Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

Directed by John McNaughton

77 minutes

It is interesting to note that Michael Haneke’s psychological film Funny Games (1997), a narrative involving well-spoken men who terrorise a bourgeois family, as well as the grinding horrors of Gasper Noè’s Irreversible (2002), share an eleven and sixteen year gap to John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Why I draw this comparison is Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is at the forefront of a gruelling and bodily experience, McNaughton should be seen as a precursor to Haneke and Noè.

McNaughton, who died recently, provides a horrendous ordeal that lies in its realistic atmosphere. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is very much a location film, showing us a sleazy lifestyle of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas played by Michael Rooker (better known as Merle from the Walking Dead. He is the only real actor). Henry is accompanied with his former inmate and more perverse Otis (Tom Towles). Like Irreversible, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer messes with linear and non linear order and uses a somatic score.

What makes this a gruelling experience is McNaughton does not suggest Henry and Otis are humane. Henry commits crimes and offers us no remorse, this is unique to the cliché’s of serial killer pathos, which is often balanced. Although, Becky (Tracy Arnold) is the only female character Henry respects, she is able to connect to Henry through her back-story, a sufferer of child abuse and induces compassion in him. Henry meets up with Otis, they kill prostitutes and record an unpleasant home invasion. The scene illustrates the torture of Haneke’s Funny Games and misogyny in Irreversible. However, McNaughton doesn’t fetishise violence. He opens with a sequence of a woman with a cut torso sprawled out awkwardly in daylight. Women are raped and decomposed but violence is bland and habitual.  If anything McNaughton is too honest.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is hard to watch and equally hard to give praise for. However, we should embark on its innovative film making and challenging themes but a leader to the likes of Haneke and Noè.