Film
Beyond the Canon: Ravenous + The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
- 7PM
Dir. Antonia Bird
With Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, David Arquette
1999, 100min, 35mm
On the eve of the California Gold Rush, a disgraced soldier is dispatched to a remote outpost in the Sierra Nevadas, where he finds himself in the midst of a coven of cast-off men who gradually develop a taste for human flesh. Mixing pitch-black comedy with unrepentant gore, director Antonia Bird fashions a totally twisted, wickedly subversive cannibal comedy that deserves to be more than just a cult classic. Plus: a one-of-a-kind score by composer Michael Nyman and Blur’s Damon Albarn.
Dir. Tobe Hooper
With Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Gunnar Hansen
1974, 84min, DCP
One of the most notorious and influential horror films of the 1970s introduced the world to the legend of Leatherface, the power tool-wielding cannibal psychopath who ensnares a group of unlucky friends deep in the bloody heart of Texas. Steeped in grindhouse grime, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre does what the best exploitation cinema does: reflects the social climate of its time—in this case Vietnam/Watergate-era nihilism—with a transgressive fearlessness.
In recent years female filmmakers have taken cannibalism far from Chainsaw’s Texas backcountry, infusing the taboo practice with the mysticism, eroticism, and charismatic seduction most often associated with vampirism, but none see the perverse humor in this hunger quite like Antonia Bird’s Ravenous
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