Chain Reactions (documentary) ★★★

Just stopping short before falling into homage, Alexandre O. Philippe‘s essayistic documentary delivers a forensic examination of one of the most influential horror films of all time. Tobe Hooper‘s 1974 classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre rose from banned b-roll shocker to esteemed cinematic masterpiece. It has been screened at the MoMA, and in 2024 the US National Film Registry included it for preservation. However, such dry data has nearly no place in Philippe’s individual examination of the mythologies and memories grown around this pivotal piece of cinema. Rather than contextualize TCSM within genre history or Hooper’s career, Philippe focuses on the experiential sediment it leaves behind. 

A deceptively simple structure and concept get rid of production trivia ballast and tear down the historic scaffolding, making room for five personal observations. The quintet of monologues opens up a prism of personal perspectives that reveals the film’s complex legacy and diverse facets. Actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, film critic and author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, as well as Takashi Miike, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama recount their first encounter with Hooper’s film, its perception in their social surroundings, and what the film meant and means to them today. This array of viewpoints creates a multi-dimensional image of the film’s impact: a cultural rupture point that always resonates differently.

Analysis and associations intertwine, forming an equally engrossing and entertaining record of social-psychological reverberation. Each interview in the series works as a self-contained essay, yet the talking-heads never veer into academism or the anecdotal. A careful modulation of visual textures and use of archival formats like VHS, 16mm, and videotape suggests a more complex thematic architecture. Comparisons between faded VHS versions of TCSM and fresh theatrical versions not only reflect the erosion of memory. They illustrate the influence of format and time on perception, the way films are experienced through layers of technological decay. The camera often lingers, underlining its premise that influence is not always immediate.

Chain Reactions is less about horror as a genre than about horror as a mechanism: a way of seeing, of remembering, and feeling. There is a palpable intent to inspect this impact from diverse cultural contexts, social settings, and timelines, different genders, and from both a queer and straight perspective. Nevertheless, the representation remains somewhat limited. Miike is the sole non-White person. Everyone is able-bodied, despite the remarkable fact that Hooper included with the character of Franklin a person in a wheelchair at a time when people with handicaps appeared only in films where their handicap was essential to the plot. This would have made an authentic perspective even more relevant. 

The most glaring exclusion, however, is that of working- and underclass individuals. Markedly, Leatherface and his killer clan are lower working class on the verge of sinking to underclass. How it feels to be seen like that should matter. Especially, since TCSM is a story about lower working class people being overlooked and discarded. Ironically, this narrative aspect of the film is even mentioned, but even the most thorough analysis of a text does not mean its lesson was fully understood.