“This is a very disturb¬ ing movie, made by some pretty disturbed people.” That was how Chris Carlo, owner of one of the first theaters to screen Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in 1990, described John McNaughton’s feature debut. Made four years earlier, the film had become a cult classic before it ever reached a movie theater. Carlo programmed it for midnight screenings where audience members often walked out, unable to endure its violence.
Before arriving at his theater, the film had endured a long ordeal. After screening at the Chicago International Film Festival in September 1986, it remained trapped in distribution limbo. The MPAA, the U.S. ratings body, told McNaughton that no matter how much he re-edited the film, it would never escape an X rating, effectively a death sentence for theatrical distribution.
It eventually found its audience through VHS tapes copied and passed from hand to hand, turning it into a cult phenomenon. Its star, Michael Rooker, later recalled that the first time he was recognized on the street, he assumed it was for one of his later roles. Instead, a stranger shouted, “Henry Lee Lucas!” Rooker was baffled. The film had not yet been released, but the man explained that someone had brought a copy to work; he had made another copy for friends, and so on. It was virality back when it actually required effort.
In 1990, the film benefited from a change the industry had long been demanding. The X rating had become synonymous with pornography, but sex played only a minor role in the movie. The MPAA ultimately introduced the NC-17 rating, allowing Henry to be released alongside Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
Its theatrical release was the result of a campaign by its distributors and by critics who had fallen under the spell of the tiny $100,000 production. Hyperviolent and told with a raw, unsparing realism, the film sparked heated debates wherever it played. Some viewers considered it depraved; others saw it as a masterpiece.
Among the latter was critic Roger Ebert, one of the film’s most prominent champions. “Some said the film was too violent and disgusting to be endured,” he wrote. “But it also is a very good film, a low-budget tour de force that provides an unforgettable portrait of the pathology of a man for whom killing is not a crime but simply a way of passing time and relieving boredom.”
Egbert was not the only voice to recognize the film as a small cinematic gem. That year, it received five Independent Spirit Award nominations and went on to win Best Film and Best Director at the Sitges Film Festival.
The fact that it was made at all was largely a matter of chance. Producers Malik and Waleed B. Ali, with whom McNaughton had made his first professional project, had $100,000 available to produce a wrestling documentary for the burgeoning and highly profitable VHS market. The idea fell through at the last minute, and they suggested he make a horror film, a very profitable genre that attracted teens and filled the shelves of video rental stores.
McNaughton had never directed a feature film and had no idea what to make. But as he was leaving, he bumped into a friend who told him about a television report on someone named Henry Lee Lucas. “It was the first time I heard the term serial killer,” McNaughton later recalled.
He would not end up making a conventional horror movie (nor would he make a biopic, although inspired by two real-life figures, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a work of fiction); the result, however, would be terrifying.
The film tells the story of Lucas, a one-eyed drifter who confessed to more than 600 murders, some committed alone and others alongside Ottis Toole, another drifter of limited intelligence who was fascinated by Lucas’s crimes.
What the film does not tell viewers is that Lucas later recanted all those confessions. He claimed he had confessed because the more murders he took credit for, the more perks he received from law-enforcement agencies happy to close cold cases and improve their clearance rates. Nor does the film explore the romantic relationship between the two men.
The director and screenwriter had little interest in factual accuracy and was irritated when some media outlets focused on the issue. “I don’t give a fuck. It’s a work of fiction,” he said.
What interested him was not reality so much as depicting something that had rarely been shown before: abjection as everyday routine. Horror movies had long confronted audiences with supernatural monsters, backwoods killers, masked strangers, figures that were easy to identify and easy to avoid. You simply had to avoid spending the summer at a sinister campground or opening a coffin in a Transylvanian basement. Nor was Henry one of the street punks targeted by Charles Bronson in the revenge thrillers of the 1970s. He was not the product of a visibly broken system.
He was the delivery driver, the bus driver, the new neighbour, the man who stops to help when you get a flat tire... You couldn’t run from him because you couldn’t recognize him. And that was what made him frightening. To heighten the tension — and to cut costs — McNaughton shot the film on 16mm stock and adopted a camera style that often feels closer to documentary than fiction.
The film is unusual from the outset. It opens on the face of a woman lying in the grass. She could be peacefully resting, but when the shot widens, we see that she is naked and covered in blood. The next image is of a man eating breakfast in a diner. He pays the bill and gets into his car. As he drives along, listening to the weather forecast, we see more images of corpses — the ones left in his wake: two men in a store, a woman in a hotel room with a broken glass bottle protruding from her mouth, another by the side of a river. It’s just another day for him. There is no emotion on his face. He does not seem threatening; he even looks like a nice guy.
