“He’s not Freddy, He’s not Jason…He’s REAL!” declares the poster of the 1986 indie horror classic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Directed by John McNaughton and starring Michael Rooker (who I have such a huge crush on that, when I met my partner, my nickname became Horny: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but that’s another story for another time), Henry is one of the most notorious horror movies of all time, even now, nearly forty years after it’s first release.
Though that first release, due to the intensity of the movie’s content, faced plenty of issues. During it’s initial search for a distributor in 1986, the movie earned an “X” rating, usually only reserved for pornographic films – though the film wasn’t pornographic, the sheer amount of violence and the extremity of the content led the MPAA to declare that no amount of cuts could allow them to release the movie under a more accessible rating. In fact, it was this movie (along with Pedro Almodóvar classic Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) that served as the impetus for the creation of the NC-17 rating in the US, indicating a non-pornographic movie that was only suitable for adults. It was under this rating that John McNaughton’s movie finally received a cinematic release in 1990, nearly four years after Atlantic initially pulled out of a distribution deal due to the X rating.
And I’m really glad this movie did eventually get a mainstream release, because, as the tagline suggests, it really serves as a challenge to the slasher horror that was on the rise over the course of the seventies and eighties. Ultra-stylised, ultra-violent gorefests like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Profondo Rosso had turned the art of murder and death into a stylish sub-genre unto itself, and, look, as a fan of a lot of these kinds of films, I’m not going to say they’re not good, or worthwhile, or important parts of horror history.
But there is a distance between the violence they depict and reality – deliberately so, a distance that Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer seeks to bridge. The movie follows Henry (Michael Rooker), an unrepentant serial killer, as he crosses paths with Otis (Tom Towles) and encourages his one-time prison buddy to turn his hand to serial murder too, with us as viewers tagging along for much of the violence and mayhem that follows.
I’ve seen Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer hand-waved away as a shock-jock movie, packed full of the worst stuff imaginable just for the sake of it, but I really think that does McNaughton’s work here a disservice While Henry isn’t an actual person, as the tagline might claim, the way that the film is shot, written, and acted removes that veil of style to present these acts in a blunt, straightforward fashion, with an absolutely incredible central performance from Michael Rooker (still, for my money, the best of his very impressive career) that goes to great efforts to humanize but not excuse Henry’s behaviour. That matter-of-fact approach forces us as an audience to contend with why we’re consuming this kind of thing as entertainment – when it’s shot and delivered to us like this, with a deliberate ordinariness, we’re reduced to focusing on the violence and why we’re so keen to see it. It’s a discomforting, confronting question.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is lumped in with a lot of mega-violent, controversial movies such as Hostel or House of 1000 Corpses, but in actuality, I think it’s most direct line of connection is to films like I Saw The Devil – movies that present monstrous, unthinkable violence in a straightforward and unglamourized way. It remains an impressive, disturbing, and genuinely shocking part of the twentieth century horror canon – and makes for as much of as an uncomfortable watch now as it did when it first released.
If you enjoyed this article and want to see more stuff like it, please consider supporting us on Ko-Fi. You can check out more of my work on my personal blog, The Cutprice Guignol!
By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Mubi)
No But Listen 