Review: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

David Blue Garcia’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a requel that plays into the current trend in Hollywood cinema to extend every franchise ad infinitum, is a mercifully short film. It runs around 74 minutes without the credits, which is more than enough for its blood-spattered riff on the hillbilly slasher. It’s stylish and cleverly shot and has one grisly murder sequence that should be remembered even as the film is forgotten in a few months’ time. What it doesn’t have is a credible story of any kind. It’s great that the film is so compact in a cinematic era that favours bloat, but even short movies need tension, conflict, and character. In short, it needs a good story that fills you with dread. Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a crucial gap in its centre, which makes all its genre trappings a bit emptier than usual and without nary a good scare to boot.

This new film in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series tries to connect back to Tobe Hooper’s original masterpiece from 1974 by bringing back that film’s final girl, Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré, stepping in from the late Marilyn Burns). It once again has a group of young people (Sarah Yarkin’s Melody, Elsie Fisher’s Lila, Jacob Latimore’s Dante, Nell Hudson’s Ruth) run into Leatherface (Mark Burnham) and become victims of his psychotic rampage. The randomness is key in this series—no one does anything to provoke Leatherface. His victims always happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. At least, that’s the case in the original film.

But here, unlike in the original, you almost cheer for Leatherface to kill his victims. The characters are presented as vapid and entitled Zoomers and Millennials who want to gentrify a ghost town in Texas and turn it into some kind of business-hub and foodie attraction, but the actual business plan is incomprehensible. When they find two people living in a property they bought and thought abandoned (one of whom is Leatherface), they call the state police and have them arrested. Thus, they set off Leatherface. They reap what they sow.

The characters are presented as satirical versions of entitled woke young people, unlike the realistic portraits of ordinary young people in the original film. They complain about a Confederate flag hanging from an abandoned building and decry the politics of Texas while trying to pull off some economic hustle. They talk about revitalization but are all about gentrification. Only Elsie Fisher’s Lila is presented in a sympathetic manner, as she survived a school shooting and has some serious trauma to deal with, such as an aversion to guns. Of course, she has to overcome such an aversion if she wants to survive Leatherface, which is another element the film uses to mock woke culture.

This reactionary streak culminates with a scene where Leatherface corners a bunch of people on a party bus. As he brandishes his chainsaw, one guy on the bus films him with his phone and warns, “Try anything and you’re cancelled, bro.” Predictably, Leatherface doesn’t care about being cancelled and massacres everyone in brutal fashion, all while the neon lights flare and party beats thump. The filmmakers hate the characters and want us to get off on their deaths. At least, they try to get you to hate them, aside from Lila. I don’t mind this kind of contemptuous humour—the cancelled joke is legitimately funny. But when I’m watching a horror movie that isn’t a comedy, I tend to want to either sympathize with the characters and hope for their survival or be amused by the awfulness of the characters and be entertained by their deaths. This film doesn’t give me either, as the characters are shallow, but not amusing; their deaths are more relief than entertainment.

In place of a core storytelling hook, the film has capable craftsmanship and a compelling style, although the style doesn’t generate much tension or many scares. It comes from the team of filmmakers behind the Evil Dead reboot and the Don’t Breathe series—Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues wrote the story—so you get the same kind of claustrophobic set-pieces and grisly horror that you’ll find in those films. But those films had a simple elegance to their approach and a structural command of storytelling that you won’t find here. Rather, the carryover from those films to this one is a brutality towards its characters that borders on contempt. Of course, those films investigate intriguing moral avenues, about drug addiction, crime, and second chances. This movie just wants you to get off on the deaths on display, without having any real thematic heft behind the characters.

So what I'm left with is to simply take some pleasure in the craftsmanship on display. At least there is some stuff to remark upon in the film. Much of Texas Chainsaw Massacre takes place in the confined spaces of a derelict home and Garcia and his team do a good job of making the geographical space credible and the lighting and color grading easy to watch. Most horror films taking place in dark, confined spaces are visually and spatially incomprehensible. Here, even though many scenes are in deep shadow, the visuals don’t fade into black negative space. You can actually see the kills.

It’s likely everyone who watches Texas Chainsaw Massacre will forget about it soon afterwards. Those who hate it will forget what made them so incensed. Those that kind of like it will never watch it again. And it’ll end up just what it always was intended to be: a short bit of content that extends property licensing, drives the online conversation for the weekend, and spikes engagement enough to justify its small budget. Clearly, such an approach has been successful. I watched it and I’m now writing about it. That seems to be all Netflix wanted. Another bit of legacy content to keep us glued to our screens.

4 out of 10

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022, USA)

Directed by David Blue Garcia; written by Chris Thomas Devlin, based on a story by Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, based on characters created by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper; starring Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, Mark Burnham, Moe Dunford, Nell Hudson, Jessica Allain, Olwen Fouéré, Jacob Latimore, Alice Kirge.

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