Unlike most horror films of the time, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer avoids extreme, unrealistic situations, and there is no humor. Nor is there a charismatic antihero, and at no point does the police appear. Henry goes unnoticed by everyone, including the authorities. His unremarkable appearance allows him to blend in without attracting attention.
“The monster is indeed real, he walks among us in the world, from town to town — perhaps even yours — and he is waiting outside the cinema for his next victim to be chosen at random, picked by chance to suffer a cruel fate,” McNaughton wrote in an article in The Guardian.
Unlike Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, which was released shortly afterward, Henry does not kill people he knows. He drifts invisibly along back roads, choosing his victims at random. He knows that killing strangers is the best way to avoid ever being caught, and he makes that clear to his accomplice.
The film also raised another unsettling issue: televised violence. The idea of screens as a threat, in one of the murders, even in a literal sense. The point in the movie at which audiences walked out was when Henry and his sidekick Otis (the film slightly alters the names of the real-life killers who inspired the story) murdered a family. For many viewers, it was unbearable. They shoot a child, Otis abuses the mother’s corpse, and then the two sit back and watch footage of the killings recorded on the family’s camcorder.
They watch their own crime in the living room, mocking what they see as if they were watching a basketball game. Violence as entertainment. Isn’t that what the audience of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is doing too? Isn’t it what we do today when we scroll through endless short videos showing assaults or fatal accidents? How could anyone in 1986 have imagined that, 40 years later, recorded violence would become such an ordinary part of daily life?
In that scene, McNaughton used a video camera because camcorders were becoming increasingly common in people’s homes. The culture of self-documentation was only just beginning to emerge, but McNaughton was already ahead of the curve. He was also ahead of the coming obsession with serial killers. At the time, they had not yet become a genre unto themselves. It would be decades before true crime became one of the most popular forms of entertainment. Today, hundreds of podcasts and documentaries jostle for attention on streaming platforms alongside biopics that filter serial killers through a lens of glamor.
The film’s unsettling power was also enhanced by its cast of unknown actors, most of whom had worked only in Chicago’s theater scene. That was partly the result of budget constraints, but it worked to the film’s advantage. Michael Rooker, then an unknown actor who had never appeared in a film, showed up at the director’s house dressed as a janitor because that was his actual job and he hadn’t had time to change.
“I couldn’t believe it. He was perfect,” McNaughton recalled. “As I let him in, I said a little prayer to myself. ‘Oh God, please let him be able to act.’ After the interview, Michael left. I waited until I felt he was out of earshot and called the line producer, Lisa Dedmond and said, ‘Book this guy, do whatever you’ve gotta do.’”
Rooker rewarded that enthusiasm by throwing himself completely into the role. He stayed in character day and night and had very little contact with the rest of the crew.
The film was shot in just 28 days. To keep costs down, the director used his friends and relatives. Actress Mary Demas, a friend of McNaughton’s, played three different corpses. Almost everyone on the crew appeared briefly on camera, and all of them wore their own clothes. Because the production could not afford extras, the people seen in exterior shots on the streets of Chicago were filmed without knowing it. The protagonist’s car belonged to one of the crew members and, since Rooker wore his real janitor’s uniform, he had to be particularly careful with his jacket because it was the only one he owned.
The film shows only a few days in Henry’s life; when the end credits roll, he simply continues on his murderous journey. The real Henry Lee Lucas died in Texas in 2001 at the age of 64. Three years earlier, then-governor George W. Bush had commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment. Ottis Toole also died behind bars. He succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver in 1996 and, according to Gary Lequipe’s book 50 Serial Killers, left unfinished a television script he hoped to sell to a network, titled Christmas with Ottis Toole.
Global fame would come to the fictional Henry, Michael Rooker, through a very different role: the warm-hearted, fatherly space pirate Yondu in Guardians of the Galaxy. Before that, he played one of the detestable racists in Mississippi Burning, appeared in JFK and Days of Thunder, and portrayed Merle Dixon in The Walking Dead. His craggy features and distinctive voice have made him one of Hollywood’s indispensable character actors.
John McNaughton never matched the success of Henry, but he went on to direct the highly regarded Wild Things and Normal Life. He also earned the admiration of Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, both vocal fans of his debut feature.
In the 40 years since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was released, McNaughton has noticed one major change: people now laugh during the film. “I remember the first screening 32 years ago. Nobody laughed. Not once. And when it was over, there was no applause. People didn’t talk for the next few minutes,” he recalled.
Anniversary screenings have been a very different experience, he says. These days, audiences laugh out loud. McNaughton believes that perhaps it’s because ”violence in movies has become so extreme that people are desensitized."
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