Henry, a drifter, commits a series of brutal murders, supposedly operating with impunity.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a 1986 American psychological horror crime film directed and co-written by John McNaughton about the random crime spree of a serial killer. It stars Michael Rooker as the nomadic killer Henry, Tom Towles as Otis, a prison buddy with whom Henry is living, and Tracy Arnold as Becky, Otis's sister. The characters of Henry and Otis are loosely based on real life serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole.
"Henry" is disturbing on many levels. Firstly, it feels very real. Too real, perhaps. Nothing is slicked up...nothing seems counterfeit or contrived. The entire thing is so utterly plausible that it chills you to the bone. "Henry" doesn't bother with any type of morality...it neither glorifies nor denounces Henry's actions. It simply observes. It places those actions before us and says "there it is...you deal with it...you sort it out."
The movie follows the exploits of Henry, a young man who is practically a textbook case of a serial killer (male, white, 30's, drifter, soft-spoken, shy). Conflict comes when his disgusting nasty inbred cousin Otis Toole stays with him, along with his pathetic sister. One night Otis and Henry pick up a couple of prostitutes and are having sex with them in the car. Henry kills both of them sort of offhandedly, with no more emotion than you would swat a fly. Otis starts joining him on his exploits. Henry is more sympathetic than Otis, however, because while Henry does these things because he is sick and doesn't have a choice, Otis seems to get off on them, and also should know better. Things sorta go downhill from there, and the sister complicates things because she is so desperately lonely that Henry starts to look good to her. It culminates in one of the most chilling, downbeat endings of all time.
Michael Rooker, still a novice actor at this point, is amazing. He comes across as somehow dumb yet clever, unable to read but able to get what he needs. This fits the redneck killer profile of his character, and is so convincing you woud think Rooker himself was a little bit dumb or slow if you had not seen him in other roles
Henry is a brilliant film. Well acted and brilliantly conceived. It isn't an easy film to sit through but often the most challenging works of art aren't. Kudos to Rooker and McNaughton for taking this subject matter with utmost sincerity. Violence is either glorified on one extreme or attacked viciously on another. 'Henry' is an honest look at the capabilities and evil power violence has. It's a powerful, shocking, raw, brutal movie that, while often difficult to watch, is impossible to ignore or forget.
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| Yeah, I killed my Mama... |
Trivia:
Actor Michael Rooker remained in character for the duration of the shoot, even off set. He didn't associate or socialize with any of the cast or crew during the month long shoot, and director John McNaughton made sure Rooker was the only person on set to have a private dressing room. According to costume designer Patricia Hart, she and Rooker would travel to the set together each day, and she never knew from one minute to the next if she was talking to Michael or to Henry as sometimes he would speak about his childhood and background not as Michael Rooker but as Henry. Indeed, so in-character did Rooker remain, that during the shoot, his wife discovered she was pregnant, but she waited until filming had stopped before she told him.
The film was shot on 16mm in 28 days with a budget of $110,000. It initially earned $600,000 on its (extremely limited) theatrical run, but has since gone on to earn millions on VHS and DVD, as well as theatrical re-releases.
The music for the film was mixed in a recording studio in Chicago run by rock n' roll Christians. According to director John McNaughton, they were quite shocked when they saw the film.
Although the MPAA initially gave the film an X-Rating, this movie, along with Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) and Pedro Almodóvar'sTie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), were the main reasons for the creation of the NC-17 rating (an adults-only film which is non-pornographic).
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| He's not Freddy. He's not Jason. He's real. |
The scene in the living room where Otis (Tom Towles) films Henry (Michael Rooker) and Becky (Tracy Arnold) with the camcorder was completely improvised by the three actors.
Michael Rooker said he was working as a janitor when he auditioned for the part of Henry and went to the audition in his janitor uniform. He got the part, and continued to wear his uniform throughout the film shoot. He only had one jacket, though, so he took it off before he "killed" anyone so he wouldn't get blood on it.
