Chain Reactions (2024) Movie Script

1
Is that all I get?
-No.
-Jeez.
Gee, look at that old place.
Looks like something
out of a dream.
Please.
I'm so sick
of these romantic comedies
with these non-committal
titles, you know?
Like, "Feeling sorta,
kinda, whoo!"
Something's gotta give!
It's like, that's like
the movie's way of going,
"Don't blame me,
I got nothing to do with this!"
Give a movie a title!
Give it... And get
ready to bleep me.
...a motherfucking title!
- Yeah!
-You know what the greatest movie title ever is?
A movie title should
let you see
a free movie in your head
when you hear the title.
'Cause you go, "Oh, my God,
we gotta go see that!"
Greatest movie title ever?
Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
My first movie memory
is a memory of terror,
because I was at a Halloween
activity day for kids.
I was 5, down in Tustin Meadows,
and it's the early '70s,
and the adults, they meant well,
but they were thinking,
"Oh, let's make pumpkin cookies,
and let's do cut-out black cats,
and we'll show the kids
an old silent movie,
Nosferatu, that'll be
safe for the kids.
It's an old, silent, G-rated."
And they projected
a little eight-millimeter
thing on a wall,
and it was... It was...
It's still one of the scariest
things I've ever experienced.
It's just this square
of light on a wall
in a library activity room,
and we were just pulled out
of early '70s Tustin Meadows,
and into this nightmare-logic
German vampire world.
Really disturbing imagery
that has its own creepy sense
of time and gravity and logic,
and it really, really
messes you up.
Nothing in Nosferatu
moves very quickly.
The vampire rarely moves.
So, it's like a series
of photographs
that are very, very disturbing.
My first "encounters"
with Texas Chain Saw Massacre
were images. I wasn't able to--
I didn't have access
to the movie...
This was now the early '80s.
...but you had access
to Fangoria magazine.
I was used to pictures of films
being very well-lit,
very well-composed.
And these looked like
crime scene photographs
that had been stolen,
and then Xeroxed,
and it was second
and third generation.
And there was something
so primitive
and forbidden and creepy about--
Just the photos of the film
were very, very disturbing.
The title sounds like
you're chewing on flesh.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
It sounds like a guy
just ripping into meat.
And now...
let's watch.
Hello?
My first viewing
of Texas Chain Saw Massacre
happened on my friend's
small, color TV
in his living room,
with his ancient early '80s VCR,
top-loading, no rewind,
no pause.
You put it in, you hit play,
boom, there you go.
- Hello!
- I bet his family
spent eight grand on that VCR.
I remember my friend had this.
We watched it at his house.
This is...
I love how they compiled
a bunch of different images.
This is Leatherface running away
from the house at the very end.
That's Pam being hung earlier.
I always loved the detail
of the chainsaw
hitting the "T" and the "H."
It's like he's killing
his own movie.
That's how evil this guy is.
It has the feel that
the killers in the movie
have stolen a camera,
and are filming all of this.
The visuals
and the film itself
are ferocious and primitive,
and not quite human.
And the stupidity
of the point of view,
of just the animal
stupidity of it.
There's no clever dialogue.
You can make them stop.
No, he can't.
Shut your mouth.
Can't be helped, young lady.
- Oh, please.
- Shut up.
-You can't let them kill me.
-Don't pay him no mind.
There's no negotiating
with this family.
They're not doing it out of
hatred. It's what they are.
You like this face?
Much like in Jaws,
they're like,
"Why are you swimming
in the ocean?
That's where sharks live.
It's kind of your fault."
Man Bites Dog is this
amazing Belgian film
about a film crew,
a young film crew
that are besotted with cinema,
who are following around
a psychopath
while he goes about his day,
and philosophizes
on what life and death are,
and it takes you a while to
realize he's a moron, basically.
But he happens to kill people.
Man Bites Dog
shares a lot of DNA
with The Texas Chain
Saw Massacre,
but there are moments
in Man Bites Dog
when you see how it's affecting
the film crew,
all the killing
that they're doing,
and eventually,
that there is some kind of
moral judgment going on.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
is so much more brutal
because the camera is
simply observing.
It has no opinion.
It's not being affected
by what it's seeing,
so you get the full brunt
of what is happening.
And weirdly enough,
the camera,
it's almost mocking us
in the weird moments of beauty
that it finds.
Almost like, "I'm gonna show you
this moment of beauty,
because you know something
horrible's coming up."
Kirk.
When Pam gets up
off the swinging chair,
and there's that beautiful shot
of her walking against
the blue sky.
The camera's almost going, "Oh,
you want a nice Hollywood movie?
Well, here's your nice
glamor shot,"
as she's literally
walking into a slaughterhouse.
She doesn't know that,
but we do.
So, the beauty of the shot
itself is mocking us,
and it's amazing.
It just really jangles
your emotions.
He likes what is lurking
beneath what looks like
a picture postcard.
The beautiful Days of Heaven
type shots of the landscape.
Or, you know,
"Oh, this is nice!"
And then it just goes
horribly wrong.
There's one shot in Nosferatu
that totally mirrors
the shot in Texas,
where she gets up off the swing
and walks into the house.
It's a very calm, peaceful,
idyllic shot
of a ship coming into a harbor,
but we know that ship
is crawling with death,
and is bringing the plague
to this city.
He's using it in service
of telling you
that death and destruction
is coming.
And I love it. It's amazing.
I've never forgotten that shot.
This is my theory
about Texas Chain Saw,
because, again,
I've seen the movie 30 times.
The opening credits
have close-up shots
of storms on the surface
of the sun.
Red storms, just blazing
on the surface of the sun,
and then, in the rest
of the movie,
people are always looking
up at the sun.
It's like the sun itself
has become diseased,
and is bathing the world
in this madness,
and it's starting to take hold,
and we're just following
a small group of people.
I think the madness
in that movie
is spreading all
over the planet.
We are just watching
one tiny incident of it.
Leatherface seems terrified
and horrified
by the fact the people
are in the house,
and doesn't quite
know what to do.
