CHAIN REACTIONS movie poster | ©2025 Dark Sky Films

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, Karyn Kusama
Writer: Alexandre O. Philippe
Director: Alexandre O. Philippe
Distributor: Dark Sky Films
Release Date: September 19, 2025 (theatrical); October 21, 2025 (digital, VOD)

CHAIN REACTIONS is a killer title for a documentary that is all about people’s reactions to the 1974 horror movie THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. It works not just because of the pun, but also because CHAIN REACTIONS, written and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, explores the “chain reaction” that the now-fifty-one-year-old film has influenced so much of what followed, which in turn has had its own influence.

The documentary is for people who are interested in developments in not just horror, but films in general, storytelling and even comedy. However, there is no getting around the central subject, with plentiful clips from TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, as well as sequences from what it inspired and graphic verbal descriptions. Those who never want to see that movie, or have seen it and never want to again, are advised to stay away from this examination of it.

CHAIN REACTIONS is divided into chapters. Pre-Chapter One, Patton Oswalt (in a clip from an old stand-up routine) says TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is the greatest movie title ever, because it allows you to see the movie in your head based simply on what it’s called. We take his point, but the truth is that nobody could really envision TCSM before viewing it, except possibly the film’s director, Tobe Hooper, and maybe not even him.

Each of CHAIN REACTIONS’s five chapters consists of an interview with a different person involved with the arts who has had a profound response to TCSM. Chapter One is comedian/actor/writer Oswalt. Chapter Two is Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike (speaking in Japanese, with English subtitles). Chapter Three is film historian and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Chapter Four is Stephen King. Chapter Five is filmmaker Karyn Kusama.

The interviews are interspersed with film clips, both from TCSM and other relevant movies, being discussed directly or indirectly. Each interviewee has unique observations. For example, Oswalt notes that the photographs that open TCSM struck him as looking like stolen crime scene photos.

Miike, who has made some extremely violent fare himself, says that prior to seeing TCSM, he didn’t especially like horror movies. The impact TCSM had on Miike is reflected in some of his work, including the scene in ISHI: THE KILLER where the protagonist reproaches an attacker for not having love for committing the attack.

Australian Heller-Nicholas finds parallels between TCSM and the decorous, fact-based PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.

King muses not only on TCSM, but also horror more broadly, as well as the difference between horror and terror. Kusama talks about how she reads TCSM as a commentary on, among other things, American entitlement.

One common thread (which many CHAIN REACTIONS audience members will identify with) is initially viewing THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE on either a badly scratched-up print, a washed-out fourth-generation VHS tape copy, or a washed-out fourth-generation VHS tape copy of a badly scratched-up print.

In Heller-Nicholas’s case, at least, she thought this was what the movie was supposed to look like; CHAIN REACTIONS offers a side-by-side contrast of the faded videotape dub, in which everything looks yellow, to a new print, where the sky is in fact blue.

One can quibble with filmmaker Philippe’s decision not to include any interview footage of the late Hooper, who passed away in 2017. We can assume that Philippe wanted to conduct his own interviews. Also, hearing from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, might lead to questions about the “correctness” of other interviewees’ interpretations of Hooper’s creation, and of course there are plenty of other places to find interviews with the filmmaker himself. Still, it makes us want to know what Hooper thought he was doing in making the movie, and whether the end result was what he expected.

There are a few lulls and some repetition here, since a lot of the interviewees cite the same sequences. Still, CHAIN REACTIONS is thoughtful, well-considered, and just about guaranteed to bring up ideas and even visceral emotions regarding THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE that won’t have occurred to viewers before.

A limited-edition Blu-ray of CHAIN REACTIONS, which includes eight different versions of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE on disc, plus unused footage, will be available through Dark Sky Films beginning December 2, 2025.

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