People like to say that the best biopics focus on a small window of time in their subjects’ lives instead of scrambling to cover everything from birth to death. The traditional cradle-to-grave biopic format (as so perfectly parodied in Walk Hard: The Lend of Dewey Cox) has long gone out of favor, with the current preference being for slice-of-life portraits of famous people in their quieter, private moments. The 1986 true-crime biopic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was ahead of the curve on that trend, choosing to focus on a small snippet of real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas’s infamous crime spree instead of creating a full profile of his life from childhood to arrest. Only, the movie eventually proved to be a warning about choosing the wrong slice-of-life moment in your subject’s biography, since it happened to focus on a small window of time in Lucas’s life that he very likely made up and did not happen at all, thank God. Lucas became famous for confessing to hundreds of murders during police interrogation after arrest in Texas, with his former cellmate Ottis Toole bragging that he was an accomplice in the headline-grabbing crime spree. The problem is that Lucas was just telling the cops what they wanted to hear, allowing them to close as many unsolved murder cases as they wanted to pin on him as long as it made the jailtime for his actual crimes easier to bear. Of the 600 murders he confessed to, it’s difficult to fully decipher which ones he was actually guilty of, and so Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer has eventually transformed into a print-the-legend endeavor, operating more as a composite portrait of a serial killer rather than a detailed portrait of this serial killer.
A young Michael Rooker stars as the cold, unfeeling Henry, portraying his brief time in Chicago as the roommate of former prison buddy Ottis Toole (Tom Towles). Ottis invites his semi-estranged sister Becky (Tracy Arnold) to crash on the couch for a while, and the trio momentarily form a fucked-up family unit that repeats the abuses they each suffered as children. Ottis & Becky both reveal to Henry that they were raised by a physically abusive father, and Henry subconsciously takes over that role in their new family home — keeping them both in line with weaponized sexual tension and threats of physical violence. Things get even more unseemly as he takes Ottis under his wing as a night-owl serial killer, strangling, stabbing, and shooting the citizens of Chicago at random as a form of stress relief. It’s unclear what Henry’s own abusive backstory might be, as nailing down the details of how and why he killed his own mother is just as difficult for these fictionalized characters as nailing down the details of his actual crime spree was for real-life journalists. Rooker mostly portrays him as a blank slate with nothing going on behind his empty, black eyes besides an unexplained compulsion to kill. He’s equally soft-spoken and vicious, without much internal life to be accessed past his hardened surface. Likewise, his crimes are depicted from an alienating distance, focused more on the stillness of his victims’ bodies in the aftermath than on the passionate thrill of his murders in real time. As a result, Henry’s only truly knowable in how he interacts with his abuse-victim roommates, making this more of a family portrait than the portrait of a single man.
Speaking of family portraits, the movie Henry most reminded me of was the 2003 horror anthology Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America, which also found infinite cruelty behind the closed doors of American family homes. That insidious tone is also echoed in James Benning’s experimental true-crime documentary Landscape Suicide, where the setting and the aftermath of vicious crimes are similarly preserved in cold tableaux. It’s a discomforting approach to crime-story filmmaking, no matter how true the crimes being depicted are to real life, which likely helps explain why Henry was stuck in distribution limbo for four years after its festival premiere despite the wide accessibility of the era’s more fantastical body-count slashers. Most of the real-time violence depicted onscreen is mediated through the remove of VHS camcorder recordings that Henry & Ottis film to review later at home over beers, once again chilling the audience at an unfeeling distance instead of submerging us in the heat of the moment. No matter what distribution issues it may have initially suffered for its unforgiving iciness, the movie’s long-term legacy has endured to hold cult-horror audiences’ fasciation as a kind of sleepover-dare endurance test. I happened to catch it in a new, cleaned-up 4k restoration at this year’s ScreamFest NOLA, where I got to experience the browns & greys of its abject squalor in fine HD detail. It no longer matters, really, whether any of the crimes Henry depicts actually happened, since the movie itself has been traumatizing enough on its own merits for thrill-seeking audiences looking to be chilled to the bone.
-Brandon Ledet