In a weird way,
up until this point,
I feel like Leatherface
was just digging up bones,
but maybe he wasn't really
killing anybody.
He was just digging stuff up,
and making arts and crafts
out of it, and furniture.
But now, people are being
fed into the slaughterhouse.
And, you know, first he clobbers
the guy with a hammer,
the way you would
just stun a cow,
then he grabs the other woman,
and with no diabolism
or passion,
just hangs her on a hook,
turns, goes back to his work,
'cause that's what you do.
And then, after he's killed
the third guy,
he goes into the front room,
and he's looking out the window,
like, "What is happening?
What is happening?
Why are people
coming to this house?"
Like, he's not prepared
for this.
Then, later on,
when his family comes home,
they're yelling at him
and bullying him.
It's like the world
is starting to go crazy.
Are you sure--
You...
You damn fool!
You ruined the door!
That last shot of Leatherface
waving his chainsaw at the sky,
it's this bright red ugly sun
like we saw in that first image,
the sun storms,
the madness is fully
taking hold of the earth,
and Leatherface is trying to
kill the sun with his chainsaw.
She's in the back of the truck
laughing, she's gone insane,
like the world is now
going insane.
It's an apocalyptic event.
That's what I think
is going on in that movie.
And that's another link
to Nosferatu,
which is, it is an apocalypse
coming to this city.
Whereas in Nosferatu, the sun,
the rising sun saves the city
from the plague
and from the madness,
but in Texas Chain Saw,
there's no escaping it.
The whole world is bathed
in this evil radiation.
Oh, honey, you're gonna
ruin your eyes.
This is not good for you.
Everyone watches
a movie differently.
Here's an example
of how everyone
watches a movie differently.
When I was in college,
I went with my then girlfriend
and her mom--
I don't know why
her mom was with us.
But we went to see
Silence of the Lambs.
And we left the movie,
and I was like,
"Man, that was intense,
like, that was amazing."
And then, her mom said,
"I know. That man
had a ring in his nipple."
And that was the thing
that she took from that.
And I was like, "I think he was
making clothes out of people?"
But, like, that's what
she landed on.
So, with Texas Chain Saw,
you can look at it
for what it is.
It's a horror movie,
a group of people come
and they encounter monsters,
and who's gonna get away?
But you can also look at it as
the most fucked up
Western ever made,
where this is the long, long,
long hangover
of Western expansion,
of going out,
subduing the Native Americans,
killing off all the buffalo.
We've done all that,
there's nothing left.
Hey, man, did you go
in that slaughter room,
or whatever they call it?
The place where they
shoot cattle in the head
with that big air gun?
Oh, that-- That gun's no good.
I was in there once,
with my uncle.
The old way. With a sledge.
See, that was better,
they died better that way.
How come?
I thought the gun was better.
Oh, no, no.
With the new way,
people were put out of jobs.
You do that?
Look!
So, the people that
did all the gross,
dirty work
that we don't like to look at...
Although we do enjoy our steaks.
But I don't wanna think about
a guy with a hammer,
you know, killing a cow.
But now they're,
"Well, we're gonna just
start eating you.
We still gotta feed ourselves,
so you're the cattle now."
And now, here's a van
full of hippies,
like, literally
a Scooby-Doo group,
and they're being slaughtered
by these displaced
blue-collar workers.
The family in Texas
Chain Saw Massacre
are doing the most extreme,
disturbing version
of how life operates.
It's not you dying
and feeding trees.
It's somebody hanging you
on a meat hook
so they can cut steaks
off of you,
and serve you to their family
so the family can survive.
'Cause, "I wanna take care
of my dad, and my brother,
and my grandpa.
And, if they need it,
I'll go make myself look like
their mom. I'll be the mom."
Like, there is this absolutely
serving the function of family
in the most damaged
way possible.
Doesn't matter how many flowers
you garland over your backyard,
no matter how many
beautiful books
you decorate your shelves with,
you will eventually die.
Your body--
And death is a horror show.
There's no way to get around it.
There's a Stan Brakhage film
called The Act of Seeing
with One's Own Eyes,
where it's a footage
of an autopsy.
And you watch it--
I remember Alan Moore
described it, where,
at first, you're horrified,
"Oh, my God, this is--"
You know, they're cutting
a body open.
But then, as it goes on,
there is a kind of beauty
in like, this is a really
complex machine,
and it works.
And that's me, I work.
That there is beauty
in all this gore.
So, if you can face the horror
of it dead on, without blinking,
then there's poetry
in you not blinking at it.
The camera in Texas Chain Saw,
by not blinking, by not judging,
is being a very demented,
poisonous sort of poet.
Every frame has something
unnerving in it.
Like, even a long shot
of the highway,
then there's a dead armadillo.
This weird swoop
of the chainsaw at the end
when Leatherface is coming
after their pickup truck,
or that pause that Sally does
after she closes the van door,
-and then she sees that symbol.
-Let's go.
Or, when they go
visit the graveyard,
there's the people that are
kind of laughing and crazy,
and the one drunk
sitting in the tire,
I've always wondered, is he
an accomplice of the hitchhiker?
Is he quietly also helping him
at night dig stuff up,
and he's finally going nuts
thinking about the morality
of what he's doing,
and that's why he's out there
drunk, like, "I've seen things!"
Things happen here about,
they don't tell about.
I see things.
Is the guy who goes and
comes and washes their window,
is he another, like, cousin, or
weird, distant, inbred version,
member of the family that they
don't know what to do with,
and they're like,
"Go wash windows."
There's a whole infrastructure
going on
that they don't talk about,
but it's there.
And, also, just when they go
and find the old house,
there's all those clocks
and watches with nails
through them,
hanging in the tree...
Much like Castle Dracula.
You're now in a zone
where time doesn't matter,
gravity doesn't matter.
We rule things here.
Texas Chain Saw
feels eternal.
The experience itself
will always be disturbing
and frightening,
outside of any context
that you're watching it in.
The moment
of Texas Chain Saw Massacre
is the moment when Pam
almost escapes the house.
