If you’re like me — that is, barely able to keep up with the new movies and DVDs, thus without the luxury to dip back into the past — than you probably haven’t seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in a long time. I know I haven’t. Therefore the film came as a renewed surprise. Not only was it even better than I remembered it, but the film is surprisingly, at least by today’s standards, minimal in its violence and gore. What TCSM does accomplish, however, and still effectively, is to create a mood, at atmosphere of unrelenting terror.

Joe Bob Briggs has probably written the definitive history-analysis of TCSM, reprinted and expanded for his book, Profoundly Disturbing, and there is at least one whole book, an oral history, dedicated to the film ( The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Companion, by Stefab Jaworzyn, from Titan books), and Robin Wood has explored its implications as far back as the early 1980s. All that I can do, on the occasion of the film’s reissued on DVD by Dark Sky Films in a two disc ultimate edition, restored and re-mastered according to the box (street date Tuesday, September 26, $29.95), is to explore some of its discreet effects.

Joe Bob points out that TCSM reverses the traditional trajectory of cautionary tales people watched in the first part of the century, in films such as Sunrise, i.e., that the country is pure and that the city is corrupt and destructive. Here, a band of teens take a trip into the country and are, mostly, destroyed by the corruption and isolation of the vast plains of Texas. Briggs might have added that in its way TCSM is a film soleil, that is, a horror noir like Val Lewton’s horror noirs, but set in the bright sunshine of the suddenly ominous great outdoors, with lawn mowers in the background and breezes rustling the hay and the wash drawing on a line. Very little of TCSM actually takes place in the dark, indeed even indoors. Cars, woods, country roads — these are the sites of most of TCSM‘s horrific events.

Not only is the film a horror soleil, but it is a comedy. As with Hitchcock’s Psycho, there are in jokes, perhaps put in place to relieve the tension of the set. But ultimately like horror films, or at least the best horror films, are really comedies, or, in the case of Frankenstein, tragi-comedies. In fact I might be willing to argue that the greatest horror film of all time is Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, because it so explicitly a balancing act between authentic humor and legitimate horror.

In TCSM, the whole of the state is nuts. The film starts out with eerie noises (the film’s music and sound production is superb, one is delighted to be reminded), and a man is apparently creating a sculpture out of recently unearth human parts, the same incident reported on the news simultaneously. Soon we learn that the whole of Texas is crazy, and the film creates a mood that links the current events of the film with Charles Whitman and the JFK assassination. This is a state, in the film’s view, in which bored citizens start visiting graves when the desecration hits the news, turning the event into the occasion for a festival. The scuzzy man (Edwin Neal) who created the body part art gets into the teen’s van shortly thereafter and scares the heck out of them with his odd way of talking and his ritual worship of and fascination with blood (yet he is also strangely appealing to at least one of the passengers).

One of the best sequences of brooding suspense occurs when two of the kids make their way at last to the house of horror (in the past a neighbor of relatives of some of the kids). As they trod up through the yard to the house, they pass benign house hold items, yet a buzzing in the air is ominous, and The 2003 remake produced by Michael Bay got this part of the film just right.

The comedy elements of the film come into full view, as it were, behind closed doors, where the family is truly horrific, as well as unpredictable, and funny in their outrageous way, bickering as if they were a normal American family, and didn’t have bones and bodies and stuff corpses littering the rooms. The effect of the film lingers for hours, if not years, later, as Sally (Marilyn Burns) manages to escape but is reduced to a quivering heap, while the Chainsaw family is injured but still there. Tobe Hooper and his collaborators leave it there, stopping in media res as so many subsequent horror films were to do, hinting at sequels and letting the horror living beyond any false conclusions on the screen.

Dark Sky offers up this DVD of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the film’s fourth iteration in the medium) in a widescreen anamorphic, 1.78:1 frame taken from the original 16mm elements. The disc has subtitles in English and Spanish under English, Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, and English Dolby Digital 1.0 tracks.

Disc one of the two disc set has several supplements, beginning with a new audio commentary by actors Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Allen Danziger, and art designer Robert A. Burns, which is moderated and highly informative (two of the participants later died). The disc also reprises an earlier commentary with director Tobe Hooper, cinematographer Daniel Pearl, and actor Gunnar Hansen. The supplements conclude with trailers, and TV and radio spots.Disc two includes the 73 minute documentary “Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth” plus the 74 minute documentary “Flesh Wounds,” which would tell you all there is to know about the film were it not for the existence of a third making of doc out that not included on this box. In other extras, Gunnar Hansen takes the viewer on a tour of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre house, and the disc ends with deleted scenes and outtakes, a blooper reel, a stills gallery, and even outtakes from “The Shocking Truth,” which provide even more information.

