Max Borg
Among the more fun additions to the program of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in recent years is the idea of letting Alexandre O. Philippe, the Swiss-born American director with a passion for pop culture, curate part of the “Out of the Past” strand. Specifically, whenever Philippe has a new documentary ready, it will screen alongside 2-3 relevant titles; in 2024, for example, it was all about Monument Valley and the iconography of the Western genre.
This year, the topic was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper’s seminal horror milestone from 1974. Impressed by Philippe’s previous work, the franchise’s rights holders asked him to come up with something for the film’s 50th anniversary. The result was Chain Reactions, which premiered in Venice last year and promptly won the award for Best Documentary about Cinema. Divided into five chapters, it goes over the history and impact of Hooper’s film via the recollections and analytical remarks of five people: Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama.
A common theme across the interviews is just how deeply unpleasant the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre can be to watch. In fact, at the Venice premiere, people who had ostensibly never seen Hooper’s original walked out during the documentary, because even isolated clips could be too much for some viewers. Hilariously, Miike – known for his own brand of unsettling genre fare – reveals the only reason he saw the movie, which had a huge effect on him, was because the screening he actually wanted to attend, a reissue of Chaplin’s City Lights, was sold out.
Philippe himself admitted, while introducing the Swiss premiere at the Fribourg Film Festival a few months later, that when he first saw Hooper’s movie, on a shoddy VHS tape, it was the first time he’d ever had to pause a tape and take a breather before finishing a viewing. It’s probably also why the various sequels, prequels and remakes never really manage to measure up: like The Exorcist, the first Texas Chain Saw Massacre is its own twisted thing, an exercise in sheer terror and filmmaking fury that cannot be replicated.
Unsurprisingly (and the documentary touches upon this in part), it was hard to view the film in some countries. In the UK, after initially being released in theaters, it was formally banned for two decades and classed as a Video Nasty, before being cleared for public exhibition in 1999 without any cuts. A similar fate befell another movie, the one Philippe chose as a companion piece to complete the 2025 program at Karlovy Vary: Man Bites Dog.
Released in 1992, it’s a (very) dark comedy hailing from Belgium, a mockumentary where a film crew follows a prolific serial killer and captures his exploits on camera. Conceived as something that could be shot with as little money as possible, the movie is written and directed by Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde, who also served as the co-editor, cinematographer and lead actor respectively. A cult movie upon release, it’s mentioned in Chain Reactions during Patton Oswalt’s interview.
Revisiting them close together, it becomes even clearer the two films share some creative DNA (in addition to both screening at Cannes originally): both of them have a grainy, low-budget aesthetic that adds to the unpleasantness; they’re both imbued with a hefty dose of dark humor (which Hooper went back to tenfold when he directed the second Texas Chain Saw movie); and they’re both loosely based on real events, with Texas taking its cues from the Ed Gein case while Man Bites Dog contains at least one reference to a real murder. Additionally, the original French title C’est arrivé près de chez vous (“It happened in your neighborhood”) comes from the parlance of the local news of that time.
And then, as mentioned earlier, there’s the censorship issue. Man Bites Dog is quite nasty, especially when it comes to a scene involving a gang rape, which caused the film to be banned outright in some countries and subjected to extensive edits in others. Curiously, the UK granted it an “18” certificate without much issue, despite protests calling for an official ban. The explanation provided was twofold: as the movie is technically a comedy, its excesses are part of the humor; and as for the risk of children being exposed to the home video release, the British Board of Film Classification (correctly) assumed a grainy, black-and-white, subtitled movie with niche appeal would not cross paths with most families.
In the US, the commercial kiss of death known as the NC-17 rating was applied, leading to a rather paradoxical strategy by the distributor: to ensure the film’s availability in video stores, they had to make cuts in order to get an “unrated” label, since the uncut version had been formally classified. The deleted scenes – including the rape in its entirety – were subsequently reinstated for the Criterion disc release.
Other similarly disturbing titles are mentioned in Chain Reactions, with Miike in particular bringing up his controversial Masters of Horror episode Imprint, which was so shocking it never aired on television in the United States (and was censored in some international markets; I first saw it on a German DVD, which omits all the scenes pertaining to an abortionist). And yet, few have the same visceral impact as Hooper’s masterpiece and its deranged Belgian descendant.
But why is it that a small comedy made on a shoestring budget by cash-strapped student filmmakers is more attuned to what made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre so effective than other films set in the latter’s universe (and, in some cases, made by the original creators)? Perhaps it’s because both movies actually have something to say, and are not shy about it in any way, shape or form.
Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel devised a story that, while not explicitly about it, effectively serves as a rebuke of the American Dream at a time when trust in the system was at an all-time low, between Nixon’s resignation and the disastrously ongoing Vietnam War. There’s a fury and disillusionment at the core of the movie which in subsequent franchise installments was replaced by a sheer appetite for gore and young attractive leads (and clumsy zeitgeist-adjacent gags such as Leatherface killing people who were filming him with their phones in the 2022 legacyquel).
Similarly, Man Bites Dog is an indictment of the sensationalism that occurs in news reporting, a critique the film takes to the extreme when the crew filming the psychotic Ben begins to partake in his depraved escapades. It’s another glimpse into a rotten, horrifying world that is slowly falling apart, unveiling the literal and spiritual stench underneath it. Much like its American forebear, it’s an unsettlingly compelling (or compellingly unsettling?) viewing experience. And perhaps, as Philippe suggested while promoting his documentary, we truly are only a few years away from another genre piece rooted in the same darkly amusing anger.