I feel like that moment
separated a specific generation
of horror movie fans:
the ones who stayed became
the people that read Fangoria
and got into
all the John Carpenter stuff,
and the ones who were out
were just like,
"Yeah, this isn't my...
It's just not my thing."
And I know people my age now
who have never gotten
beyond that point.
Once the porch scene happens,
they're like, "Yep, I'm out."
It's also
a very, very twisted version
of the scene
in Gone with the Wind,
where Rhett Butler,
who basically rapes her,
he just-- "You're not
turning me out tonight,"
and he picks her up,
and takes her up the stairs
while she's pounding on him.
It's just a mutant version
of what people thought
romance was in movies.
There'll be no locks or bolts
between us, Mary-Kate,
except those in your own
mercenary little heart.
You watch it now, you're like,
"Ooh, yikes."
So, at least
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
was like, "Well, this is
what it actually is," you know?
She is literally
a piece of meat, ka-chunk.
I see Tobe Hooper as the best
kind of film stylist,
in that he was an opportunist.
You can plan and storyboard
all you want.
It's when you get
to the location, and realize,
"Oh, that shot I want
I can't get,
but I could get this."
They had no money.
And it has that adrenaline,
desperate quality to it,
of, "We're grabbing shots
wherever we can."
I watched it again,
on my big-screen TV,
and I just now realized,
the lamp over the dinner table,
that's a human face.
And the "armchair." Get it?
So, there's all these
little details.
Bob Burns, the art director,
was frigging amazing.
I mean, look, Tobe Hooper
did kind of a scary thing
for an artist,
which is he really
didn't blink from his dark side.
Sometimes the zeitgeist
picks a messenger,
and that messenger doesn't
realize that they're the one
that's being picked, and they're
the one that's channeling
and delivering
what the zeitgeist
wants people to look at.
And I think the zeitgeist,
clearly, is prankish
and playful,
and it's like, "Oh, I'm gonna
show people what they are
through the grossest
drive-in movie possible,
but that will actually
stand the test of time."
Hello?
Is anybody home?
Excuse me, I'm looking
for some friends.
Hello?
I thought I heard something.
There's a light.
- Yeah?
- Yeah.
Oh, looks like a house.
What are you doing?
No, no!
According to Sheriff Maldonado,
there were instances
in which only the head
and extremities were removed.
Do you believe in Jesus?
Yes, I do.
Well, you're gonna meet him.
Where is my ring?
Did you ever go back to the
theater to watch City Lights?
I was born in the same year
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
was born.
I grew up on the border
of the outer suburbs
of Melbourne in Australia,
and the bush, effectively,
and we were about 40 minutes
from Hanging Rock.
So, growing up, that film was
hugely, hugely important to me.
Because it really tied film
and the magic of film
to a place
that I knew really well.
What we see...
and what we seem...
are but a dream.
A dream within a dream.
And for my eighth birthday,
my parents took me--
They brought me
a brand new little lace dress.
And for some deranged reason,
they thought it would
be funny to hide.
When I went to the bathroom,
I came back, they were gone.
And that has stayed with me.
Miranda,
don't go up there! Come back!
That feeling has stayed with me.
Partially resentment
to my parents,
but mostly just that fear
and that connection of fear
to the cinematic.
For a lot of Australians
of my generation,
Texas was like Road
Runner cartoons.
You know, it was this sort of
imaginary, faraway place.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
was denied classification
in 1975 twice,
and then again in 1981.
It wasn't until 1984
that the film was cleared
for release.
Give me that flashlight!
My memory
of Texas Chain Saw Massacre
in those very early days
when it was finally released
was it was something
that was the terrain
of friends' older brothers.
Very gendered and very forbidden
for little girls.
And so there was a sense
of danger and excitement
to Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
this film that's been banned
for ten years,
finally released in Australia.
I was far too young
to see the film,
but I have a kind
of ambient memory
of it being in the atmosphere.
And I don't know
where I first saw the trailer.
K-Tel Video.
Your home of entertainment
presents more great titles
from Filmways VTC.
This is the
horror movie to end them all.
It feels like
Leatherface cut the trailer
to the Australian
Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Like, it's off its head,
it is mental.
It has this incredible
kinetic energy.
It doesn't make
a lick of sense at all.
It's like an art film.
It's like this avant-garde,
experimental frenzy.
And, you know,
you have sort of flashes
of generic horror content,
but, you know, kind of blurred,
this sort of Stan
Brakhage-esque,
experimental blur.
It's like Mothlight
with serial killers.
It kind of has no relation
to the film,
in that sort of images
from one moment
are sort of placed
next to images
from a completely separate
part of the film.
And so the sensory
really takes dominance.
Help!
And that does come through
in the film itself.
Get back and push down.
This is impossible.
I knew something was there.
The first time I saw the film
was when I was a bit older,
so it would have been
the early '90s.
And it was always presented
to me as a kind of test.
Are you hardcore enough?
Got something for you.
Ugh!
I first saw Texas Chain Saw
alongside things like
I Spit on Your Grave,
Faces of Death, Executions.
And because these films
were really gatekept
by the young men
that I knew at the time,
there was a real clash there.
And I remember
watching these things
and thinking,
"These are for me."
Like, "These really speak to me.
These don't belong to you."
So, the Australian VHS release
of Texas Chain Saw Massacre
really right through
until the late '90s
was copied from, like,
a really beat-up film.
So, you have the wear and tear
of normal VHS usage
combined with the fact
that it was a pretty, pretty
shitty print to start with.
So, the version that I saw
and that most people
of my generation saw on video
doesn't look like the version
that we see today.
It's visually
completely different.
I don't remember that film
having any blue or green in it.
I remember it being
yellow and scratchy
and faded and beat up
and that that was part
of the danger.
The feeling that you were
watching something really covert
that you weren't meant to see.
Because the version
that I first saw was so yellow,
I tethered it
much more closely, I think,
to a lot of Australian film
that I'd seen.
What we see...
and what we seem...
are but a dream.
A dream within a dream.
Because yellow is really
very, very at the forefront
of the aesthetics
of the outback
and of the desert.
So, yellow is how I see heat.
