The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (VHS Screening)

Relive the mayhem as it was originally experienced by Australian horror and genre fans: on a scan of a degraded VHS tape.

You know the story: a collection of youths become stranded in a remote backwater, where the locals are anything but friendly; cue the killing. When released in 1974, Tobe Hooper’s sweaty, panic-inducing experiment was as much a seething comment on contemporary society – the endless violence of reality-as-horror broadcast into homes en masse – as it was a surprise cinematic tour de force. Inspired by the real-life depravity of suspected serial killer Ed Gein, Hooper and his co-writer Kim Henkel dreamed up one of the most iconic movie monsters of all time, Leatherface, and his nightmare of a family.

Along with its malevolent minimalist sound palette, stunningly detailed museum of a set, incredibly game cast and efficient, masterfully structured script, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was built on often gorgeous 16mm cinematography; but if you’d watched it in Australia in the 1980s, when the long-banned film was only available on grey-market videotapes, you might have had to squint to see it. In this special one-off screening that ties in with the Victorian premiere of Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary Chain Reactions, step back in time and watch the film as so many of its fans experienced it for the first time: on a scanned degraded VHS tape, whose distinctively fuzzy audiovisual textures bring out the film's verité rawness in all its squalid glory.

“Tobe Hooper’s terrifying 1974 slasher remains one of the most effective and masterly horror films ever made … The more you watch the film, the more [clearly] it seems like a work of art.” –  The Guardian