Horror Fans Must Stream This ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Documentary on Shudder

Back in 1974, director Tobe Hooper, alongside co-writer Kim Henkel, unleashed into the world an ambitious independent film that would go on to traumatize audiences for multiple generations. With its title alone, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre evokes feelings of terror and dread without even having to have seen the movie, and those of us who have witnessed its carnage have even more reason to be unnerved by the Sawyer family and the iconic Leatherface. Whether you’re unfamiliar with the movie or have seen it countless times, the documentary Chain Reactions will shed fresh insight into the experience, and you can stream it now on Shudder.

The documentary comes from filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe, who previously delivered documentaries focusing on George Lucas, Psycho, Alien, the zombie subgenre, and The Exorcist, approaching each subject from a unique perspective. With 78/52, for example, Philippe used the shower scene in Psycho, which had 78 camera setups and 52 cuts, as a jumping-off point to explore everything that made the movie so frightening as opposed to chronicling the film’s development linearly.

With Chain Reactions, fans are once again given an unconventional exploration of a topic, this time by focusing on five bona fide masters of horror. While some documentaries about horror movies attempt to accumulate as many famous faces as possible to talk about a topic, Philippe instead puts together a murderer’s row of talent to dissect the movie.

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To talk about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Philippe brought together comedian Patton Oswalt, filmmaker Takashi Miike, critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, author Stephen King, and filmmaker Karyn Kusama. In addition to only featuring a select handful of perspectives, rather than intercutting between each individual, each “Chapter” of the documentary lets them tell their own connection to the film.

Oswalt, who famously has a stand-up piece about how accurately the title tells you exactly what the movie offers, explores his first encounters with the movie, recalling arguably the most fan-centric analysis of the movie and its impact. Miike, meanwhile, reflected on how he only saw the horror movie after he wasn’t able to see Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, and how he embraced the freedom of independent film that was offered to Hooper with his own work.

Australian critic Heller-Nicholas details the cultural impact of how the film reflected one interpretation of America to outside communities, in addition to expounding on how limited access to subpar copies of the film resulted in a different recollection of the movie than what other audiences in other parts of the world earned. King, meanwhile, expressed how the film managed to both frighten and inspire him, as Kusama explores the metaphors – both intentional and accidental – in Texas Chain Saw and how there’s much more to the picture than a killer with a chainsaw.

With a 98% positive score on aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, Chain Reactions is one of the more acclaimed documentaries in the realm of horror.