And I knew that Texas was hot,
and it's like, okay,
so it looks like this,
it looks yellow.
It's this very
Australian aesthetic of heat.
You know, it looks like things
like The Proposition.
Australia.
What fresh hell is this?
And it looks like things
like Wolf Creek.
It looks like the start
of Wake in Fright.
I first saw Wake in Fright
on a VHS tape
that was taped off
this one famous
TV broadcast in 1989.
And, of course, it's this
washed-out print
that was shown on TV,
on a tape that had been played
a hundred times before.
And I saw it at school,
and it was, you know,
hot Australian summer
with no air conditioning
in my classroom,
which fits in, of course,
beautifully to the film.
It's like this sort of
post-apocalyptic Kansas
in like a really fucked
up Wizard of Oz.
And it's, like,
this is the outback.
Welcome to Australia.
My memory
of it, seeing it on video,
looks exactly like
my memory of seeing
Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
and it's tethered so tightly
to the things
that were going on in my world,
and in my life, in my country,
at the time.
In 1983, we had,
uh, dust storms,
these enormous dust storms,
terrifying dust storms.
We had horrific bushfires,
the Ash Wednesday bushfires,
which were
absolutely catastrophic.
It's the most scary thing
that's ever happened to me.
It's the most frightened
I've ever been.
I have this very, very strong,
vivid memory
of these sort of yellow,
very heavily yellowed images
of houses that have
been burnt down
and all that remains
are the chimney stacks.
And every time, even now,
no matter how many times
I see Texas Chain Saw Massacre
and I see that tombstone,
I always think
it's a chimney stack
every single time.
There she is, ladies.
Hanging Rock.
Hanging Rock
was so physically close
to where those fires were.
The bush that you see
in Hanging Rock
is the bush that was destroyed
in those fires.
It's the same place.
And there's a beautiful little
montage sequence in Hanging Rock
where the girls are sort of
swaying and spinning
and they take off their shoes
and it's hot.
And I feel that heat.
My body remembers that heat,
and that panic,
and that fear,
and that disorientation.
So, when I think of
the dust storms
and I think of the fires,
over time,
they've sort of blurred
with images from films.
And the heat that I associate
with Texas Chain Saw Massacre
has sort of bled into
my memories
of the Ash Wednesday fires.
And the fact that one was real
and one was a film,
you know, memory doesn't care,
it doesn't care.
It's like this weird,
porous thing.
I find it hard to be
objectively critical
about Texas Chain Saw Massacre
because it's a film
that you feel
before you think about.
It's a very smart film.
The depth
of the cultural knowledge
is extraordinary to me.
And I don't even know
if it's conscious.
It probably isn't even
a conscious thing.
I think of that moment
in the van
where the hitchhiker shows them
the photographs of the meat.
And the first photograph
looks exactly like
a Rembrandt painting.
And the second photograph,
very heavily reminiscent,
I think, of a Francis Bacon.
And it's-- There's Leatherface
vibes there for me.
There's no way
that the Black Maria truck
at the end is an accident.
Black Maria was the name
of Thomas Edison's film company.
It was the very first
film company.
I feel like the hitchhiker
when he takes his Polaroid photo
and he's like...
You know, it's, " Look."
The magic of photography,
the magic of cinema.
You took my picture.
And that feeds back
into this early film tradition
where it's like, "
I can't believe
cinema's a thing."
You know, I can't believe
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
is a thing.
I can't believe it works.
I can't believe this film
pulls off what it does.
Magic.
Everything means something,
I guess.
That's
my motto as a film critic.
You know, film critics
are often accused
of reading too much into things.
No art is ever created
in a vacuum.
Whether it's conscious or not,
film soaks up the zeitgeist.
It has to. It has to.
It's extraordinary to me
the parallels
between Texas Chain Saw Massacre
and a lot of Australian cinema
in the 1970s.
It's eerie because these are...
These are places
that are literally worlds apart.
It's an odd thing to say,
but I think
we almost don't pay
enough attention to Leatherface,
which I know sounds strange
because he's one
of the great monsters of horror.
Where are the kids?
Where are they? Show me!
It's a home invasion film
from Leatherface's
point of view.
He's... He's really stressed out
that these young people
just turn up in his house.
If you watch him as he moves
from the kitchen to the window,
he's fussing,
like, he's flapping.
He's like, "I don't know
what to do with myself."
It's such a, like, it's such
an Italian, like, "Mamma mia,"
like, it's so gestured.
It's gorgeous.
It's very Buster Keaton,
the way that he moves.
It's silent cinema, you know?
It's the legacy
of the Black Maria.
As much as my memories
of the film
are tethered to yellow,
so much of the film's energy
completely changes
with the color red.
When I think
of Hieronymus Bosch,
I think of the Hellmouth,
you know, these big, sort of
gaping red, terrifying voids
that I think Texas Chain Saw
makes quite literal.
This idea of the Hellmouth,
you know,
taken from the Medieval art
that was presented in paintings
and in manuscripts
as a literal mouth,
like a big red mouth
with, you know, people inside
or devils with big red mouths.
Those strange
little art objects,
the feathers and the bones,
these weird little things,
they're like they're straight
from a Hieronymus Bosch
painting.
And it almost feels to me
like Texas Chain Saw
is riffing on that.
The scene
with Sally and the Cook,
I think, is, um,
is really pivotal.
Sally's literally sandwiched
between the cannibalistic grill
and the saucers
on the other side.
I think that's really great.
And Cook pushes her
against a chopping block,
you know, in case
the cannibalism motif
isn't kind of
coming through already.
And we have this
incredible moment
where he leaves to get the car.
She thinks he's going to help.
And the sound
of the sizzling escalates
and the sound
of the radio escalates.
Barometer is 29.9 and rising.
Acting on a tip...
You see the horror in her face
when she puts it all together
and realizes
that what she's hearing
and what she's seeing
are connected.
The way that that grill
is presented
is this terrifying
red, gaping void.
It is the entry to hell.
...there were
instances in which only
the heads and extremities
were removed.
And others in which only
a hand or foot is removed.
The remainder of the cadaver
left intact.
