A soundtrack of wildlife, drones and saucepans ensured the 1974 film became truly horrifying. Its co-creator recalls the can-do spirit that made it happen

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre arrived much like its hulking antihero, Leatherface: without warning and with a sickening blow to the skulls of unsuspecting audiences. Despite its bare-bones production and lack of actual gore, the 1974 movie carved a new path for horror film-making, and key elements were the eerie sound design and abstract score: perfect matches for the film’s red-raw storytelling and stark imagery. But despite its enduring influence, the soundtrack has never had an official release until now.

Put out by Waxwork Records, it has been painstakingly stitched together – rather like Leatherface’s horrific mask – from the original recordings, and it is startling: a cloying series of drones, scrapes, clanks and groans that draw a jagged line to genres like industrial, noise, dark ambient and musique concrète . “We really wanted the mind of the viewer to do some of the work rather than it being ‘here’s the Leatherface theme,’” says Wayne Bell, now 73, who originally composed it with director Tobe Hooper. “We loved the idea that our score tested the edge between sound and music. That boundary was a wonderful place to hang out.”

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From Matilda to Six, she is the movement director everyone wants so work with – and her work has lit up hit after smash hit. But, she says, it’s time this under-appreciated art received proper recognition

Ellen Kane is on a roll. When we speak, the choreographer and movement director has two shows running, Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre, and Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at the Donmar. She has just finished Why Am I So Single?, the follow-up from the writers of Six, the smash hit about Henry VIII’s wives, and she’s in rehearsals for the revival of Dear England, James Graham’s funny and stirring depiction of Gareth Southgate’s tenure as England manager. If you watched all those shows in a row, you would have no idea the same person had a hand in them all, such is the art of the movement director, a job that many may not even realise exists. But it’s an essential one.

“Outside actually directing a scene, everything that moves on the stage is usually done by me,” says Kane, chatting backstage at the National. That means any dance, obviously, but also scene transitions, characters getting from A to B, and working with actors on how they connect with the audience. She helps make visible a character’s emotional experience. “So that we, the audience, can feel it,” she says. “I love to feel. I can watch something and appreciate it, ‘Oh that’s beautiful.’ But do I leave moved?”

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The actor starred in the innuendo-laced comedy films as well as TV sitcoms including Porridge and The Likely Lads

Julian Holloway, who starred in eight Carry On films and was a regular in TV shows such as The Sweeney and Doctor Who, has died. He was 80.

In a statement to the Guardian, agents for the actor confirmed that Holloway died after a brief illness in a Bournemouth hospital on 16 February.

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Wigmore Hall, London
Schoenberg’s revolutionary work powered the new-music ensemble’s second Wigmore programme, based around 20th-century modernism

Founded by the composer and conductor Beat Furrer in 1985, Klangforum Wien is now regarded as one of Europe’s finest new-music ensembles. But, for its first visit to the Wigmore Hall in London, the Vienna-based chamber orchestra brought two programmes that focused on what was new a century ago, when, on either side of the first world war, the Austrian capital was the epicentre of modernism in music.

In the second of Klangforum’s concerts, though, only the work that ended the concert, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire truly belonged to that revolutionary movement. The first half had been made up of pieces by composers who were very much watchers from the sidelines of modernism, who borrowed some of its tendencies without fully embracing them.

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Starring John Travolta as a loan shark who lands himself in Hollywood, this noirish satire is pure pastiche. Like its lead, it’s a sucker for the movies

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There’s a scene in Get Shorty when the mob-connected loan shark Chili Palmer, played by John Travolta, watches a screening of Orson Welles’ classic noir Touch of Evil. Coming out of it, he tells the actor Karen Flores (Rene Russo): “You know, Welles didn’t even want to do this movie, he had a contract he couldn’t get out of. But sometimes you do your best work when you have a gun to your head.”

The essential joke of Get Shorty is that Hollywood often operates like organised crime. Based on a novel by Elmore Leonard – the US author whose works also inspired everyone from Quentin Tarantino to Steven Soderbergh – Get Shorty follows Chili from Miami to Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Trying to persuade the B-movie schlock producer Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman) to pay a gambling debt, Chili ends up pitching him an idea for a movie.

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The Oscar-nominated actor has said he is attempting to be more candid about his former co-star’s alleged behaviour

Guy Pearce, the actor Oscar-nominated for his role in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, has opened up about his experiences when working with Kevin Spacey on 1997 film LA Confidential.

Pearce had previously been oblique about his time with Spacey, who has been dogged by accusations of sexual misconduct, which Spacey has always denied, calling him “a handsy guy” in 2018. But speaking on Hollywood Reporter’s podcast Awards Chatter , the actor said he was now attempting to be franker about his co-star’s alleged behaviour.

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The multi-Oscar-nominated director has said many of his fellow contenders are experiencing similar financial difficulties

Brady Corbet, the 36-year-old director behind Oscar season’s most acclaimed film, has said he – and many of his fellow nominees – are experiencing severe financial difficulties.

Corbet said he “made zero dollars” from his three-and-a-half hour drama about a Hungarian architect in postwar America.

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Fares is a refreshingly unpredictable voice, starting as a film director before moving into games; now, he says, working on a movie would be ‘a vacation’

There aren’t many video game developers as outspoken as Hazelight’s Josef Fares. Infamous for his expletive-laden viral rants at livestreamed awards shows , Fares is a refreshingly firy and unpredictable voice in an all too corporate industry. As he puts it, “It doesn’t matter where I work or what I do, I will always say what I want. People say to me that that’s refreshing – but isn’t it weird that you cannot say what you think in interviews? Do we live in a fucking communist country? Obviously, you have got to respect certain boundaries, but to not even be able to express what you think personally about stuff? People are too afraid!”

Yet while gamers know him as a grinning chaos merchant and passionate ambassador of co-op gameplay, in Fares’ adopted homeland of Sweden, he is best known as an award-winning film director. His goofy 2000 comedy Jalla! Jalla! was a domestic box office success, while his 2005 drama Zozo was a more introspective work about his childhood experience of fleeing the Lebanese civil war.

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Alexis Lanternier, chief executive of the French streaming service, says it can compete with bigger rivals by rewarding the real musicians its subscribers want to support

It is reassuring to find that even the boss of a music streaming company can have his listening app commandeered by his children.

Nestled among Alexis Lanternier’s top picks on Deezer is the Aladdin soundtrack, fighting for competition with Creedence Clearwater Revival and rapper Jul, the most listened-to artist in France.

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