“Every frame has something unnerving in it,” Patton Oswalt says in the trailer for Chain Reactions—a new documentary about the enduring influence and impact of 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Tobe Hooper’s grisly classic has often been imitated and has spawned some regrettable sequels and remakes, but the original remains a uniquely terrifying product of a very specific time and place, not just in pop culture, but also in the realms of independent cinema.
A new trailer for Chain Reactions is here, and it gives you a good idea of how it’s structured, focusing on five Texas Chain Saw fans in particular. Along with Oswalt, there’s Stephen King, Takashi Miike (director of Audition and Ichi the Killer), horror scholar Alexandra Heller-Nichols, and Karyn Kusama (director of Jennifer’s Body). As Texas Chain Saw‘s creepy hitchhiker might say, “A whole family of Draculas!”
It’s helmed by Alexandre O. Philippe, whose other films-on-film include Doc of the Dead, Psycho study 78:52, Memory: The Origins of Alien, and Lynch/Oz.
“I think of it as a role model,” Miike muses, noting he first watched Texas Chain Saw at 15 and realized what he wanted his future career path to be. With the IP’s rights holders making headlines recently—teasing all the big names in the running to make another version of Hooper’s tale—it seems we may see yet another version on screens eventually.
Still, as Chain Reactions will no doubt make crystal clear, there’s no duplicating the eerie, gritty quality that makes the original such a standout. Anyone can make a movie about a cannibal family running a roadside barbecue joint; anyone can don a human-skin mask, grab a chainsaw, and call themselves Leatherface. But it takes a rare film to infuse a story like that with such a documentary feel; it makes the audience think they’re peeping in on a nightmare that’s both awful and totally plausible. It’s also visceral as hell: you can practically smell the rotting interior of that iconic farmhouse and feel the drop of Grandpa’s shaky hammer come down on your own skull.
In other words, we’re more than excited to see this documentary—and then rewatch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre again. And again.
Chain Reactions opens in New York and Los Angeles September 19; according to Deadline, it will expand to more cities September 26.
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