Somebody! Help me!
Help me!
Please! Please help me!
Please!
My first movie experience
was a horror movie.
It was called Bambi.
I was probably 3 years old,
and I remember
Bambi's mother saying,
"Man has been in the forest,"
and I just went,
"Oh, my goodness."
What happened, Mother?
Why did we all run?
Man...
was in the forest.
I've been a movie fan
since forever.
My first editor,
Bill Thompson, said, uh,
"Steve King has got a projector
in his head."
And there's some truth to that
because I grew up on the films.
I gravitated toward
monster movies.
My brother didn't care for them,
and so I would usually
find myself sitting by myself.
I love the black-and-white
movies.
The idea that reality
and the outrageously crazy
could merge together in a film
and it would be realistic.
What I'm thinking about
in particular
was Ray Harryhausen's work
in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,
where you see a flying saucer
crashed into the reflecting pool
in Washington D.C.
And you see another one
that wobbles
and then takes off
the Washington Monument.
And I thought,
"I wanna do that."
I wanna bring the reality
and the make-believe together
in the same place
so that you can't even
tell the difference.
Stay away!
There are a lot of movies
that are like that,
that, uh,
I just absolutely love.
One of them is The Haunting
of Hill House.
That movie scared
the living shit right out of me.
It wasn't anything that you saw.
It was what you thought you saw.
You could see a door
bellowing in and out
like a lung.
You could see a shape
in the plaster
that began to look like a face,
that sort of thing.
I... I just loved that.
It's all suggested.
It's all shadows.
And there's a scene early on
in The Exorcist
where a clock just stops
for no reason.
It just tick, tick, tick,
and then it just stops.
That's a very unsettling moment.
You have to be a real artist
like Robert Wise
in The Haunting of Hill House
to do the thing
where it's just
almost suggested.
There isn't really
a lot of blood
in Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
I should say that I never saw
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
when it came out.
I saw it in 1982 in Colorado.
I was a young father,
and I was writing to stay ahead
of the bill collectors.
I was in the theater
almost by myself.
And that's when a movie
really has a tendency
to work on you, you know,
to get its cold little fingers
under your skin.
It had that kind of
washed-out '70s look
for want of a better term.
You could tell that this print
had been around for a while,
and it's better for it
because it just looks...
It looks fucking real,
and it works because
there's no artifice about it.
There's no, you know,
kind of buildup.
There's no character nuance.
I mean, there are scenes
in the graveyard.
They're not extras.
They're not
Hollywood people at all.
They look like they came
from the nearest
little Texas town.
My granddaddy's buried here.
Can we find out
if anything happened to him?
What's your granddaddy's name?
Honey, that big heavy fella
with that flashlight
in his hand,
that's the sheriff.
You go tell him your
granddaddy's buried in there.
-He'll let you in.
-Thank you.
Say, fella, I'm gonna
run off with your girl.
You don't mind, do you?
It's fantastic.
And that adds to the horror,
because you never feel
that kind of barrier,
that see-through
barrier between,
"Oh, well,
this is just a movie."
You wanna get about four
or five men and a couple dogs?
There's a house over here
behind those trees.
We wanna go check it out.
Night of the Living Dead
is the same way.
You know, you don't know
any of those people.
They look like real people.
The zombies
look like real people.
It just feels
like you can't tell
where fact ends
and fiction begins.
The thing that sticks
in my mind, of course,
was they're trying
to kill the girl
and they want to use
a sledgehammer on her,
and they keep trying
to give the old man
who's just green, uh,
to give him the hammer.
And that's... That's a very
Cormac McCarthy scene.
In fact, in some ways, I see
a book like Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
and Texas Chain Saw Massacre
as almost like fraternal twins.
The slaughterhouse,
the idea about the bolt gun,
it's a real Cormac McCarthy
touch.
- What is that for?
- Would you...
- Would you hold still, please?
- The air gun.
It shoots a bolt into their
skull and then retracts it.
It's just, "Boom."
Goes, "Boom."
Franklin, I like meat.
Please change the subject.
-Boom.
-That's terrible.
It's still going on.
Josh!
Josh, where are you?
Tell me where you are!
Texas Chain Saw
has a lot in common
with The Blair Witch Project.
My memory is...
I'd gotten hit by a van,
and I was in the hospital,
and I was in early recovery,
and I was in a lot of pain,
and I was taking a lot of dope
for the pain,
and my son came in,
and my memory is
that he had a TV monitor
hooked up to an actual
tape machine.
And we sat and we watched
that movie.
And the more we watched,
the more these kids got into
the woods and started to see
these talismans hanging
from the trees and everything.
I got to a point where I said,
"Joe, turn it off.
I can't take anymore."
And that's rare.
I'm kind of case-hardened,
but every now and then,
one will get under your skin,
and that one really
got under my skin.
Both of them were made
on tiny budgets
with small casts.
And both of them have a look
that's almost amateurish,
but they both work...
because you don't really see
what's going on at first.
I don't think in
The Blair Witch Project
you ever see exactly
what's going on,
because it all leads up
to that final shot
with the guy standing
in the corner of the basement
with his face to the wall.
It's terrifying, but you can't
even say why it's terrifying.
Whereas in Texas Chain Saw,
the brilliant thing
that Tobe did
was he begins with a number
of Polaroid photographs
that flash and are gone,
flash and are gone.
And we find out later
that they're bodies
that have been exhumed
from a cemetery.
But really beyond that...
My old agent, Kirby McCauley,
used to say,
"It's all violins.
It's all violins."
You don't really see too much.
I think that at some point,
you have to put your cards
down on the table.
You have to show what's there.
That's always been
my philosophy.
Horror is disintegrating
into a pile of putrescence.
Whereas terror
is that ball
bouncing down the stairs
in The Changeling.
It's a really scary moment.
I've always felt
that horror was easy,
and at the same time
terror is probably
a finer emotion
if you want to put
an adjective on it.
But I've tried to use terror
in some of my stories,
mostly The Shining,
which is a story
where you just see things
out of the corner of your eye
for quite a while
before the horror
really kicks in.
