Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer Review

• 23rd Oct 2011

Few films have provoked undiscussed media coverage yet have remained as controversial as John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Why it is so controversial is not necessarily due to the level of horror or violence rather than the way the violence is filmed, dealt with and morally ends which I will look at later in this review. The films background and origins are as fascinating as the film itself. The film was made in 1986 but was not released until 1990. The films director, John McNaughton, whose first film this was hails from Chicago and decided to film there on familiar turf. He was the 36-years-old when he made the film and for years had been drifting from job to job having graduated from art school as a sculptor. He also states on the DVDs extras (more of which later) that a man approached him in a bar who worked for a media distribution company Maljack and suggested he work for an audiovisual business and put him in touch with the Ali brothers, Waleed and Malik. This was the early eighties when the video market was booming and giving second life to forgotten classics, exploitation films and controversial films. After working with the Ali brothers for some time the pair offered to give him money to make a horror film with a suggested budget of $100,000. He had no script or idea until it was suggested to him that he make a film about the renowned serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas had been imprisoned in Texas for murders in that state and Florida when over a few years he murdered his mother following a terrible upbringing having been exposed to his mother having sex with clients and forcing him to watch. Released early he soon went on a killing spree with what was suggested was his homosexual lover Otis. Henry Lee then had a relationship with Otis’s 13-year-old cousin leading the pair to split. Lucas went on to murder her and another older woman who suspected him of murdering the girl. In prison Lucas bragged of many other murders, but it became unclear whether he was telling the truth and just enjoying the media attention. Never the less it transpired he many have been responsible for many murders that remain unaccounted for.

McNaughton did not necessarily want to make a biography of Henry Lee Lucas but instead he used the facts as the basis of his story. As already mentioned McNaughton chose to film in Chicago rather than the South; he kept the names of the characters (although Becky was not 13 as in reality and is depicted as Otis’s sister). McNaughton did, however, keep the background story (“I killed my Mom”) and that Becky was sexually abused from childhood; as well as Otis’s not so latent homosexuality are among other aspects which remain in the film. He presented the shots of individual’s murders as what he called tableaux in a sequence montage of short shots: a girl lying dead in a lake, by the side of the road, a murdered prostitute in a motel room etc.

The majority of the cast are made up of non-professionals apart from Michael Rooker as Henry, though this was his first film (by the time it was finally released he had already appeared in several films post Henry). Rooker is perfectly cast as he coldly plays the troubled protagonist, but the director and crew made many short cuts to save on the budget (borrowed a car and shot some scenes on an Illinois farm without permission) and spent a good portion of the budget on the prosthetic make-up and blood scenes in the more controversial scenes of the film such as the dismembering of Otis’s head.

McNaughton admitted that trying to get the film released or a distributor was more difficult than making the film itself. It took four years to get this film released. Some scenes did cause a good deal of consternation on its release. The scenes that stick out are the shot of the murdered prostitute with part of a broken bottle in her face, with a breast exposed and one wrist tied to a sink, the home invasion scene (more of which in a moment) and the murder of the electronics warehouse fence ending with a TV smashed over his head. The home invasion is perhaps the most troubling in the film depicting the scene in which Henry and Otis with their freshly stolen video camera film their random attack on a middle-class family – breaking the neck of a boy, stabbing the father and raping and murdering the mother. This scene is central to understanding why this film is so troubling. It is shot (by Rooker) in grainy black and white and this is what makes the film so harrowing. Later Otis and Henry are shown blankly watching their work on their TV. Don’t forget that this was made in the post age of the video nasty.

When it was finally released in 1990 it caused controversy with James Ferman and the BBFC promoting some cuts. It came out shortly before The Silence of the Lambs and a comparison between the two makes for interesting reading with the more stylised Lambs next to the cold dispassionate killing in Henry. However, the version presented here is the uncut version and because it was filmed in grainy 16mm and blown up to 32mm it wouldn’t benefit from any enhanced screening – Blu-ray or HDMI, but the new release by Studiocanal does benefit from a heap of extras including interviews with McNaughton, a documentary about Lucas (although it is out of date following the documentary’s making Lucas’s death sentence was commuted to a life sentence but he died in prison in 2001), a making of documentary, deleted scenes, a stills gallery and alternate takes, making this a definitive presentation. It’s also good to see that the cover sleeve is the original poster for the film with Henry dressed in a vest looking blankly at his reflection in the mirror. The film is as disturbing on revisiting it as it was on its original release when I rented it on its original VHS release in 1990.

Chris Hick