A24 and Glen Powell are reviving The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a TV show — and it’s got me revved up for all of the wrong reasons
We are no strangers to remakes and adaptations. Horror games have been getting a lot of treatment on the big screen lately, including the box office success of Markiplier Iron lung and the new liminal horror film Exit 8. The genre is booming and most of the time I’m excited to see new takes on things.
I’ve also really enjoyed recent installments of long-running film franchises like X saw and the 2018 version of Halloweentwo surprise hits that I didn’t expect.
Adding Too Much Backstory Could Spoil The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Story
Make no mistake, horror sometimes benefits from expanding on the source material. IT: Welcome to Derry is a great example of how this worked, as Stephen King’s novel was huge and Pennywise has been around for a long time, giving a TV show the opportunity to explore a completely different era.
My concern regarding Texas Chainsaw Massacre get a longer series is that Leatherface is more exciting when he’s a mysterious character. The franchise is already very large, with nine films, a comic book, a novel and two video game adaptations. By adding a TV show to the mix, it feels like we’re just exploiting an idea that has nothing left to give.
The most recent entry in the franchise, simply called Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), was a train wreck. I hated it, and so did many others, with critics giving it a 31% Tomatometer rating. Its audience score is even lower, at 25%.
Leatherface’s origin story has also been changed over the years, so the timeline has become quite complicated. The TV show has a lot of work to do to give audiences a satisfying glimpse into this world, and I fear they won’t be able to do it, given how each movie has offered its own, sometimes contradictory, take on Leatherface’s story.
There are just too many Texas Chainsaw Massacre already there for me to be excited about the show. As always, I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I don’t think they’ll be able to match the incredible 70s film, which was groundbreaking at the time and still influences filmmakers today.
We don’t know much about the TV series yet, but I hope at least they try to explore new things, maybe even beyond Leatherface and the Sawyer family. But my first impressions aren’t great and we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
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