Chain Reactions

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.