Chain Reactions is a discussion and homage to one of the most influential and ground-breaking movies in cinema history, the Texas Chain Saw Massacre of 1974.
Chain Reactions
Director: Alexandre O. Phillipe
New Zealand International Film Festival 2025
You must make a friend of horror. For if horror is not your friend, then it is your enemy (Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now).
The original in remastered form screened at the NZIFF on two consecutive Friday evenings. You can read the review here.
There are undeniable artistic merits to the movie, and horror writer Stephen King, film maker Karyn Kusama and movie critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas positively revel when they dissect down with a surgical assault on the bones and viscera of the movie.
Actor Patton Oswalt gives the movie fan’s perspective, whilst Japanese film maker Takashi Miike indicates how other cultures perceived America as inbred psychotic killers. Paradoxically the great humour in this, as well as determining Miike’s career path.
He is probably the most extreme in taking influence from the most disturbing aspects of Chain Saw.
His Auditions and Ichi the Killer are legendary for their extreme, stylised violence and torture sequences. Splatter is emphasised.
In 2005, Miike was invited to direct an episode of the Masters of Horror anthology series. The series, featuring episodes by a range of established horror directors such as John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper (the writer and director of Chain Saw) and Dario Argento. It was supposed to provide directors with relative creative freedom and relaxed restrictions on violent and sexual content.
However, when the Showtime cable network acquired the rights to the series, Miike’s episode, Imprint, was deemed too disturbing for the network. Showtime cancelled it. Mick Garris, creator and producer of the series, described the episode as amazing, but hard even for me to watch… definitely the most disturbing film I’ve ever seen.
Patton Oswalt is a stand-up comedian as much as he is a television actor. He is a huge fan of comic books, especially DC, and this would explain some of the appeal of the original Chain Saw.
His first sighting was as a grainy, marked, fourth generation VHS (maybe a bootleg), which he watched at a mate’s house on a small screen built into the player.
Washed out colour, the print quality makes us appreciate the remarkable quality of the restoration.
Willard Tobe Hooper was born in Austin Texas in 1943 and died in Los Angeles in 2017.
His debut movie, Eggshells (1969) is now regarded as a first run for Chain Saw, as commented on by Kusama.
Made with $US40,000, the following one was $US140,000 and recouped $30 million. He then went on to make Poltergeist (produced by Spielberg), and the four-part adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.
King has great admiration for Hooper the director in his artistic approach to filmmaking, especially on a limited budget. They have both worked together on movie features as actors, King looking like a big bumbling oaf and Hooper resembling a cool assassin- type Harvey Keitel.
King has an interesting take on morality. That is up to the critics and the review writers. The movie makers job is to make the best product that he can and bring all the art and inventiveness to the project he can muster.
Karen Kusama, as a moviemaker, gets quite lyrical in comparing the art of Chain Saw to the art of Dutch 16th century Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel.
Strong feminist elements in her movies. She made the cult horror-comedy classic Jennifer’s Body (2009), starring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried.
Chain Saw is a difficult watch, but I’m glad it exists. Every time I do, I get more little details out of it.
Australian film critic Alexander Heller-Nicholas gives us the essential detail so elusive to confirm, that the movie was banned in Australia until 1980.
New Zealand tagged along with this like sheep, but it was not formally banned here. And it did make the television news in 1974. The late show.
She makes the connection to Aussie movie Wolf Creek, loosely based on serial outback killer Ivan Milat.
One of the best recent suspense-horror movies was the Blair Witch Project (1999). Looks deliberately low budget with hand-held minicams, and creepy bone and feather talismans hung on trees as the teens realise, they are going around in circles. Cribbed from the macabre artefacts which feature heavily in Chain Saw horror house.
There is a shout-out to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead (1981). This one riffs on the grotesque decaying corpses which feature as inserts in the original Chain Saw, stunningly effective in this current remaster.
A huge influence on getting Peter Jackson started, I remember attending this as a late-night feature at the Civic Theatre, off Film Festival 1981.
A bunch of us were somewhat inebriated, and in a rowdy mood. Truth be told, so were many others. As the film progressed, it got more extreme to a point of genuine beauty. Horror beauty. Everyone shut up and then came huge applause at the finish.
Far more disturbing are the allusions to American Psycho, the original novel by Bret Easton Ellis.
A scene in the documentary of monster Patrick Bateman (played by Christian Bale in the movie adaptation) doing sit-ups whilst Chain Saw is playing on a TV screen.
The book is the equivalent of the movie in that it is genuinely disturbing in its graphic violence. Many writers, like Norman Mailer, praised it as a classic American novel. A deliberate riff and re-write of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Finally, the commentators make the connection to America of the new millennium.
The inbred cannibal family are linked to Rust-Belt Middle America. They were a family of abattoir workers who lost their livelihood through globalisation.
Kusama makes the connection. She feels genuine sympathy for them in the famous dinner scene. Where the only female left, Sally Hardesty, is tried to a skeleton chair whilst the four males, Leatherface included, display their psychosis in full.
For Kusama, the movie was prophetic of Present time, and there can be no greater artistic achievement than that.
The final iconic scenes are present, cut with a few outtakes included. Leatherface swinging the chain saw. Now I appreciate the dancing.
Rev. Orange Peel
