‘Chain Reactions’ Director Alexandre O. Philippe On Celebrating ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ With Stephen King and Rediscovering Kim Novak — Venice Film Festival
deadline.comAlexandra O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions is an extraordinary documentary about an extraordinary film. With contributions from comedian Patton Oswalt, writers Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Stephen King, plus filmmakers Takashi Miike and Karyn Kusama, it examines the legacy of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 shocker The Texas Chain Saw Massacre through a series of very personal and revealing interviews.
Written by Hooper and Kim Henkel, two Texas students, the original film finds five teenagers coming unstuck when a road trip takes them to the Sawyer house, the bone-strewn home to chainsaw-wielding maniac Leatherface (so named for horrifically obvious reasons) and his inbred cannibal family.
Philippe’s thoughtful, reflexive style has developed a lot since his breakout film The People vs. George Lucas (2010), a meditation on Star Wars fandom.
In 2017 he released 78/52, an intensive study of the shower scene in Psycho, which he followed in 2019 with Memory: The Origins of Alien, a deep dive into the themes of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi.
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