The things that are primal
and terrifying
are the things
that we know as children
that we really, really fear.
Like, when I was a kid,
I can remember
seeing frost on the window
and thinking
that it was the face
of some crazy person who was
out there trying to get in.
And so, if I were
to make a movie,
and put frost on the window,
and shoot it the way
that Robert Wise
shoots some
of the plaster figurines
in that bas-relief
in that movie,
I think it would work,
because I think
that most children
they may not have seen
frost on a window
that looks like a face,
but they've seen, like,
dolls that are terrifying
for some reason.
That appear to be pleasant
enough in the daytime,
but once it's nighttime,
they take on a different aspect.
Tobe did some of that
in Poltergeist.
So, it can go either way.
But you have to be a real artist
to do the thing where
it's just almost suggested.
My boots aren't laced!
Oh, my God,
what the fuck is that?
What the fuck is that?
It is scary in a way,
and Blair Witch
is scary in a way
that Hollywood movies
don't seem to be able
to replicate.
And I think part of the reason
is because there are
too many people
involved with
the creative process in movies.
I've run into producers who say,
"Well, yes,
I want to give you notes
about this and that
and the other thing."
I hate the goddamn notes, okay?
Because whatever
they want to do,
every step homogenizes
the process
a little tiny bit more.
With Texas Chain Saw,
Tobe didn't have
to worry about any of that.
He could do
where the spirit moved him.
So, you see that
in small budget,
independent movies.
It's true with Evil Dead.
Evil Dead is balls-to-the-wall
horror.
When I saw Evil Dead in Cannes,
I went nuts for that movie.
I thought it was
really terrific,
really scary, and really,
really original.
Oh, God.
And I said to Sam
when I finally met him,
Sam Raimi, I said,
"How did you do
that steady cam thing?"
I said, "Kubrick took
all this special equipment
and very expensive stuff
to make what's essentially
a very cold movie."
And Sam Raimi just
kind of laughed and he said,
"There were two people
holding a two-by-four
with the camera mounted on it,
and they just ran like hell."
That's the solution
that wouldn't occur to somebody
who's making a Hollywood movie.
The merits of Texas
Chain Saw Massacre.
Well, I think it puts us all
in touch with our primal fears,
and it gives us a chance
in a relatively harmless place
to experience emotions that
we ordinarily wouldn't feel.
And I think those things
are valuable.
Not everybody does.
Is that social?
Is that social?
I don't know if it really is.
You know, that's a...
That's a question of morality,
and I'm not sure that when
you deal with entertainment,
those boundaries
are necessarily the same.
Speaking just for myself,
I actually want to violate
good taste.
I think that that's where
you're supposed to go,
as somebody who writes
horror fiction,
or stuff that
has to do with the macabre.
I'm sure that, at the time,
when Poe wrote that
Tell-Tale Heart story,
and he wrote about
dismembering the body
and putting it under
the floorboards,
there were people who went,
"That's too far,
that's too far."
Well, you're supposed
to go too far.
I think that
when it comes to movies,
the taste and conscience
side of it
belongs not with the filmmaker
but with the people
who do the rating for the films.
And I think that their tastes
and their ratings
are very plastic.
The swearing, Paul.
There, I said it.
Yeah? The profanity bothers you?
It has no nobility.
For instance, you know,
you can see a movie
where Godzilla stomps a city
and it will get a PG-13 rating.
And as long as you don't
show dismembered bodies,
it's all right.
But when you draw back
a little bit
and you think about it,
there are thousands of people
that are being killed
by movies like Godzilla,
or Marvel pictures
with supervillains
that lay waste to huge cities.
We just don't see them.
Sam Peckinpah once said,
"There's nothing
more pornographic
than a Hopalong Cassidy movie
where you go 'pow', like that,
and the guy goes 'Oh' like this
and he falls down."
There's no blood, there's no
mess, there's nothing like that.
It's very sanitized.
He just goes, "Oh, God."
Like that.
He doesn't say "Oh, God,"
because that wasn't allowed.
But Peckinpah said,
"I'm gonna actually
show what happens,"
so that in a movie
like Straw Dogs
or The Wild Bunch,
you see what happens
to the people who are shot.
There's blood.
He even shows it in slow motion.
So, yeah, morality and movies,
morality and art,
I don't think
they really go together.
Somebody else has got
to decide that.
You can't ask Tobe
what he thinks
about taste and conscience,
because Tobe is gone
to the great reward in the sky.
If you asked me, I would say
he never thought about taste
and conscience in the least bit
when he made that movie.
You never know what boundaries
are gonna be violated,
because that's what it's about,
it's an outlaw genre, really.
And it always has been.
You can't ever get comfortable.
And that is the artist's job,
to make you uncomfortable.
And I think that there's a great
gun culture in this country
that's partially fueled
by movies like Death Wish.
The difference between
a movie like Death Wish
and a movie like
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
is you don't really expect
some impressionable
18- or 19-year-old
to go out and buy a chainsaw
and start cutting people up,
whereas somebody
who saw Death Wish
might very well say, "Yeah,
that's a pretty good idea.
Never mind the movie, fuck that.
Let's go out and shoot a bunch
of drug pushers or something."
You have to be careful
about that.
Now, I have a book called Rage
that was published.
It was written halfway through
senior year in high school,
and it was about this kid,
Charlie Decker,
who comes in
and shoots his teacher
and holds his class hostage
with a gun.
And it gets the class
sort of, like, on his side,
and then, later on,
there was a shooter in Oregon
and he shot three or four kids
and that book was found
in his locker,
and there were a couple
of other cases.
And I said,
"This might actually
be an accelerant."
And I pulled the book,
because I don't want
to think of myself
as partially responsible
for that.
It was written at a time
when school shootings
were unheard of.
That's my only defense,
and it isn't a good one.
Seventy-four, November,
take nine.
I admire this movie so much,
and it was made for,
you know, chump change, really.
It's amazing.
And Tobe was young
when he made this movie, too,
because you don't know
at that point
that you can't do
certain things.
So, everything is on the table.
It's a fantastic thing.
