While my first experience seeing Leatherface wasn't in Fangoria, it was in a film magazine. My older cousin had brought it up with him to one of our regular trips to the family cabin. Flicking the through the pages, his was the first face (or faces?) that caught my eye. His skin sallowed from the glossy paper of the film mag appeared alongside other horror icons like Jason, Freddy and Billy the Puppet, but where the others had this goofy and cartoonish charm in my child mind, Leatherface truly disturbed me. Wearing the skin of your victim was such a ghoulish thing to my nine year old mind that I felt like his low placement on "The 100 Most Evil Villains" listicle must have been a mistake.
Gaffney's Creek, as it turned out, became the regular spot for friends and family to chat about our horrorful fancies. With a population total of five, no reception and a single phone booth several kilometres away, our shack was (and still is) the ideal slasher location. Once, when my friend came up with my brother and I, we joked that Jason would take the woodcutter’s axe in the corner of our room and hack us to bits in our sleep. Ah the innocent daydreams of ten year olds!
We all have stories like this. Whether its Patton Oswalt being sent to a 19th century nightmare world through Nosferatu (1922) on his family's beat-up projector, or famed author Stephen King, high on painkillers, begging his son to turn off The Blair Witch (1999) on his hospital TV: horror has made a deep impression on us all. And no film has come close to sawing its way through our collective brainstem than Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). A now fifty year old urban legend that only strengthens with the degradation of its many film prints.
Director Alexandre O. Philippe uses Chain Reactions as a springboard to not only gush about Hooper's magnum opus, but to interview five of his fellow afflicted. Part of the fun of these five distinct interviews is being surprised by his choices. Enlightened by their by their takes and experiences with the film (or its contemporaries), it’s nerve wracking to find out which celebrity might be lurking around the corner to give their two cents. You've got your obvious picks like King or horror scholar and Melbourne critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, to wildcards like Oswalt, who at first seems to be an excuse to use his stand-up on movie titles as a cold open, but whose knowledge of the film and obsessive analysis of it's every frame is well documented.
The standout for me though was Takashi Miike, whose torturously grotesque films like Audition (2000) and Ichi the Killer (2001) would probably be screwball comedies if the then thirteen year old director hadn't been turned out of a Chaplin screening and decided to see what else was on instead. What surprised me, as I imagine it will surprise most, is that Miike's sadistic fancies are far from apathetic. He finds violence that's solely used as a "tool for filmmaking" sickening.
It seems to be a common sentiment among the other guests, as well as Philippe himself. There are multiple mentions of the Death Wish series of films throughout the documentary, as many consider the films to be the purest form of violence being 'glorified’. As Charles Bronson guns down disenfranchised drug dealers and loiterers, his life as an enforcer is given a puritanical sheen by Death Wish’s filmmakers. This is in stark contrast to Miike and Hooper, who intentionally create moments of dementedness that make you squirm, writhe and want to turn away from the disgusting hyper-violence exposed to your eyeballs.
If pain and fear are two of the strongest feelings we have as humans, it makes no sense for Hooper to be senseless. After all, Hooper wouldn’t have been able to scare others so effectively if he wasn’t frightened by his own ideas in the first place. To paraphrase Karyn Kusama and Oswalt’s observations, Hooper was scared shitless by the U.S' oncoming insanity, the rise of the serial killer, gun culture and the distorted lie that was to become the American family. A madness that would rise over the land like a boiling red sun, subsuming the land in a confused and apathetic sadism. Leatherface and his ecletic family's cannibalism were just an extension of our collective disconnection from reality, from others and from ourselves. Texas Chain Saw Massacre is Hooper's American nightmare made manifest.
And Phillipe does an excellent job dragging us and his guests into that nightmare, with never before seen on set footage that rises from the ashes with a jaw dropping 4K scan. Cameras walk through the empty hallways and float up creaky wooden steps without a soul in sight. Spliced in with footage from the film, these out of time shots haunt the every frame, even more than Texas Chain Saw itself. They become spectral afterimages of a filmmaker long gone from this mortal coil. These images complement the meaty interviews, and strangely, provide quite a few sight gags. When a gleeful, shirtless and diapered toddler waddles through skulls and chicken bones, kicking up feathers in his wake, it's a surreal look into the onset fun that was had while filming one of the scariest movies of all time.
It's fun sharing a nightmare with others, because it means we're unlikely to go mad if we know things can still scare us and others. But while it is interesting to see your horror favs were once scared little children as well, I wouldn't mind seeing who that kid ended up being.
Is he still playing in viscera with same tenacity as someone fooling around in autumn leaves or is just working some random desk job?
What sort of nightmares did he end up crafting?
Thanks for Reading
Decided this would be the perfect film to help revive the blog. They’ll be more MIFF stuff on the way so stay tuned!
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