#19: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

If this list ranked films based only on the principle of pure horror, John McNaughton’s brilliantly directed, scripted (with co-writer Richard Fire), and acted look at a chapter in the life of Henry (Michael Rooker), an affable and unfailingly polite human monster, would easily rank in the top three. The problem is that while the film hits the intended bulls-eye of forever creeping you out (more on that later), the act of actually sitting through the full 83-minutes is not a pleasant one. Since purchasing the DVD in 1998, I’ve only been able to bring myself to watch a few times.

A senseless murderer with no apparent motive other than to work out the psycho-sexual damage he suffered as a child at the hands of his mother, in one moment Henry is politely paying a lovely cashier for his breakfast and in the next murdering and torturing some random woman he followed home from the mall. There’s no rhyme, no reason, no trigger, no trail. Henry understands how people like him get caught, and so he drifts from state to state and never kills the same way twice. As he explains to his budding apprentice, roommate, and former cellmate Otis (Tom Towles)…

If you shoot someone in the head with a .45 every time you kill somebody, it becomes like your fingerprint, see? But if you strangle one, stab another, and one you cut up, and one you don’t, then the police don’t know what to do. They think you’re four different people. What they really want, what makes their job so much easier, is pattern. What they call a modus operandi. That’s Latin. Bet you didn’t know any Latin, did you kid?

Let’s just pause for a moment to admire what an impressive piece of dialogue that is, and there’s plenty more where that came from.

Into the life of this twisted duo walks Becky (Tracy Arnold), Otis’s sister and a former stripper on the run from a disastrous marriage. Becky carries just enough damaged psychological baggage of her own to find herself attracted to the seemingly gentle Henry, especially after Henry protects her from her incestuous-minded brother. Will Becky help to redeem Henry? Well, consider this your spoiler warning…

The combination of the low $110,000 budget and the on-location shooting throughout the City of Chicago using 16MM, gives the film a docu-drama feel, which only makes the experience of sitting through it all the more difficult. At first, however, you’re lulled into thinking things won’t be as bad as advertised. By focusing on the dynamic of the three central relationships and Rooker’s career-making performance as the low-key and at times, charming predator, McNaughton seduces you into believing that what you might be watching is the story of a sociopath’s redemption; that through Becky’s love Henry will become the anti-hero who saves her. Then comes the infamous home invasion, the single most disturbing scene you’ll ever see in a piece of narrative fiction.

McNaughton’s GENIUS in staging this haunting and deeply upsetting scene is that he chooses to reveal what happens after the fact. With dread bubbling in our guts, we watch Henry and Otis, video camera in hand, pull up and park in front of what is obviously a nice suburban family home. Then the story cuts to the point-of-view of the video camera. With Henry filming and uncharacteristically excited as he eggs his partner on, Otis has a screaming woman in a choke-hold from behind and molests her as her tied up husband (we assume) lies helplessly on the ground. As the hypnotically gruesome scene plays out to a point well beyond our ability to watch (especially when an unsuspecting child barges in), McNaughton pulls his own camera back to reveal Henry and Otis calmly sitting on the couch, sipping beers in front of the TV. They’re enjoying the video replay of their own horror show and we were watching right along with them. And the scene still doesn’t end there…

To deliver this sequence in this manner is quite simply the single greatest decision any horror director has ever made. So effective is this approach, that to this very day any bump or creak in the night immediately brings it the forefront of my mind. Hundreds of horror movies later, nothing’s ever come close to replacing it.

As incredible as this may sound, and you have to see the film to understand what I mean by this, “Henry” is not in the least exploitative. In fact, this is one of the reasons the film’s so ridiculously effective. Great storytellers like Quentin Tarantino are master manipulators and their success comes from our desire to enter a crazy world of their own making. Their ability to deliver outrageous exploitation is why we love them. McNaughton, on the other hand, manipulates nothing. The grindingly awful mayhem just … happens. Nothing cartoonish and nothing showy. For this reason, “Henry” barely qualifies as a genre picture.

In interviews, McNaughton has said that he agrees with those who have criticized his directorial debut for having no moral point of view or resolution. Inspired (for lack of a better word) by real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, that was the whole point when the filmmaker set out to create a character study of a monster, but a monster who also happens to be unsettlingly human. No Hannibal Lecter flamboyance, no Michael Myers superpowers, no narcissistic show-off eager for a theatrical cat-and-mouse game with the police; just a quietly intense man driven by something as inexplicable as it is unreachable; smart enough not to get caught and outwardly normal enough to hide in plain sight.

Once again, however, I’m going to disagree with the filmmaker. In my mind “Henry” does have a moral to its story, and a very important one. Until the final scene, until Henry’s final kill, we hold out hope that within this remorseless creature exists something that can be redeemed, a sympathetic quality that might be reasoned with. To his great credit, McNaughton will have none of it, and in the end tells us in no uncertain terms that Henry is a thing of pure evil – and does so without stripping away the qualities that make him human.

That’s the moral of this story and in today’s pop culture world of charismatic serial killers, misunderstood child molesters, and nuanced Islamic terrorists, “Henry” stands out as a beacon of sanity.