Tobe Hooper’s gonzo massacre movie set the template for so many horror films that were to follow – but retains a uniquely disturbing power all of its own

In 1974, Tobe Hooper released this intimately upsetting and disturbing horror: a gonzo-macabre masterpiece inspired by the true story of serial killer Ed Gein , who was arrested in 1957 for grisly atrocities in remote Wisconsin. (Texas sounds better in the title.)

Hooper’s minimalist shocker appeared just 14 years after Hitchcock’s sleek Psycho, which was also indirectly inspired by Gein (via the novel by Robert Bloch). Psycho is a far more refined variation on the Gein theme, more like Edgar Allan Poe. In contrast, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre feels utterly different: gritty, gloomy, social-realist; a no-budget account of how the Gein horror might have felt to those who actually encountered it. It feels closer, in its down-home style, to something like Barbara Loden’s Wanda , from 1970. Compared with the screeching slashers and their jump scares which it inspired, this is almost … well, not restrained exactly but more controlled, less generically self-aware, readier to defer its shocks. It is pre-formulaic. The first bizarre murder happens with no stabbing musical score on the soundtrack, with the camera positioned unresponsively at the other end of the room.

With Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness hitting UK cinemas next week, we ask where it features in the pantheon of anthology masterpieces

The Meaning of Life is probably closer to the world of TV sketch comedy, rather than ensemble movie, but the Pythons’ gang-show film was a box office smash and won the Grand Prix in Cannes in 1983 (while Víctor Erice’s The South and Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy got zip). With crazy grandiloquence, it took us through all the big questions of existence, and the tragicomic limits of physical pleasure were finally exposed by the restaurant scene in which Mr Creosote explodes. Like John Landis’s portmanteau comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie from 1977, this was full of very chancy, confrontationally bad-taste material that wouldn’t get on television then or now.

The message is clear but subtle in Christopher Murray’s anti-colonial fantasy which features an emanantly watchful performance from Valentina Véliz Caileo

Just as the 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent reversed the terms of the Aguirre-style colonialist expedition picture, this Chilean-Mexican-German collaboration (produced by Pablo Larraín) is a kind of inverted horror film that similarly draws on South American history. Where in western horror, Indigenous or pagan elements usually become demonised return-of-the-repressed fodder, in Chilean director Christopher Murray’s unsettling fantasy they are a source of identity, power and even reverence.

Sorcery is a 19th-century radicalisation story. On the rain-lashed island of Chiloé, Indigenous teenager Rosa (Valentina Véliz Caileo) works as a servant for German farmers; speaking their language and practising their Christian religion, she is cut off from her Huilliche roots. When all the homesteaders’ sheep die simultaneously, with twine braids found on their corpses, her father refuses to give up any culprits and paterfamilias Stefan (Sebastian Hülk) unleashes his hounds on him with lethal results. Sent to live with Mateo (Daniel Antivilo), an elder involved with Indigenous secret society La Recta Provincia, the orphaned Rosa senses the potency of their rituals and realises they could bring her justice.

‘I had no interest in teen vampire films and turned it down five times. But Joel Schumacher promised I wouldn’t have to wear the makeup and teeth, or have to fly around. Of course, he lied’

Joel Schumacher, the director, wanted me in the movie right from the first time we met. But the script I read was nothing like the magical movie it would become after rewrites and production, and I had no interest in teenage vampire films. So I turned it down about five times – but Joel was determined. He spent weeks explaining his vision, a mix of horror and comedy, and eventually wore me down. We made a deal: he promised I wouldn’t have to wear the makeup, the teeth or have to fly around. Of course, he lied.