It’s been done, quite literally, to death. Yet with his first full-length motion picture, Marcus Nispel is out to prove that his improvised and improved take on an old formula can still scare audiences witless.

And this time, it works.

Nispel’s remake of the 1974 drive-in horror classic “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is downright terrifying. The director takes the audience on a back-country path straight into the basic psychology of horror.

Nispel’s version of the chainsaw-wielding antagonist “Leatherface” (Andrew Bryniarski), adorned in a human flesh mask, keeps the punishingly graphic gore spurting throughout. The character is filmed frighteningly well in nightmarish flashes of shadow. Here cinematographer Daniel Pearl (director of photography for the original “Massacre”) can be seen as one of the true stars of the movie.

Pearl is brilliant while creating tension through his careful manipulation of the lighting and backdrop.

Leatherface is spurned on by an equally upsetting cast of familial villains led by the sadistic investigations of Sheriff Hoyt, (R. Lee Ermey). Ermey’s bark is as fiercely frightening as it was in “Full Metal Jacket,” and his untrustworthy demeanor is truly bone-chilling.

Playing a nice parallel to the in-your-face horror of such male characters, is the veiled, suppressed evil of the feminine side of the Hewitt family. Here we have the standard “have a cup of poisoned tea while I’m falsely polite enough to hide my homicidal urges” type of villain as portrayed by Kathy Lamkin. This kind of subtle trepidation causes just as much audience palm sweat as the raucous blare of the title weapon, and reveals superb snippets of acting and directing.

Nispel delves deep within the dark themes of cannibalism, sadism and incest relentlessly to give the audience a stomach-churning glimpse at the face of human depravity. The director draws on the cinematic subtleties of many modern-day thrillers including “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Seven” to the point of slaying the original “Massacre” beyond recognition.

For classic film buffs this may seem blasphemous, but those critics should note the pointless tedium of shot-for-shot remakes such as Gus Van Sant’s 1998 version of “Psycho.”

Furthermore, the original was shot with an underlying theme pertinent to the era in which it was produced — long-haired flower children fighting for their survival against the familial unit. Nispel’s remake modernizes this theme to draw out more of a universally felt urban fear of savagely unrefined families living in the wooded American South.

While Jessica Biel is astonishingly sexy as Erin, the film’s heroine, she is unexpressive and brings little more to the film than eye candy. The rest of Biel’s distressed road trip crew is sufficiently acted, but their main purpose is to up the body count.

While “Massacre” is almost disgustingly blood-and-guts packed, this fresh take on an old classic should greatly please true horror film buffs.

Grade: B