Many of the insults which the TV sales man (Ray Atherton) shouts at Henry and Otis (eg "I can see you've had some college") were improvised on-set by Atherton himself.
During its release limbo, tapes circulated around Hollywood which won many roles for Michael Rooker including one in Eight Men Out (1988).
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| Dude watches his TV up to close |
Although completed in 1986, the film didn't get a theatrical release until 1989. It is often mistakenly claimed that this was due to its being tied up in censorship issues with the MPAA, and although this is true to a degree, the majority of the delay occurred because the executive producers, Malik B. Ali and Waleed B. Ali were somewhat underwhelmed by the film turned in by director John McNaughton, and weren't sure it was even worth their time releasing it on VHS, let alone releasing theatrically. As McNaughton himself says, "they just put it on the shelf". Several years later, Chuck Parello (who would go on to direct Henry II: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1996)) saw the film and was deeply impressed. Parello was working for the Ali brothers at the time, and he began to lobby them to do something with it. He convinced them to let it be screened at the Chicago Film Festival in 1989, where, after getting a glowing review from the Chicago Tribune's Rick Kogan, the film was accepted into the 1989 Telluride Festival and subsequently the 1990 Splatterfest Festival, becoming the sensation of both festivals. At this point, the Ali brothers realized they had something unique on their hands and set about promoting the film for theatrical release.
Even members of the film making team themselves have been disturbed by the film. Composer Robert McNaughton couldn't watch the film right the way through upon first seeing it, and actor Tom Towles (Otis) has only ever seen the film once, at the Splatterfest Film Festival in 1990.
The four murder scenes seen in the first few minutes of the film were all based on real life murders which Henry Lee Lucas claimed to have committed, especially the first shot, where the body of the nude woman is posed in exactly the same position as a victim in a case involving Lucas.
Director John McNaughton and actor Tom Towles both considered the character of Otis to be a comic buffoon, and they consciously presented the character in a darkly humorous manner. Interestingly, Towles, a former US marine, formal training was in improvisational comedy, not dramatic acting.
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| Before "The Silence of the Lambs" comes the most highly acclaimed and controversial film of the year." |
Actor Tom Towles initially auditioned for the role of Henry, before director John McNaughton asked him if he'd be interested in playing Otis.
When the film was submitted to the BBFC for classification in 1990, distributor Electric Pictures removed the shot of the dead woman on the toilet without consulting director John McNaughton because they felt it would predispose the BBFC to look on the film as an exploitation piece and not a serious film.
Director John McNaughton originally intended to shoot the entire film with a hand-held camera, so as to give it the look and feel of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. He had hired Jean de Segonzac to work as the director of photography as de Segonzac was regarded as one of the world's foremost hand-held cameramen. However, a week before filming began, de Segonzac had to drop out of the project, and McNaughton was left without a director of photography. He subsequently hired Charlie Lieberman, who had shot a number of half hour substance abuse programs, and together, McNaughton and Lieberman decided to abandon the hand-held idea and go in the opposite direction; never using a hand-held camera at all, and ensuring very exact, very rigid framing throughout the film.
Producer/composer Steven A. Jones was paid $100 for his 14 months work on the film.
The song playing in the background when Otis tests out the new video camera is "Psycho" by The Sonics.
Entertainment Weekly ranked this as the 16th scariest movie of all time.
During the screening of the film at the 1989 Telluride Festival, nearly half the audience walked out during the family massacre scene. When the film finished, it was met with complete silence, as the audience were so stunned by what they had just seen and didn't know how to react. As director John McNaughton was leaving the theatre, he was approached by a distressed man who informed him: "You can't do that". McNaughton asked him what he meant, and the man explained that you couldn't make a film about a murderer who gets away in the end, without punishment or without any kind of moral resolution, reiterating "You can't do that". McNaughton thought about this for a moment, and then said to the man: "We just did".
Throughout the film, any sound of a neck breaking is really a Styrofoam cup being crushed near the microphone. The sound of Henry (Michael Rooker) cutting off Otis' (Tom Towles) head is a plastic mesh grapefruit bag being slowly torn open.
