At a time when the reputation of scary movies was much lower, pornography was being taken seriously. They shared some of the same artists, audiences and grimy theaters. His sitting ducks are making a low-budget pornographic movie inspired by the success of “Debbie Does Dallas.” It helps to know that “Chain Saw” was made by a seedy New York company, Bryanston Distributing, that was flush from the success of the famous sex film “Deep Throat.” The line between horror and porn was blurry in the 1970s. He can overdo it (we didn’t need the “Shining” reference), but while the contours of the plot are straight out of “Chain Saw” - city kids jump into a van heading into rural Texas before stumbling upon a house of horrors - he is smart enough to tell his own story. With these images, West is working the erogenous zones of horror fans. Rob Zombie’s gnarly Firefly trilogy (“ House of 1000 Corpses,” “ The Devils’ Rejects,” “ 3 From Hell”) and the original and remake of “The Hills Have Eyes” (both terrific) capture the relatable dread of a dysfunctional family, taken to a Grand Guignol extreme. The best movies made in the spirit of “Chain Saw” grasp that the source of its deepest madness is the family dynamics. It’s a deft, disquieting little shocker, but unlike the 1974 “Chain Saw,” which has an unhinged spirit that even after many viewings makes you think anything could happen, the twists in “Fresh” are a little too predictable to really jar sensibilities. But when the main character says he’s from Texas and his mother has died, horror die-hards will tense up in recognition. It takes places in a world seemingly distant from Texas massacres. More novel is the slickly entertaining “Fresh,” an urban horror story about the hell of modern dating in which a single woman meets the perfect guy, who it turns out isn’t. The result is a boringly rote series of slayings. It abandons the nuance of the original, adopting the Gleiberman view of Leatherface as a one-note killing machine. The recent Netflix reboot of “T exas Chainsaw” has the opposite problem. You can detect the influence of “Chain Saw,” however, in a spate of recent movies, including Ti West’s “X,” a thrilling new indie from A24 that captures the disreputable pleasures of 1970s horror with slickly modern refinement. Yet “Chain Saw” has been stubbornly hard to imitate in comparison with peers like “Night of the Living Dead” and “Halloween,” which spawned entire genres. Of the classic horror movies of its era, none is more revered among genre filmmakers. They spoke in vivid, awe-struck detail, as if recalling a religious epiphany. With its director, Tobe Hooper, shyly nibbling on his salad, everyone took turns describing the first time they watched this unlikely masterpiece. The one time I recall the mood turning solemn was when discussion shifted to “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974). Just as comedians tend to be more serious in person than you expect, horror artists are, generally speaking, very funny. A get-together of directors of scary movies, including Wes Craven, Eli Roth, Larry Cohen, Don Coscarelli and Robert Rodriguez, this event, semi-jokingly referred to as “the masters of horror dinner,” was giddily jovial. Fifteen years ago, I sat down with 20 or so of the most prolific serial killers in the world, responsible for hundreds of stabbings, decapitations and other unspeakable murders - and was absolutely charmed.
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