Movies Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Raw, Rural Horror
More than fifty years on, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre still feels like something you weren’t supposed to see. Tobe Hooper shot it in brutal Texas heat on grainy 16mm, and that grime is the whole point. There’s barely any blood on screen; the horror lives in the sunbaked dread of driving too far down the wrong road and running out of gas near people who live by no rules you understand. That specific fear, rural isolation curdling into something predatory, has haunted horror ever since. If that’s the nerve the film hit for you, here are six that press on it too, plus one recent title almost no one has caught.
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
Wes Craven’s desert nightmare is the closest sibling to Hooper’s film, and the two almost feel like they were carved from the same rock. A family takes a shortcut through the Nevada wasteland, breaks down miles from anywhere, and becomes prey for a clan living out past the edge of civilization. Craven strips it down to sun, sand and survival, and like Chain Saw it’s really about an ordinary family colliding with a monstrous one. The 2006 Aja remake is glossier and nastier, but the original’s cheapness is a feature, not a flaw.
Wrong Turn (2003)
Trade the flat Texas plains for the dense green of the West Virginia backwoods and you get this lean, mean little chase film. A group of twentysomethings gets stranded on a forgotten mountain road and hunted by inbred cannibals who know the terrain far better than they do. It’s more conventional than Chain Saw, leaning on solid practical gore from Stan Winston’s shop, but the DNA is unmistakable: leave the highway, lose the map, and the woods swallow you.
House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
Rob Zombie’s directorial debut wears its Hooper worship on its sleeve, right down to a doomed carload of kids poking around rural Texas for a local legend. It’s louder and more cartoonish than its inspiration, a fever dream of grindhouse color and screaming, and it won’t be for everyone. But when it locks into the Firefly family’s farmhouse, that queasy dinner-with-the-monsters energy from Chain Saw comes roaring back. Rough around every edge, and kind of glorious for it.
The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
Zombie’s follow-up is the better film by a wide margin, and it barely counts as horror. It flips the script and puts the Firefly clan on the run across a dusty, sun-blasted Southwest, turning the killers into the protagonists of a grimy 70s road movie. The result is closer in spirit to The Hills Have Eyes crossed with a Peckinpah western, but that heat-warped Americana dread ties it straight back to the original’s world. Mean, funny and weirdly mournful by the end.
Wolf Creek (2005)
The Australian outback stands in for the Texas backroad here, and it’s every bit as merciless. Three backpackers break down in the middle of nowhere and accept help from a friendly local bushman, which is exactly the wrong move. Greg McLean takes his time, letting the vast empty landscape do the early work before Mick Taylor turns the second half into something genuinely hard to sit through. Same core betrayal as Chain Saw: you’re stranded, someone offers a hand, and the hand belongs to a predator.
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
The outlier, and one of the best on the list. S. Craig Zahler’s slow-burn western spends most of its runtime as a patient, talky frontier drama before detouring into cave-dwelling cannibal horror so savage it recontextualizes everything before it. Kurt Russell leads a rescue party into troglodyte country, and the dread accumulates like dust. It’s not a slasher, but it shares Chain Saw‘s bone-deep sense of civilization thinning to nothing the further you ride from town.
The One Almost Nobody’s Caught
Here’s the film I keep quietly pointing people toward. Blood Star, a 2024 indie that slipped out with next to no marketing, is a desert-road psychological survival thriller directed by Lawrence Jacomelli, and it belongs on this list more than its total lack of buzz would suggest. It isn’t an A24 release and never pretends to be; it’s dustier and leaner than that, closer to a 1970s highway nightmare than anything polished. A woman ends up stranded on an empty Mojave stretch, and plain bad luck slowly hardens into something predatory. There’s no chainsaw and no farmhouse full of freaks, but it runs on the exact current Hooper tapped: the wrong road, no one coming, and the creeping certainty that you’re being watched.
What surprised me most is how it looks. Word is it was shot in roughly ten days by a crew you could fit in a van, and you’d never guess it. The desert photography is handsome in that bleached, horizon-goes-nowhere way, the kind of visual patience micro-budget genre films almost never manage. No cheap jump scares, just pressure that keeps tightening and a premise that gets worse the longer it sits with you. It feels like it should already have a small cult and simply hasn’t been found.
None of these will hand you the precise sweat-and-grain panic of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but they all understand the assignment: strand ordinary people where the rules don’t reach, and let the isolation do the killing. Start with whichever one takes you furthest off the map.
Blood Star is currently streaming on Apple TV and Amazon. If backroad dread and desert isolation are your thing, you can read more about the film and where to watch it over at bloodstarmovie.com or head straight to the watch page.