I had the chance to interview Gunnar Hansen via email on the occasion of the film’s 32 anniversary release. Hansen, who was born in Iceland, is now a poet and editor living in Maine, with a sideline in acting and documentary making. Here are the results of the interview:

What is the role of the horror film in mass culture these days? And if that role has changed in 30 years, how has it altered?

These days horror films are big again, with bigger and bigger budgets, after a long period of decline. I don’t think that horror ever declined for real fans, but it certainly did for the general public. I think these cycles of interest are what horror has to suffer through. At the time Chainsaw came out, horror movies were pretty much moribund after a couple of brilliant flashes in the 1960s — Psycho and Night of the Living Dead. Chainsaw changed all that. Horror movies got interesting again. Then as the cycle came all the way around, most horror fillms started getting dull again. (Call me old fashioned, but Scream just doesn’t do it for me.). Now, finally, we seem to be in a strong revival, and once again horror films are back into the mass culture. What excites me about this is that their popularity means that maybe soon a new Tobe Hooper will come along and redefine horror again. It’s about time.

What do you think of the fact that the movie is both a cult hit among horror fans and a darling of high brow critics such as Robin Wood? It suggests that despite its roots in horror it has great universal appeal.

I’m glad to see that the movie holds up well for both ends of the critical spectrum. From a horror fan’s point of view, it delivers the goods — it is disturbing and scary and entertaining. At the same time, for the critic, it has resonance (as a critic might say). It can be seen as being about more than just the surface story, and it has enough substance (and technical niceties) to it that it bears up to close examination. It’s well constructed and compelling — and it is appealing on so many levels. Rex Reed called it the scariest movie he had ever seen. At the same time there were plenty of people who hated the movie. In 1977, Harper’s published an article called “The Pornography of Violence,” in which the writer called Chainsaw, “A vile little piece of sick crap with literally nothing to recommend it.” And this kind of attention, of course, only gave it more exposure and extended its audience. But it’s funny to me that so many high-brow critics now want to claim it as their own. I have read articles saying, in effect, “When Chainsaw came out, it was almost universally ignored. Only a few of us perceptive film theorists understood its depth.” Which of course is a load of road apples. The movie was a hit with the public from the first day; the high-brow film academics had to play catch-up.

Since you are masked throughout the movie, I imagine that few people “recognize” you on the street or within the biz. Has that been a help or a hindrance in your subsequent career?

I don’t think that the mask has meant much one way or another for my career. (It has, though, been a convenience, since I like not being recoginized on the street.) I never really intended to have a career as an actor. I tried out for the part of Leatherface because I was curious to learn about what it was like to work on a movie. Once the movie came out, I continued to pursue a writing career. The mask didn’t affect that. But, of course, Chainsaw’s success meant I was getting offered new roles. I finally gave in, and in 1987 started working in films again. And, again, the mask didn’t matter. What mattered was that I had played in a very successful horror movie, and I was being offered horror roles. And that was just fine with me.

The cult flavor of Chain must have taken all of you by surprise. By this time, though, over 30 years later, do you wish the film would just go away?

Yes, Chainsaw’s cult following really did surprise me. I had hoped that the movie would be successful enough that after a few years a few hard-core fans would remember it. I never imagined more for it. All these years later, though, I really don’t wish the movie would go away. I’m proud of it and my chance to be part of it. Its cult status has allowed me to act in other films and now and then attend a horror fan convention. And at the same time, I am able to do the other work I love — writing.

Who is your favorite poet? If there is only one. Or, rather, Who is your favorite poet right now?

Right now it’s probably Wallace Stevens. But there are others whose names have been popping up lately: Andrew Marvel, Donald Hall, Philip Larkin.

Who are some of your favorite writers in general?

Non-fiction writers: Bruce Chatwin, E.B. White, John McPhee. I don’t know whether I have favorite fiction writers, other than the obvious, Herman Melville. Some favorite novels include Par Lagerkvist’s The Sybil, Jerzy Kosinski’s Painted Bird, and Gabriel Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Which is worse: pretending to kill people with a chainsaw, or editing the copy of writers for publication?

Editing copy. At least bad copy does now and then make me dream of oiling-up the saw.

Once you got into it, what was one big thing about the movie business that took you by surprise?

I assume we’re talking about the movie business, rather than movie making. So often it seems to me that people in the business really don’t say what they mean. You either learn quickly to devine the meanings, or you spend a lot of time wondering what really got said at that last meeting. To slightly rephrase George Burns, “The secret to success in Hollywood is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

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