Spiritual Horror
Spiritual Horror
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
20th Anniversary two-disc Special edition
Directed by John McNaughton
(MPI/Dark Sky Films)
I first saw Henry on the closing night of its initial run in Philly, where it was playing at a small art house called The Roxy. I was one jaded, serial-killer-worshipping fucker at the time, but when I left the theater that night, I was numb. It felt like a kind of deep spiritual horror. No movie had ever done that to me before.
Back in the early 80s, so the story goes, John McNaughton, a would-be filmmaker, was working at a Chicago-based industrial house called MPI. One day, in a move that paralleled the genesis of Carnival of Souls, his boss tossed some money his way and told him to go make a horror movie.
So with a minuscule budget, a few friends from a local theater company and a script loosely based on serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, McNaughton made a film that was at once shocking and insightful, human and monstrous, socially conscious and utterly nihilistic. And it even looked good.
It told the very simple story of Henry (Michael Rooker), a serial killer with a flat affect who's apparently been drifting around for a while, killing people at random. While passing through Chicago, he moves in with his old cellmate Otis and Otis' sister, an ex-stripper named Becky. It turns out that the crude, simple-minded Otis is even more enthusiastic about killing than is Henry.
On the surface, it's straightforward-Henry and Otis kill people. But below the surface, it's a much more complex film than it dares admit. Sort of like if Godard had made a slasher film (I'm thinking of the home-video scene in particular here-the whole film is in that scene).
Perhaps because of that, it ended up sitting on a shelf for three years. It wasn't your typical horror movie, after all. When it eventually was released, it became one of the films that led the MPAA to institute their NC-17 rating. It also became a huge cult hit, appealing to both derelicts and the art-house crowd.
Apart from an abortive DVD release several years ago, Henry's been unavailable until now. Dark Sky (a subsidiary of MPI), has finally released a handsome two-disc set to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the film's completion.
Personally, I tend to be suspicious of most two-disc sets, but while the material on the extra disc here may not always be exciting, but it is certainly justifiable. There's the to-be-expected featurette, the collection of deleted scenes (proving that they were cut for a very good reason) and a short documentary about Henry Lee Lucas. (I've seen better Lucas docs, but it was still a good idea.) And if you flip the cover over, the reverse side contains Joe Coleman's original poster art, which no theater dared display.
Henry may not disturb me the way it once did, and it seems much funnier now than it did then, but it's still effective-and that home-video scene still gets to me.
-Jim Knipfel