THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was a movie of its time, and it reflected that as surely as any other more prestigious and acclaimed American classic.  It’s a genuinely important American film. Movies of the era such as THE GODFATHER, TAXI DRIVER, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE are justly heralded, but THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is equally important as a historical document of the 1970s. The movie arrived in 1974.  This was the era of the Vietnam War.  The war was still going on when the movie was being made.  What director Tobe Hooper and his collaborators did, consciously or otherwise, was to capture the anger of the era.  Obviously there are no politics directly addressed by the story, which is at its core, like PSYCHO before it and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS after it, a hyper-fictionalized elaboration of the Ed Gein story.  The political furor of the era is not to be found in the main text, but instead, it roils underneath, embedded within the ferocious,...

Every year around this time, I write about scary movies in a column I call, for lack of a better title, 31 FLAVORS OF HORROR! This space is where I will share all of those columns to date. I will add ...

Today is September 11th, 2021, twenty years on from that day in New York. I wasn’t in New York on that day, and the not-being-there, I think, had its own effects on the trajectory I took. This isn’…

YouTube video by Jet Li

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, John Carpenter’s first major feature credit as director, is the first true expression of Carpenter’s individualistic style and worldview.  (I say this with respect to fans of D...