The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Unlike any horror film before it, and often attempted by every horror film after it, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre truly strives to terrify its audience through a disturbing and depraved sense of fantastic realism.

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

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.

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.