Beginning with the oft-told anecdote of director Tobe Hooper fantasizing about crowd control via a certain gasoline-powered tool during a hectic holiday rush at Montgomery Ward (and thus planting the seeds that soon sprouted into an eventual horror classic), Joseph Lanza’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Film That Terrified a Rattled Nation is hardly the first nonfiction book about the 1974 movie. It is, however, a unique one. Lanza treads territory that prior TCM texts simply weren’t interested in exploring: the film as a result of American’s turbulent, troubled times. Those days were wrought with immense societal upheaval and disruption that arguably strengthened the movie’s effectiveness in striking chords and stirring up as much shit as it scared out of audience members.

In examining how the “post-’60s version of Hansel and Gretel” was shaped by the country’s mood at the time, the author does so more or less scene by scene, placing each chapter against a different aspect that was in the air: for example, the astrology craze, the dangers of hitchhiking, a nationwide beef shortage, the rise of porno chic, the birth of the serial killer. It’s a fascinating approach to considering a famous film, and an introductory page listing a “supporting cast” hints at the book’s depth and breadth: Johnny Carson, Richard M. Nixon, Alice Cooper, Linda Lovelace, the Zodiac Killer and the Ray Conniff Singers among them. But those just scratch the surface; among those unlisted but who come into play as the pages turn include Cormac McCarthy, Patty Hearst, Edmund Kemper, Charlie Chan, Barney Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Jim Jones, the NRA and the Loud family.

Lanza brings the same incisiveness he has to his previous subjects (from enfant terrible Ken Russell to ear-terrorizing elevator music), leaving us with a whip-smart whipcrack of a read: a mix of “making of,” film criticism, true crime, pop culture history, sociology and a historical zip through the zeitgeist during an era of pivotal uncertainty, when Americans went looking for the America they once knew … and found it dangling from a meathook. —Rod Lott

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While I am old enough to remember true double features being advertised, I unfortunately am young enough to never have had the good fortune to attend. By “true,” I borrow the criteria used by author Bryan Senn, referring to studios’ or distributors’ intentional pairings, rather than those at the whim of a theater owner or two-for-one reissues. This keeps his book on the subject, “Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills!”, at a manageable length. So does limiting coverage to the genres and date range set by the book’s subtitle, Horror and Science Fiction Double Features, 1955-1974. Mind you, even with those filters in place, the contents make up yet a still whoppin’ 430-ish pages.

As he did with such previous works as The Most Dangerous Cinema and The Werewolf Filmography, Senn takes a focused look at a niche corner of cult movies and leaves no set of sprockets unchecked. Following an enlightening introduction of how and why the double feature came to be, he takes the reader on a chronological tour of presumably ever cinematic twofer, 147 in all. He not only reviews each picture individually, but even how well the films meshed — or mismatched, “like a schnitzel taco.”

As always, his reviews are as thorough and informed as they are entertaining. While the McFarland & Company book more than delivers as film criticism, I find “Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills!” to be more valuable as a historical document on two fronts, appropriately enough. The first is simply in preserving the memories of Hollywood’s now-abandoned practice as generously illustrated through movie posters, newspaper ad mats and PR ballyhoo. If the posters and ads are a treat (and they are), perhaps best represented by the conjoining on the book’s cover (the iconic grindhouse one-two gut punch of I Eat Your Skin and I Drink Your Blood), the latter is even more so, represented with such images of such get-’em-in-the-door gimmicks as “zombie eyes” for Plague of the Zombies and a Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake kids’ mask.

The second front is in providing biographical sketches of — and subsequently saluting — largely unsung B-movie “heroes” like Teenagers from Outer Space auteur Tom Graeff (aka Jesus Christ II) or taxi driver Leonard Kirtman, whose double bill of Carnival of Blood and Curse of the Headless Horseman had to the most surreal experiences for theatergoers among all revisited in Senn’s worth-ever-penny wonder. —Rod Lott

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