As much as any surrealist arthouse flick, Texas Chain Saw feels like a nightmare made real, an inescapable but entirely authentic vision of pure hell.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 12, 2024

What makes it so terrifying is how awfully real it all feels.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 25, 2024

A visceral nightmare that you can smell as much as see. The sound design, editing and unrelenting extended climactic chase are harrowing and unnerving. A classic, but not one I can revisit often

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 9, 2024

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a perfect horror film. In many ways, it might just be a perfect film, full stop. At 82 nail-biting minutes, there isn't a wasted second in this nightmarish thrill that is as horrifying today as it was 50 years ago.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 7, 2024

Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a 50-year-old movie, but the horror classic has lost none of its devastating power in the interim.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 2, 2024

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre brings genuine horror back to the cinema. Be warned: its Gothic realism reminds us how rarely screen mayhem actually evokes real fear and revulsion in these times when "murder by numbers" is an everyday news item.

| Sep 30, 2024

Everything about the film is inept. Two of the girls get a chance to do a lot of screaming. I could have screamed, too, for wasting my time.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 30, 2024

An inexcusably lurid piece of junk from a producer-director named Tobe Hooper, who knows his craft, but must have been desperate to want to make his mark with such a raw and gory outlay of baroque horror.

| Sep 30, 2024

Besides pandering to the worst kind of sadistic taste, "Massacre" is just plain bad.

| Sep 30, 2024

The foreground becomes comically absurd in its congested derivation of gags to make our flesh creep. So the film is neither sickening nor thrilling nor artistically interesting.

| Sep 30, 2024

It doesn't help much to know that this revolting movie is based on an actual event in Texas less than three years ago.

| Sep 30, 2024

The movie chloroforms sensitivity, has no point to make, is so exultant about disease and fright that you're finally forced to question the morality of the moviemakers.

| Sep 30, 2024

Tobe Hopper's 1974 chestnut is one of the standard bearers of low-budget horror, and remarkably, it hasn't lost an iota of its chill factor in the half century since its release.

| Sep 24, 2024

There have been umpteen imitations, remakes, and sequels since, some interesting in their own right, but none a patch on the original.

| Sep 3, 2024

All modern movies owe a debt to the late Tobe Hooper’s grimy, gruesome, and ultimately graceful gem of a horror film. Not only did it carve out its place in the slasher canon, but genre cinema itself will forever live in the shadow it still casts.

| Jul 25, 2024

No other later horror film captured so well the strangeness of living through a long night of evil and emerging into bright sunlight, with its tacit promise of restorative justice or virtue, or just normality.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 13, 2024

Under its brutal dissembling of anthropocentrism and customary moral divides, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre points to the terror of a harsh and uncaring universe.

| Dec 12, 2023

Along with 'Night of the Living Dead' and 'The Last House on the Left', it ushered in the modern age of horror in the 1970s. It is one of the great transgressive American horrors and is still the film upon which Hooper's reputation is built.

| Oct 27, 2023

That sound, for those who have heard it, is unforgettable, and the sheer shock of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remains an all-time high for the genre.

| Jul 18, 2023

a masterclass in how to do unrelenting horror right—how to use every tool at your disposal to grip your audience and not let them go

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 19, 2023