Sawed Together

“Everyone watches a movie differently.” When Patton Oswalt says this early in Chain Reactions, he pretty much lays out the entirety of director Alexandre O. Philippe’s thesis. It’s the latest of the documentarian’s video essays on film history, building on the structure he established with 2023’s Lynch/Oz. That film was basically an anthology of six essays by filmmakers, each looking at a different aspect of The Wizard of Oz’s influence on the works of David Lynch. Here, that structure of five stand-alone essays is applied to arguably the greatest horror film ever made: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Lynch/Oz’s problem was that it relied on people who didn’t know the Wild at Heart director being pushed into a kind of psychoanalysis. When critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas says she finds it hard to be objectively critical of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, she puts her finger on the problem with Chain Reactions: All we’re really learning about is the relationship of these five random voices to this one film. That’s if we’re lucky: Stephen King barely talks about Chain Saw at all, instead discussing censorship and self-censorship in relation to Death Wish and his own “lost” novel, Rage. These digressions aren’t enough to build anything like a real conversation about the Austin-made classic. There needs to be something more.

Opinions are one thing: When an interviewee just gets a fact objectively wrong, it’s infuriating, just as it is when there’s a blindingly obvious point made, or when there’s a clear thread left hanging. King, for example, notes that Sam Raimi just screwed his camera to a board for the faux-Steadicam shots in Evil Dead without noting that that’s exactly how Daniel Pearl carried off the famous under-the-hanging-bench shot from Chain Saw a decade earlier. Moments like these aren’t the fault of the interviewee, but of Philippe for deciding to leave them in.

That’s not to say that there aren’t interesting observations. Heller-Nicholas takes on sexism in fandom, as well as raises the questions of image quality (there are a couple of generations of Chain Saw watchers who will always have a visceral response to 4K restorations). King similarly sings the praises of shitty, battered prints, rose-hued and reeking of piss, while noting how successful Hooper was in implying rather than showing violence. Out of all five interviewees, it’s the two invited filmmakers who are most coherent and on point. Karyn Kusama (whose segment should probably have been the opener) balances both cool analysis and personal relationship. Japanese horror auteur Takashi Miike manages something similar when he explains the impact of the film, and most especially the meat hook scene, on his own filmmaking career.

That just writing “the meat hook scene” without any further explanation is sufficient just shows why Philippe was right to pick The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for a subject. What maybe most frustrating is that he could have done something more meaningful with a more straightforward documentary about Hooper’s masterpiece, something closer to Memory: The Origins of Alien or his Psycho-centric 78/52 (sadly, it’s too late to go deep with the now-deceased Hooper as he did with Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist). This still leaves the rough-hewn 2020 video extra Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth as the most exhaustive documentary to date, and it deserves more. Honestly, Kusama’s discussion of Chain Saw in relation to Hooper’s first film, Eggshells, and her engagement with the technicalities of, yes, the meat hook scene, hints she may be the filmmaker to give this soul-shattering masterpiece a more definitive analysis. To quote Oswalt again, there’s poetry in not blinking. Maybe Philippe should have stared a little closer at his subject.

This article appears in October 3 • 2025.