Critics Campus 2025 participant Armani Hollindale speaks to Alexandre O. Philippe about symbolic violence, subjectivity, gender and artistic responsibility as examined in his Texas Chainsaw Massacre omnibus documentary Chain Reactions.

Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary Chain Reactions is a love letter to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) composed in the words of its most passionate devotees: comedian Patton Oswalt, director Karyn Kusama, J-horror maestro Takashi Miike, novelist Stephen King, and film critic and author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Philippe’s film offers audiences an invaluable perspective through which to engage with horror – and with cinema in general – and the director’s own attitude towards screen culture is one that should be widely shared.

I watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at a Halloween screening last year – on the same night they were playing Paris, Texas [1984]. I had gone up to the concession stand and asked for a ticket to Texas Chainsaw, but the staff member handed me one for Paris, Texas.

What you’re talking about, really, is the idea that Alexandra Heller-Nicholas talks about in her chapter – this idea that Texas Chainsaw, for her, was very gatekept by her young male friends. This idea that, well, you’re a girl, so it’s not for you. And there’s nothing that could be further from the truth. I’ve been fighting against this for my entire career, and I’m going to keep fighting against it. I keep telling people: Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not just one of the, or the, greatest horror movies of all time. How about we remove the word ‘horror’ from the equation? It is just one of the greatest movies of all time, period.

You’ve included women in your film Chain Reactions. That is the most powerful thing you can do.

Yeah, I don’t think you can make a film about Texas Chainsaw without including women. Just as you can’t make a movie about Hitchcock without including women.

What do you feel is your responsibility in making this documentary? What do you owe audiences?

For me, what really matters is perspective and the way that a movie gets under someone’s skin. How do you get in someone’s mind’s eye about how a particular movie feels for them? I think the closest I’ve gotten to that is in Alex Heller-Nicholas’s chapter, when she talks about Picnic at Hanging Rock [1975], the outback and the emotional connection, for her, between certain Australian movies and Texas Chainsaw. There’s the moment where I’m showing this shot from the Australian VHS, and I use the music from Picnic at Hanging Rock. In the way of making films about films and playing with footage in a transformative way, you’re not just doing it to be cute – you’re doing it to show essentially how it feels, how Alex might feel like when she watches Texas Chainsaw Massacre. She told me that, when she watched Chain Reactions for the first time [and] saw that scene, she got goosebumps.

That’s really beautiful – it’s the kind of respect for visual elements that Chain Reactions talks about. And painting is obviously a huge part of how you look at films. Does this come from a background in painting or art history?

[When I was] a kid, my mom would always ask, ‘Do you want to go to the park, or do you want to go to the museum?’ I would say, invariably, ‘I want to go to the museum.’ I haven’t really changed that way. I’m an art collector as well. My dad was an art collector. I’m very proud of my art collection and I’m always going to seek out great art.

Above: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre | Top: Chain Reactions

The aesthetics of Texas Chainsaw play a significant role, yet you manage to talk about beauty and poetry without pretension. Was this a conscious effort?

Yeah, always. The thing I can’t forget is that my films, they’re completely different from, say, a thesis book. I always look at my films as a bridge between cinema studies and the general public. Taking ideas and making them accessible, digestible, understandable to the general public so that they can actually have confidence in the act of cracking a film open and deconstructing it – this is something that we can all do. There are people out there who seem to be very stuck on one way to look at a film and think, ‘This is it,’ and that’s extraordinarily reductive.

I often find it difficult to control the association game – teeth, bones, the colour red, all these historical parallels, the music, motifs, etc. How do you control the infinity of signs that unravel?

Well, I think that’s interesting. Again, it always goes back to the personal, right? If I tap into my subject’s obsessions and interests, it takes you on an emotional journey. Alex focuses on the colours yellow and red. For Takashi Miike, it’s about pain. It goes beyond influence, beyond inspiration.

In the documentary, Stephen King briefly talks about how he took his book Rage (1977) out of print because it might have been a catalyst for a real crime. This felt like an entry point into a wider discussion about morality and the movies.

It’s a really complicated thing, and I really like that I got to catch Stephen King struggling a little bit with the idea. I do agree with him that it is not the responsibility of the artists to hold back; we can’t censor ourselves, in a way. Like everything, how do you consume art responsibly? How do you share art responsibly with your kids? How do you make them resilient in the face of art that could be disturbing?

Not everybody should be watching horror. People are affected by horror in very different ways. I’ve always been able to sort of make the difference, you know – this is fictional, this is what the horror is teaching me. Horror films at their best are actually cautionary tales; they teach you something about our world, our society, the way we behave. If we start going down the path of banning those films, I think we’re doing ourselves a collective disservice.

I mean we could talk about this for hours … This whole idea of ‘good guys with guns’ and ‘bad guys with guns’ is completely insane. It’s driven by the gun lobby and we need to start there, you know, before we start talking about horror movies.

When I was watching Chain Reactions, I realised that the words ‘violins’ and ‘violence’ sound the same.

Interesting …

Chain Reactions screened as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.