When Otis (Tom Towles) attempts to rape Becky (Tracy Arnold), he begins to choke her with an item of clothing. During the filming of this part of the scene, Arnold passed out for real.
After filming the family massacre scene, actor Tom Towles (Otis) insisted that actress Lisa Temple (who plays the mother) go to the casualty department because he was convinced he had injured her neck for real when he snapped it. Temple herself was confident that no damage had been done, but for Towles' peace of mind, she did go to casualty, where she received a clean bill of health. Over time, this story has evolved into an urban myth that Temple had to go to the hospital because she was traumatized by the scene, the content of which the filmmakers had concealed from her prior to shooting. As she herself tells it in Portrait: The Making of 'Henry' (2005), there is no truth in this story whatsoever. She went to the hospital purely as a precaution.
The fake head of Tom Towles used in the scene where he is stabbed in the eye cost $700.
The film makes use of many uninterrupted takes. The scene when Henry and Otis drive through the night and kill the man who stops to help goes on for almost two minutes without a single interruption.
The character of Henry is loosely based upon the real life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. As in the film, Lucas was acquainted with a fellow convict named Ottis Toole (although in the film, the character's name is only given as Otis). Additionally, Lucas became the lover of Toole's 11 year old niece, Frieda Powell, who lived with Lucas and Toole for a time and often went under the pseudonym of "Becky" (although in the film, Becky is Otis' sister, rather than his niece, and is considerably older than Powell was). Also as in the film, Lucas ultimately killed Becky. Furthermore, like the fictional Henry, the real Henry's mother worked as a prostitute from her house, often forcing him to watch her whilst she had sex, and occasionally making him wear a dress. The real Henry's father had also lost both his legs in an accident, prior to which he had been a truck driver, just like the fictional character. However, the actions of the fictional Henry are inspired not by Lucas' real crimes, but by his fabricated ones. In prison, Lucas confessed to over 600 murders, claiming he committed roughly one murder a week from 1975 to 1983. Ultimately however, the vast majority of these claims turned out to be false, whilst many of the rest could not be substantiated one way or the other. Lucas was simply confessing to every unsolved murder brought before him because doing so ensured better conditions for him, as law enforcement officers would offer him incentives to 'confess'. Such confessions also increased his fame with the public. In the end, Lucas was convicted of eleven murders, and sentenced to death for the murder of Frieda Powell, although his death sentence was later commuted to life in prison by the then governor of Texas George W. Bush.
The scene where the salesman (Ray Atherton) has the TV smashed over his head was filmed in reverse with Michael Rooker pulling the prop TV away from Atherton's head.
Throughout filming, the filmmakers cut costs by utilizing family and friends, as well as their own possessions, and even the crew itself, wherever they could. For example, the dead couple in the bar near the start of the film are the parents of director John McNaughton's best friend, whilst the bar itself is where McNaughton used to work.. Actress Mary Demas (a close friend of McNaughton's prior to the film) plays three different murder victims; the woman in the ditch in the opening shot; the woman with the bottle in her mouth in the toilet; and the first of the two murdered prostitutes. The four women Henry encounters outside the shopping mall were all played by close friends of McNaughton. The woman hitch hiking was a woman with whom McNaughton used to work. The clothes Michael Rooker wears throughout the film were his own clothes (apart from the shoes and socks). The car driven by Henry belonged to one of the electricians on the film. Art director Rick Paul plays the man shot in the lay-by; storyboard artist Frank Coronado plays the smaller of the attacking bums; grip Brian Graham plays the husband in the family-massacre scene; executive producer Waleed B. Ali plays the clerk serving Henry towards the end of the film.
In the original script, the family massacre scene is longer. After the three family members have been murdered, Otis (Tom Towles) molests the body of the mother (Lisa Temple) and performs full necrophilia with it. Prior to shooting however, director John McNaughton made the decision to abandon this part of the scene.
Henry Lee Lucas died in prison on March 13, 2001 of heart failure.