It's a kind of a classic
feel to it,
a classic, primal,
horror movie feel.
Man, the movie is like
fucking less than
an hour and a half long.
It's almost a short subject.
It really gets in there.
It's like a Beatles song,
in a sense.
The archetypal Beatles song
would be like, "She Loves You,"
or "I Wanna Hold Your Hand."
Two minutes and 17 seconds,
gets in,
does its business, done.
There's no fat, there's nothing.
So, yeah, I would say
that it's timeless.
And you can't say...
You can't say
it's part of the zeitgeist,
because it's so early, you know.
It feels like, almost like...
the zeitgeist came later.
Do you see what I'm saying?
That it's like...
Just its own thing.
I read somewhere
that Texas Chain Saw Massacre
is the only movie
about psychotics
that was made by a psychotic.
And it does have
some of that feeling to it.
I worked with Tobe
a little bit on Sleepwalkers,
and Tobe was just this
soft-spoken, nice man,
and quite handsome.
And he had his lines down pat.
Hey, buddy, buddy.
I ain't taking the rap on this.
I lock this place up
every night.
It's not my fault
if every pervert, weirdo--
Don't talk to me,
go to talk to someone in charge.
I'm busy.
And I didn't get
a real chance to talk to him,
but my idea about him was,
he's like the rest of us
that do this for a living.
He puts on his normal face
and he comes out
and he does his job.
And I'm the same way.
I wear a normal mask
when I'm doing these things,
and then I turn into
somebody else
when I'm writing something
that's really scary.
And there's always
a kind of a smile on my face
because I'm thinking to myself,
"I'm gonna getcha."
No! No! No! No! No!
No, please, no!
Please, please, please, no!
No!
The first time I got
to see the movie
was on film actually,
at the Angelika Film Center.
I was about 19.
I was probably
in the fourth or fifth row.
And I remember walking
out of that theater
feeling like I had never seen
such a legitimately
terrifying vision of the world.
I didn't understand
that the movie
was going to affect me
the way a great work of art
can affect you.
And to see a movie that had this
grindhouse kind of reputation,
and then to recognize it
as an American masterpiece
was just this really
interesting,
disjunctive experience for me
as a young artist.
I feel like we are watching
this incredible depiction
of multiple populations
that feel entitled
to a way of life.
You don't want to go
fooling around
on other folks' property.
Some folks don't like it,
and they don't mind showing you.
Oh, my father owns it.
-That's your daddy's place, huh?
-Yeah.
Whether it's the kids in a van
who want to see an old home
that's in their family...
They already have a legacy
of owning property.
They have the legacy
of having a car
and taking a vacation,
road-tripping together.
...or the nightmare family
they run into
and are tragically going
to collide with.
That family is sort of
the other side of the coin,
of this depiction
of an American family
in which their industry
has been taken away,
their livelihood
has been taken away.
And yet, there is a sense
that they are owed
their jobs back
as professional killers
and good killers.
To watch the dinner scene again
in the very quiet privacy
of my own home,
where I'm certain my dog
thought something terrible
was happening in the other room,
I was really struck
by the depiction
of, first of all,
this idea of the patriarchy.
I won't have this.
It brings up so many complicated
feelings as you're watching,
because on the face of it
what's happening
is offensively violent,
offensively grisly,
and yet it has this quality
of high comedy,
because it really is so revealed
as base and pathetic.
They, as a family,
are so pathetic.
He's just a cook.
Shut up, you bitch hog.
Me and Leatherface
do all the work.
He don't like it,
ain't that right?
You're just the cook.
Shut your mouth!
You don't understand nothing.
I cannot help
but watch the movie
and feel some
very uncomfortable sympathy
for those characters,
and deep sadness.
When they're talking to Sally
at the dinner table,
it's the saddest, scariest
depiction of masculinity
I think that might
exist on film.
And of a broken masculinity.
Leatherface is a child.
And the chainsaw itself
is just another prop
in a role he's trying
to find a place
in the production to play.
Like, he's in a family
with no role,
and that has made him
completely insane.
Howdy.
Want to take off the mask, huh?
No? Okay. All right.
And so,
to see human monsters like this,
it's actually evoking,
I think, the feelings
that a lot of older
horror classics,
I think particularly
of Frankenstein,
where that monster
is the product
of something larger,
something far more diabolical
and fucked up.
I can't look at Leatherface
and feel like
he's simply a monster.
He is a part of us.
And for that reason,
I can't reject him out of hand.
There's something about
this family's
inability to modernize
that is both, like,
incredibly touching
and maddening,
because they are stuck
in an America
that doesn't exist
for them anymore,
and it's made them insane.
And I feel like
that's something that
Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel
were investigating.
What do you do when you take
a person's livelihood away?
No matter what you think
of their livelihood.
And I think in a funny way,
the monster family
and the victim family
are incredibly entwined
in their identity, in a way,
and in their expectation
of what America owes them,
and what the promise
of the American dream really is.
Didn't you say there's
a swimming hole around here?
Yeah.
Well, Pam and I'd like
to go swimming, man.
Uh, there used to be a trail
down between those
two old sheds.
Come on, we'll find it.
This must be it.
Perhaps the bigger
nightmare of the movie
is that it didn't exist at all.
I feel like
watching the movie 50 years on,
it is as if we are witnessing
the young artist Tobe Hooper
looking into the future
of America.
And he is imagining
a world on fire.
He is imagining
a level of American violence
that seems to be unprecedented,
day after day.
He's seeing a depiction
of community relationships
that have completely
disintegrated, and...
It's like the movie
is evergreen,
so sadly, for Americans,
because it feels relevant still,
even strangely
more relevant to me now.
Health officials in
San Francisco reluctantly admit
they may have a cholera
epidemic on their hands.
Some 40 cases of the highly
infectious disease have
been confirmed.
And he sets it all up
in those opening minutes
with the bad news
that could be
the bad news I'm listening to
on my drive to talk
to you today, 50 years on.
I mean, it's an uncanny
kind of prescience.
By putting the date
at the beginning of a movie
like this or like Psycho,
instead of making it more real,
what it does is
it makes it timeless.
