Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986, not fully released till 1989)

 

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986, not fully released till 1989)

 

We have an unhealthy attraction to Serial Killers in this country. The FBI estimates that at any given time, there are maybe 200 active in a nation of 350 million, meaning there are two and one half times as many active Congresspersons than Serial Killers, and let’s be honest, how many of you can name more famous Serial Killers than Congresspersons?

 

Horror films about Serial Killers can be traced back to the dawn of horror cinema with “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920) probably being the first. For the next 85‑odd years, though they were popular, there were precious few attempts to make the ones in cinema reflect the ones in the real world. This film changed that and brought about a sea‑change in other filmmakers’ perception of the subject. Since “Henry¼” there have been a string of biopics about real‑world Serial Killers that at least attempt to be thoughtful and realistic, and sometimes they succeed, notably “Monster” (2003) which was an incredible critical and financial success, garnering its lead Charlize Theron and Oscar, Golden Globe, and SAG award.

 

“Henry...” draws specific inspiration from a real‑world killer but, unlike “Monster,” and most of the others, it made a courageous choice – though put the villain in the center of everything, it refused to make him in anyway sympathetic or even likable. “Henry¼” is no “anti‑hero” in the tradition sense, he’s flat-out loathsome, but Director John McNaughton (who coauthored the script with Richard Fire) trusted that if that audience were shown something that appeared truthful and that they had never saw before, they would find it compelling.

 

The factual source of this fictional story was Henry Lee Lucas, and though the film’s references to him are quite explicit (name and other biographical details) I admire that the filmmakers were honest in admitting it was ultimately a fiction; but then again, they really had no choice. You see Lucas, after an arrest for possession of an illegal firearm and interrogation for the one murder he was actually suspected of, started confessing to many more. He ultimately was convicted of 11, but law enforcement cleared a total of 213 cases based on his confessions, while Lucas claimed he killed as many as 3,000, a flatly impossible number, and was proved to be an exceptionally skilled liar and manipulator, garnering preferential treatment based on his fiction‑driven cooperation; yet he still possessed knowledge in some cases only the killer could've known. It will forever be debated if all Lucas’ victims are now known, or if he’s actually guilty of all those attributed to him.

 

Complicating the establishment of true facts was his friendship with Otis Toole, another convicted Serial Killer with a penchant for false confessions. Toole’s equivalent character in this film is, not surprisingly, named Otis. The film, to keep its story straightforward and coherent, pulled from a Lucas fact here, a Lucas fantasy there, hammered it all out into something linear, and then had the fictional Otis befall a blunter fate than real‑world Otis Toole.

 

The film’s realism earned it both instant admiration and controversy, it had to wait three years before wide release because of a debate with the MPAA rating system (while restricted to midnight screenings, Village Voice's Elliott Stein called it one of the best American films of the year). It was ultimately released unrated, because there was there seemed no way out, I’ve read the MPAA claimed that they "wouldn't know where to begin cutting."

 

Yes, it’s bloody as all hell and some of the violence is of a sexual nature, but other bloodier films passed through far more easily; though in those cases the violence was camp, while with “Henry’s¼” the telling and demonstrations are deliberately flat and unforgiving, making it many times more brutal than the cheerful gore of “Evil Dead” (1981) which featured buckets of blood, the explicit dismemberment of four characters, and a woman raped by a tree.

 

This was Director, McNaughton’s second film, following the obscure True-Crime Documentary, “Dealers in Death” (1984), he also had made a few obscure Music Videos. A few years prior, he dropped out of the corporate world and started banging around as a Carnie, a Sailboat Builder, and Bartender in various parts of the USA. He convinced Waleed Ali, a Chicago-based home video executive, to finance a Horror film; Ali was apparently not expecting anything like this, he might have been looking forward to something more akin to “Evil Dead.” McNaughton has gone on to be a major Director, with several films and TV shows notable for their excellence and originality, and several notable for their awfulness.

 

 

Roger Ebert, who gave the film great praise while in the same breath expressed great reservations, summarized it well, “[S]ome said the film was too violent and disgusting to be endured. Others said it was justified because of its uncompromising honesty in a world where most horror films cheapen death by trivializing it. The division seemed to be between those who felt the film did its job brilliantly, and those who felt its job should not have been done at all.”

