"If you're programming your own little horror film festival in the run-up to Halloween, and Tobe Hooper's stone-cold classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 1974 is part of the lineup, then this would make a handy follow-up for a night's viewing. It's not a making-of movie, although there are snippets of insight into the production's process; nor is it a meta-commentary at the rather sprawling level of Room 237, the delirious doc about The Shining."
"One may wonder why these five people are featured and not, say, any other bunch of opinionated famous movie buffs, but at least they have pretty interesting things to say. Each quilts together their own personal experience of the film with more general musings on cinema, technique, horror vo terror, and that annoying conversation stopper at every dinner party: the zeitgeist."
Chain Reaction is constructed in five chapters featuring interviews with Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Karyn Kusama, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Stephen King. The film operates between making-of exposition and sprawling meta-analysis, offering personal recollections and broader reflections on cinematic technique and cultural impact. Interviewees recount formative viewing experiences and link stylistic elements to memory and place, as when Takashi Miike recalls first seeing Texas Chain Saw at fifteen after failing to get into a reissue of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas associates the film's degraded yellow palette from low-quality video copies with the landscapes of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Stephen King contributes perspectives informed by adaptations of his own work. Overall, the interviews weave personal narrative with musings on horror versus terror and the film's cultural zeitgeist.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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