Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

One of the most impressive directorial debuts of recent years, John McNaughton's chilling study (1986) of an inimical, relentless serial murderer creates a provocative and affecting film. While staying at the Chicago apartment shared by Otis (Tom Towles) and his timid sister Becky (Tracy Arnold), Henry (Michael Rooker) slowly draws his old prison buddy into a dark, obsessive world of casual murder. The violent images are at first oblique: Henry's past victims shown as a series of grotesque tableaux, accompanied by the echoing sounds of their death struggles. The violence later becomes graphic, but what makes it so disturbing, at times profoundly affecting, is the detached tone McNaughton maintains throughout. Whether presenting a halting conversation or a scene of invidious violence, the camera observes these events with an unrelenting gaze. Even so, this amoral tone and semi-documentary look are given an extra, stylised dimension by precise framing and skilful lighting techniques.

Michael Rooker's performance achieves a frightening intensity. Despite charm of sorts, Henry is a baleful killer for whom murder and taking a cold beer out of the fridge are analogous events. Co-scriptwriter Richard Fire's terse, acute dialogue achieves what McNaughton has called 'the poetry of idiocy', with Otis asking, 'Where you goin'?' and Henry replying, 'Nowhere. You wanna come?' A remote possibility of redemption seems to be offered by Henry's tentative relationship with the fragile Becky, but even this faint glimmer of hope is extinguished by a devastating, downbeat ending. Ultimately Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a film of ferocious and haunting power.

Henry was filmed on a budget of $125,000 during the winter of 1985-86 in the grey slush half-light, wet and isolated anonymous no-place locations of Chicago's freeways, downtown alleys and drab apartments. McNaughton examines the complex and innately contradictory pathology of a man for whom killing is not a crime but simply a way of passing time and relieving boredom and yet simultaneously displays an unusual capacity for humanity. The film's introduction of Henry shows him thanking a waitress: 'Real nice smile you got there', he says before hopping into his car in search of a potential victim.

The plot trigger is the arrival of Otis's sister Becky, a topless dancer from the South who wants to find a respectable job and send for her daughter; her husband is in jail on a murder rap. Otis treats his sister with barely concealed contempt and an undercurrent of incestuous lust – though 'kindly' Henry aims to see he doesn't follow through on this impulse. As the three share meals and conversation, McNaughton elaborates inclusive background detail. Becky was abused sexually by her father, Otis has unreciprocated desire for a high-school boy to whom he sells marijuana, Henry at fourteen, killed his mother, a hooker who dressed him as a girl and forced him to watch her in bed with johns. In less skilled hands this psychological detailing might destabilize the narrative balance, but McNaughton acutely and sensitively refuses to condescend to the intensely damaged characters he depicts or redeem them. His tone is disengaged but never dispassionate. Tracy Arnold, in a delicate and acute performance, makes Becky's need for connection palpable. Sensing nothing of Henry's current murderous proclivities, she sees him as a lifeline. As the film reaches its dramatic conclusion, McNaughton exposes a world stripped down and bleached out of recognisable standards. 'I love you, Henry", says Becky as she drives off with him to start what she hopes is a new life. But for Henry, love is impossible. He remains forever affectless, impersonal.

The catalyst for 'Henry' was a TV interview with real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who claimed to have murdered 360 people. McNaughton says: 'Henry was slow-talking and kind of strange looking, but he had this sort of dumb charm. And it was because he had this kind of charm that he had been able to get close enough to people to slaughter them. So I immediately thought, here was real-life horror.' Originally, McNaughton and his producer Steven Jones thought of making a semi-documentary film – 'A sort of week in the life of a serial killer' – but when scriptwriter Richard Fire and cast members Michael Rooker, Tracy Arnold and Tom Towles (from Chicago's Organic Theatre Company) became involved, what had now become an ensemble effort took on a more structured and stylised form. The intention from the outset was to achieve two things: an unorthodox approach to audience identification, and a distanced and objective moral tone. It is these two elements, rather than the traditional accusations of gratuitous violence or cynical exploitation, which have been at the centre of the controversy that has continued to surround the film.

On the question of audience identification McNaughton is justifiably adamant: 'I hate being criticised for succeeding in what we set out to do. People act as if this is something that happened accidentally, when that was very much the idea. You come into any film looking for a character to hang on to, a character to identify with. And we tried to change the rules, to do something different, to push the boundaries of film-making a little bit. So you come into the picture looking around for the character you're going to hang your hat on, and eventually you realise, in an uncomfortable fashion, that it's the bad guy, it's Henry.'

It was the film's amoral tone that caused most problems with the American censors, who not only criticised McNaughton for failing to take up a moral position, but also were unable to deal with the fact that Henry doesn't get caught in the end. Once again, McNaughton insists that this is precisely the point: "I hate it when a film-maker tells me what moral judgements to make, when everything is pre-packaged for me. What we tried to do was say, "What do you think the morality of this piece is, what do you think the morality of Henry's soul is? I'm not going to tell you, look into yourself, spend some time thinking about it"."

The culmination of this strategy of forcing the audience back onto themselves occurs in the film's most disturbing scene. Entering the house of a suburban family, Henry and Otis appear to murder them 'live' on screen. 'Take her blouse off', Henry tells Otis, who is grabbing a struggling woman. 'Do it, Otis. You're a star.' Cinematographer Charlie Lieberman turned a camcorder over to Rooker to shoot the scene as Henry would. The video footage – grainy, unfocused, crazily angled – makes the carnage joltingly immediate. It is a harrowing, almost unwatchable scene, but the shock is accentuated by the way the camera then pulls back to reveal our guilty complicity in this vicariously violent spectacle. 'That's really the key scene of the picture', explains McNaughton. 'We used video, because to me the emotional content of a video image is different from a film: with film you believe in the surface illusion, but with video you don't. So video tape to me, having grown up in the 60s – when the Kennedy assassination was run endlessly on TV, and that degraded video image was used for the Vietnam war footage – that video image reads as real, instantaneous, now. So we knew that by using that video image, would make the act seem absolutely, terrifyingly real. And then the idea was to put parentheses around parentheses. We set it up so you see Henry and Otis about to enter the house, and then you see the image on the TV. And because you know they have a video camera, you think you're seeing them murder the family as they're taping it. But then you realise that you're sitting there watching it on the cinema screen just as they're sitting there watching it on the video. And that's where the whole picture turns inside out, where it says to you: "You think this is graphic, but you're sitting here watching it, waiting to be entertained. Now what do you think about yourself, and what do you think about watching this kind of violence on the screen?"'

Reviewed by Adrian Gargett