"It's the most terrifying film I've ever seen." - William Friedkin
An American experience of chaos: Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre
A book by Jean-Baptiste Thoret
13.5cm x 19cm | 250 pages (including photo
ISBN: 979–10–93798–34-9
THE ABSOLUTE CULT FILM, SEEN AND RE-SEEN BY ONE OF ITS GREATEST SPECIALISTS, JEAN-BAPTISTE THORET, IN A REVISED AND ENLARGED BOOK, UNPUBLISHED IN BOOKSTORES FOR OVER 30 YEARS!
“Watching a Tobe Hooper film means accepting an extreme exploration of the blind spots of our time, and sometimes of our childhood, and learning that everything we bury always ends up resurfacing.” – Jean-Baptiste Thoret
The quintessence of experimental horror, a profound and visceral work, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973), like many films that emerged in the early 1970s, delivered a vision of America defeated by the upheavals of its history.
Leatherface, the chainsaw-wielding offspring of an unemployed Texas family, appeared to many American viewers as the symbol of a society in decay, sending its youth to their deaths on the fringes of North Vietnam. Leatherface, the barbaric yet endearing son of a family of deranged hillbillies , wallowing in a perpetual celebration of death, blending cannibalistic practices and voodoo rituals against an apocalyptic backdrop. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is undoubtedly one of the paragons of a prodigious decade marked by chaos and subversion.
More than fifty years have passed, and Tobe Hooper's second feature film possesses, more than ever, the power of extreme experimentation, a dazzling formal adventure, an anti-fairy tale that the slasher genre would exploit ad nauseam a few years later. This is a film about the End. About the negation of illusions and initiatory fables, about the glorification of regression as the only possible escape from a world on the brink of collapse, about the end of a conquering and self-assured America discovering, as if emerging from a disturbing nightmare, a transformed, paranoid, and absurd world. But while its grounding in its time is undeniable, Tobe Hooper's film has managed to give form to a more universal terror—the memory of the camps, the handling of bodies, or the genocide of Native Americans—which partly explains its incredible legacy, its resistance to the test of time, and its influence on future generations of filmmakers.
It's the Sistine Chapel of horror cinema.
Through a remarkably rich and thorough analysis, combining critical study, sociological reflection on 1970s America, on-set testimonies, and appendices examining the film's censorship in France, this book recounts the genesis of Tobe Hooper's iconic film, illuminates its driving forces, and meticulously explores its various themes. This revised and expanded edition includes archival photographs.
Jean-Baptiste Thoret is a director ( The Neon People , We Blew It …) and the author of some fifteen books on cinema, including American Cinema of the 1970s (Cahiers du cinéma), Dario Argento, Magician of Fear (Cahiers du cinéma), Michael Mann, Mirages of the Contemporary (Flammarion), and Back to the Bone: John Carpenter 2025 (Magnani). Since 2019, he has directed the "Make My Day" collection at Studio Canal.
Release date: October 16, 2025