In planting this concept
of specificity for the audience,
a day that something
terrible happened,
for which and to which
we can apply
all kinds of memories
of our own.
It's like Texas Chain Saw
Massacre is saying,
"Well, this film
is going to now enter
that pantheon of memory for you
and will be burned
in your memory forever."
It's like he's branding
the audience with the time.
The date is very powerful to me.
Um, August 18th is the day
my brother died.
And I feel like I know...
I just feel like
that date visits me, uh,
in this interesting
kind of cosmic way.
And, um...
It's just a strange,
strange thing.
Strange.
When malefic planets
are in retrograde...
And Saturn's malefic, okay.
...their malefice is increased.
The depiction of
and the conversation around
the planetary alignments
on an astrological level
along with
the constant reference
to the sun and the moon visually
in the language of the film
to me is part
of that bigger strategy
that Tobe Hooper was employing
that seemed to suggest
something almost mythic
about what we were
about to watch,
that it's not
small-town America.
It's a depiction
of primal human animus,
primal human urges
and disappointments
that can only
end in catastrophe.
But it's as if he's saying,
you know,
this is the landscape of myth.
And so,
we are witnessing that
getting acted out upon these
terribly unlucky characters.
But then we're also witnessing
this violence being perpetrated
by characters who themselves
also seem terribly unlucky.
The film
which you are about to see
is an account of the tragedy
which befell a group
of five youths...
I mean, I always forget
about the opening crawl,
and then to see it, it's like
what Hooper is preparing us for
is the American nightmare.
And then he's titillating us
by saying,
"And it's a true story,"
which is its own kind of
theatrical flourish of the film.
And then to be in that graveyard
and get those fast shock cuts.
...this morning.
Officers there discovered
what appeared to be
a grisly work of art.
Along with this
incredible tracking shot,
it's as if to me, Hooper,
the filmmaker,
is announcing himself
and saying,
"And now I present to you
a grisly work of art."
Such an interesting question
to think about the role
of beauty and poetry in art.
And this larger question
perhaps about its necessity.
The feathers
that fly through the air
as we watch characters
crawling across a floor
to find a piece of furniture
made out of bones.
It's so much like the thing
that would bring a child
back to Grimms' Fairy Tales,
even if it meant they lost some
sleep and had nightmares.
And I think
that is the secret ingredient
to the film's brilliance,
is that he's not
making something
that we can strictly
look away from.
The final sequence of
Texas Chain Saw on the highway,
it's a collision
of competing ideas
about the American project
as something hopeful,
optimistic, fair,
and then the madness
of human impulse,
human instinct.
Hooper is saying, in my opinion,
"I'm not optimistic
about America,
but I do believe
beauty still has a place."
And that that idea
that in other horror films,
the sun rises
to put evil to bed.
I think, in Hooper's case,
he's saying the sun rises
so that we may see evil better,
so that it's more legible to us.
I have a friend in San Francisco
-that you could stay with.
-Really?
Eggshells
is an interesting first film
because it's really clear
that Tobe Hooper was interested
by American motifs.
The concept
of the big old house.
The concept of the town square.
I think Eggshells displays
this really interesting
sense of freedom.
Freedom with the camera,
freedom with the rhythms
of the storytelling.
And it was sort of
like a test run
for Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
which I think became a much more
classically distilled story.
And then he took some
of those stylistic flourishes
and really found
his filmmaking voice,
his visual language.
And there's something about
this is America, right?
Like the plains,
a sense of wide-open space,
a sense of possibility.
A sense of modernity is welcome
here with this, you know,
vehicle slicing through
the frame.
So, it's kind of playing
on our romantic notions
of the American landscape.
Hello?
His obsession with
doorways
and framing people in doorways,
it makes me think of Bergman.
It makes me think of Tarkovsky.
I feel like Hooper
is right up there
with indelible images
about characters
at a threshold from which
walking through the door
ensures you will never return
to your old life.
There's a sequence
in Texas Chain Saw
that I watch and have
to fight the urge to look away,
and also want to figure out
exactly how it was achieved.
Which is the moment
that Leatherface takes
Pam's barebacked body,
lifts it up onto that meat hook.
I'm sure there are cuts that
allow for a trick of the eye,
but my experience
of it is always,
this is one continuous
nightmarish thing happening
and it feels so real.
It's so beautifully
staged and framed
to set it up with the bare hook
previous to that moment
so that you are really
focused on it.
You really sense its potency
in the frame.
I have that experience
with other movies,
like Come and See,
the Russian film.
There's a sense that
what I'm watching
is a living,
breathing nightmare.
What makes this movie
an enduring masterpiece
is that its thesis seems to be
America is a madness,
and I want you to look at it
and experience it.
And there's art
that perhaps works
within a more polite setting,
but ultimately,
I think most great art
is a punch
in our complacent faces.
That movie expands my notion
of what art even is.
It allows me permission
to make stories that feel
maybe harder sometimes...
...or more unpleasant.
Spit on it, spit on it!
-Fuck you.
-Spit on it.
And still believe
that there's a place for beauty.
There's a place for redemption.
I think Tobe Hooper
wanted people
to walk out of that theater
shaken and changed.
And he did that using the medium
in a really sophisticated way.
He uses so much art and poetry
in the filmmaking
that I would think many
audience members
couldn't help but feel
seen, spoken to,
provoked, and respected.
I can't think of a better
mission as an artist,
you know, to make work that is
attempting to see its audience
and make them see something
bigger than just the mirror.
It's a hard movie to watch.
It's a hard movie to re-watch.
And I keep going back to it
because it's worth it.
It has poetry...
beauty...
No, no, they didn't see me.
...shock...
awe.
The remains of relatives
have been removed.
No suspects are in custody.
Tragedy.
It's as big an American film
as any American classic.
And for that reason,
I keep returning to it,
because it gives something back.
There's always more to see.
Sally?
- Sally--
- There's always
more subtlety and meaning
to glean from re-watching it.
Sally!
How lucky
we are as cinephiles
to have Texas Chain Saw Massacre
as an American statement.