 

I suspect the revulsion that this film inspired is significantly born of the fact that it pretends to refuse to Moralize or Judge; though it was a fiction, it took the, clearly disingenuous, pose of total objectivity in its documentation. It actually does Moralize and Judge, just subversively. Among the cast of losers, it gives us one character a bit more human, and through her, shows us the cost of being inobservant and passive towards Evil. I’ll get back to that. Also, I’m a horror fan, and I’m more than familiar with fake Moralizations in films that actually celebrate the sins they document, and I responded positively to the lack of that specific brand of disingenuousness here.

 

Ah, yes. But we’re not all rational, are we? Henry Lee Lucas is real enough, isn’t his reality proof of the need to Moralize maybe a little harder?

 

Ah, no. With a beast like Henry, it is unlikely that Moralizing would really matter.

 

This is the story of a completely empty soul. He must be driven by an intense compulsion, but he’s long past the stage of being a conflicted man‑child scared of his evil like with George Romero’s Serial Killer, “Martin” (1977); for Henry, killing has become a way of life, a shockingly indifferent way of relieving tension. He kills not only too much, but too casually, in much the same way that lost men in dive bars drink too much. Otis woops in triumph with each new experience, while Henry is all business, but what kinda of business is it really? What does he gain? It’s not really financial gain, he just can’t stop, and he’s long stopped asking himself why.

 

It was filmed it on the minuscule budget of $125,000, using unknown actors from Chicago’s Organic Theater Company. In the title role, Michael Rooker, proved capable of delivering a monotone with compelling intensity. He’s gone on to have a significant film career (he played villains in "Mississippi Burning" (1988) and "Sea of Love"(1989) and re‑achieved cult‑status as Merle on TV’s “Walking Dead” (first aired in 2010)).

 

Tom Towles plays the less mature predator Otis and accomplishes something remarkable: he’s a far more conventional loser than Henry when he became Henry’s student in the art of senseless stranger‑murder; in doing so he normalizes the attraction to blood lust to the audience. Henry is something special, but Otis wholly occupies his fairly conventional, bleak, economically bereft landscape. As he’s both unexceptional and so easily converted, he’s more a statement on the normalization of violence in a disintegrating society than Henry. Towles never became the star that Rooker did, but he has built a substantial film resume.

 

The third central character is Tracy Arnold as Otis' sister Becky, inspired by real-world Ottis Toole’s niece Frieda Powell. Becky is a teenager working as a stripper, she had been sexually abused by her father, physically abused by her husband, and moved in with Otis for shelter, only to find Otis has a sexual interest in her she finds repugnant. Life had left her longing for stability without having a clue what it looked like, and incapable of making normal, self‑preserving judgments. She looks at Henry’s emotional deadness and mistakes it for Stoic strength. She does not run from Henry when he matter‑of‑factly describes how he killed his own mother. She also doesn’t seem to notice that he himself is confused by the facts of his own crime (deft reference to Real-World Lucas’ dissembling confessions, but as it happens, his murder of his own mother is not in dispute).  Hell, she doomed herself the moment she said, with complete sincerity, that Henry was a “real gentleman.” Both Becky and real‑world Powell suffered the same pathetic fate (Powell’s murder is another one of that is not in dispute). Arnold received great praise for this, her first film role, but according to IMDB, has worked only sporadically since.

 

The opening of the film is a montage of victims and then there are more after Henry chooses Otis as a protégé. Henry’s got rules for killing and discusses at length how he has gotten away with so much murder for so long: he carefully avoids a "modus operandi" that can allow the police to tie the various corpses together; he’s never lives in the one place for too long, so if police ever realize they're dealing with a serial killer he’s already gone; etc. I can’t think of another movie Psycho so pragmatic; I know a lot of people were offended that part of this film was essentially a how‑to manual.

 

Notable kills include when Henry and Otis pretend to have car trouble and then Henry shoots the first Good Samaritan that pulls over.

 

The most notorious is a home invasion and exceptionally cruel family elimination that they videotape to watch for their own entertainment later (that one was the center of their problems with the MPAA, but certainly not the only problem). We know it’s a fiction, but the style is akin to a cheaply made documentary, so we feel like we’re watching a snuff film. In this, the movie indicts the voyeuristic audience, making all who watch feel unclean. This is reinforced when we find ourselves watching Henry and Otis, watching themselves, reveling in their kills.

 

The atmosphere of utter desolation and it is unrelentingly ugly, not only the violence, but every character, and every setting.

 

It’s also a masterpiece.

 

Trailer:

 

Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer Trailer 1990 - YouTube