“Chain Reactions” skillfully contextualize a Macabre American classic

While Hollywood rushes on who will be the next one to take a bite The Texas chain saw the massacreA new documentary is there to remind us of how the original Tobe Hooper of Tobe Hooper in 1974 is alone. Chain reactions Follows the elegant and thoughtful style of the previous previous documents of the director Alexandre O. Philippe, whose 78/52 (About the shower scene in Psycho),, Memory: the origins of abroad,, Saute de Faith: William Friedkin on the exorcistAnd Lynch / Oz. Five speaking heads and carefully chosen images and clips are woven, exploring SAW at the Texas chainImpact on cultural, artistic and personal levels.

The interviewees are also carefully chosen: the actor Patton Oswalt, the filmmakers Takashi Miike (Hearing, Ichi the killer) and Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s body, invitation)film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and author Stephen King. They all have in common a deep love of SAW at the Texas chainBut they come to this appreciation from different angles and contexts.

Oswalt talks about his first film memory – a terrifying meeting with the silencer Handicap During a childhood Halloween party, probably at the time SAW at the Texas chain was released in 1975. Fan of budding horror, he became fascinated by what looked like a prohibited text, an impression that resisted once he was able to look SAW at the Texas chain As so many children of the X generation have done: on the magnetoscope of a friend, a band that had known better days.

“He has the impression that the film killers have stolen a camera and film all of this,” he thinks, and also points out that “each frame has something troubled.” You can say that Ooswalt looked at SAW at the Texas chain Several times since this first visualization and has thought about it a lot, in particular its representation of Leatherface and themes of the survival of the blue passes. His apocalyptic reading of what the sun represents in the film is something that I have never considered but that I can no longer get out of my head.

Miike’s first SAW at the Texas chain The experience, he explains in his segment, only came by chance, after Charlie Chaplin’s film he had wanted to see was exhausted. “For the first time, I felt that the films could be something dangerous,” he recalls, and admits that the purchase of this second choice ticket ended up changing his life. If her 15 year old self had not dodged SAW at the Texas chainHe said, “life would have been different. I would probably not be a director now.” He also talks about the film compared to the Japanese horror, both traditional and the most recent of J -Horror outings – and gives a fascinating preview of the use of violence in cinema, including his own titles, notably Squisy.

Heller-Nicholas is perhaps the least recognizable among the speaking heads, but his point of view is no less interesting, especially since she talks about growing in Australia and how SAW at the Texas chain was perceived there. Like Oswalt, she was able to see it first thanks to a “version of shit VHS” and remembers that the yellow and low quality presentation has actually improved the “feeling that you are looking at something really secret that you were not to see”. The film is based on this meaning, whatever the version you are watching – but the memories of Heller -Nicholas are something that people who have only seen SAW at the Texas chainVirgin 4K restoration will never understand fully, for better and for worse.

Successful author King, who tells by looking SAW at the Texas chain For the first time in the early 1980s in an almost empty theater, appreciates the way Hooper – with whom he worked on 1992 Sleepwalker; Hooper also directed the 1979 Lot of Salem Mini -series – supplied its story with “no barrier that makes you think that it is only a film”, compare it Night of the Living Dead That way.

King also hollows out in the difference between “horror” and “terror”, something on which he is particularly qualified to speak, while praising SAW at the Texas chain For its “outlaw” aspects. “The artist’s work is to make you uncomfortable,” he said, although anyone looks at Chain reactions Certainly gladly endured this scary dinner scene – including grandfather’s weak attempts to kill himself with his hammer – more than once.

Kusama also saw SAW at the Texas chain For the first time on the big screen, in an art theater. His discussion explores the confusing role of Leathface in the cannibal family and the way in which the film can be read as “a vision of the failure of America” ​​as well as “a representation of primary desires and disappointments”. She is the only interviewed to point out the claims of the Crawl of opening of the film based on a true story, a warning which barely prepares the spectator of the upcoming nightmare.

After looking Chain reactionsYou will immediately want to review The Texas chain saw the massacre To seek new meanings, the documentary may have helped you discover, as well as to appreciate the singular mixture of the movie and macabre anxiety. As Kusama notes, there is “always more subtlety and meaning to glean to see him again”. Even more poignant, as Miike says: “We must hold SAW at the Texas chain Dear and continue to feed it.

Chain reactions Open September 19 in New York and Los Angeles; It developed nationally on September 26.

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