“Psycho’s” Marion Crane, with her furtively erotic and sly-eyed scheme of stealing $40,000 so she can get married, is now, in effect, a group of roving kids in a van who act out the license of the sexual revolution, and there’s a Mansonite madness to the whole thing. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” echoed the shock and terror of “Psycho,” but in a wild-ass rural-devil counterculture way. At the end of the shower scene, we feel hope and faith are swirling down that drain right along with Marion Crane’s blood. “Psycho,” which I consider to be one of the 10 greatest films ever made, is the demon seed that spawned the slasher genre - but apart from its pure fear factor, it’s really a movie about the death of God. They‘re the twin poles of modern horror, and they’re intimately connected. I’ve seen “Chain Saw” about 20 times, more than I’ve seen any other horror movie except for “Psycho.” It’s no accident that those two films loom so large. Once, in the early ’80s, I saw it stoned, and it was scarier than ever. I went back to see it again and it was just as scary. It wasn’t a documentary, but it almost felt like one it seemed to weave the terror of real experience into its grungy vision of hell on earth. The first time I saw “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” it knocked me sideways. To be a horror fan back then was to drink from a cornucopia of movies that seemed, in their extreme way, to capture what was going on in the world as much as any movies you could name. “The Wicker Man.” “Dawn of the Dead.” “Don’t Look Now.” “The Tenant.” “The Omen.” “The Last House on the Left” and “The Hills Have Eyes.” And, yes, “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Halloween.” The ’70s was the formative age of contemporary horror, a time when horror films across the spectrum were listening to and talking to each other. “The Exorcist.” “Alien.” “Carrie” (one of the two films that made me want to be a film critic). Just think of all the classics that came out during that era. I became a horror fanatic in the ’70s, because I happened to grow up then, but also because that decade was a high-water mark for horror, one that spawned so many of the tropes that rule horror cinema to this day. “Owen PLEASE explain the Texas Chainsaw Massacre parallel.” “What do you expect from a by-the-numbers hack like Gleiberman?” “Totally excremental review by someone who doesn’t know excrement about the subject matter.” How is the original Halloween a knockoff of TCM?! Had you said Black Christmas, I would’ve been like I can accept that. “Hey Variety, if you ever want someone who’s actually seen Halloween ’78 and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre enough times to know they’re really NOTHING alike, hit me up.” This following behind a long, sad chain of critics who have no respect for the horror genre.” “I think we can all dismiss Owen Gleiberman’s Halloween Kills review as he thinks the original Halloween stole directly from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. “Halloween is a knock-off of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on what planet? They couldn’t be any more different in style, tone, story, social commentary, etc.” Here are some tweets that sum up the reaction: I felt it didn’t need to be belabored again.īut oh, what a trigger that sentence turned out to be! The response on Twitter was fast and brutal. What I meant is that I had no active desire to explore it, since I’ve already explored it so often. I never intended to leave the topic for another time. Looking back over the history of the slasher film, a subject I’ve been writing about for nearly as long as it’s been around, I described the original 1978 “ Halloween” as “a mayhem-by-the-numbers knockoff of ‘ The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,'” adding, “but let’s leave that topic for another time.” That was meant to be a shorthand quip. It was one sentence, tucked inside a parentheses. Last month, in my review of “Halloween Kills” (which was premiering at the Venice Film Festival), I wrote something that ticked off a whole lot of readers, though in this case the offense wasn’t my decidedly negative review of the film. Maybe that’s why when we disagree about them, it can feel like war. A great horror movie hits you on every level - heart, mind, eye, squirm-in-your-seat body shudder. Over the years, I’ve ticked off more horror fans than I can count, and it’s all because of something that we totally share: a passion for the genre that’s nothing short of consuming. If I had to list my three greatest hits of outrage, they would probably be my pans of “Pretty Woman,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Let the Right One In.” It’s no accident that the last of those is a horror film. Occasionally a critic will write something that gets readers seriously riled.
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