and even if the perpetrator is initially concealed (it’s usually not for long), the torment is not. Horror isn’t hidden under platitudes, miscommunication or iniquitous intentions - and that in itself is comforting. There isn’t much to figure out other than to stay alive. The mysterious boogie man or woman, waiting to fight you for your existence does not exist. Well not in our daily life anyway, like we would be led to believe. What does exist however are statistics.


Between 2009/10 and 2023/24 in the UK 1,972 women were killed by either a partner, an ex partner, family member or friend/acquaintance - compared to 273 by a stranger (Statistica Research Department 2025). Turns out we don’t need horror films to insight violence. There are plenty of people around us who are more than willing to inflict it, those that have shared our bed, our lives, they may have even birthed us. The screenwriter Kim Henkel was working as an illustrator when he wrote the film alongside Hooper, his driving force was the real life killer Elmore Wayne Henry (Oldfears 2025). What stuck him about Henry, that despite how mindless his killings were, Henry still had a sense of morality that justified the murders. That even in the midst of evil, a sense of order out of chaos can still arise - and this is the heartbeat of Texas Chainsaw. So if there is a next time and I hope that there is - take time to appreciate more than the movie, the writing, the production design, the cast, even the camera angles. Texas Chainsaw is a master class in creativity left unrestrained, and one that may never be repeated. But look what happens when true artistic freedom takes place, a story that morally reverberates for generations to come. In Texas Chainsaw what you are watching is a director and film crew set loose in a sweet shop. No parents and no cashier - the doors are locked and you can gorge on as much as you want.


Three people in a dusty outdoor setting. One uses a chainsaw near a film camera, with trees and a truck in the background. Casual attire.

Ria completed her MA Writing for Script & Screen at Falmouth University, and is a gothic horror and cinematography enthusiast." Follow Ria @rewrite.write


Sources:


IMAGES COPYRIGHT:

  • 1974 Vortex Productions,

  • MAB Productions

  • Janus Films


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