Heartland
by Dave Kehr
John McNaughton’s Henry carries the lurid subtitle Portrait of a Serial Killer, though what’s really frightening about the film is its easy intimacy with its characters and its flat, Midwestern matter-of-factness. This is horror on a first-name basis, informal and unassuming, down-to-earth.
In the four years since it was finished, Henry has acquired a substantial cult reputation—no mean feat considering that it has barely been seen outside of festivals and furtive midnight shows. It is, however, a film with a powerful ability to creep beneath the spectator’s skin. Though far less explicit than the average slasher movie, it leaves behind an impression that is far more difficult to shake, perhaps because McNaughton’s method is based on denying the physical release, the easy catharsis, most horror movies provide. Henry remains closed, contained, folded in upon itself—just like the lingering shot of the blue garment bag, with an unseen body inside, that constitutes the film’s final, mute image.
Filmed in the Chicago area with a cast drawn largely from the local theatrical community, Henry places an emphasis on acting, rather than special effects, that’s almost unheard-of in the genre. The film’s surface texture suggests Elia Kazan more than Alfred Hitchcock. As Henry, a shy, well-mannered young man whose accent suggests an origin in the rural South, Michael Rooker becomes a coarser, working-class James Dean; he has the same shyness, the same vulnerability, but lacks the verbal gifts (the screenplay suggests that Henry is illiterate) to express himself even to Dean’s degree. As Otis, Henry’s cloddish roommate and eventual collaborator, Tom Towles steps into the Karl Malden role as the more grotesque misfit. Tracy Arnold, as Otis’ sexy-innocent sister Becky, could be a Carroll Baker or Lee Remick, teasingly aware of her powers but afraid to indulge them.
Like Kazan, Henry is theatrical in the best sense (Richard Fire, McNaughton’s co-writer, is the director of Chicago’s Organic Theater, former home of Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator). Rather than indulge in the analytical montage, predatory camera movement, and jumpy crosscutting standard to horror films, McNaughton parks his camera in an advantageous position and quietly observes.
The early killings are filmed as black-out sketches, a setup followed by the cruel punchline of the desecrated bodies (McNaughton resists showing the murders themselves). The core of the film takes the form of extended conversations held around the tiny kitchen table of Otis and Henry’s apartment, as the characters illuminate their Gothic pasts over greasy meals and card games. Becky tells Henry of the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father; Henry responds with the story of the time he killed his mama, though he remains a little unclear on the details. Did he kill her with a baseball bat, a gun, or a knife?
Henry’s motives are just as foggy. Though he, too, claims abuse—his mother was a whore, he says, who made him put on a little girl’s dress and watch her at work—his story sounds suspiciously like oneupsmanship designed to extract some sympathy from a girl who might be sweet on him. McNaughton is careful to allow Henry’s ultimate reasons to remain unknown and unknowable. His choice of victims shows no consistency, no obsessive pattern: a suburban housewife, a coffee-shop waitress, a skinny young man, or an overweight dealer in stolen merchandise can all serve his purpose, which is, as best he can explain it to his apprentice Otis, simply to relieve some tension. Yet he seems no different after he has killed. If he finds any pleasure or release in what he does, he’s long repressed that, too.
At first, McNaughton allows Henry to build up some audience sympathy—the actual killings aren’t shown, and Henry’s underdog appeal is carefully nurtured. The first murder that is depicted in detail, that of the fence from whom Henry and Otis try to buy a TV, is given clear motivation and tacit endorsement: the man was rude to them. As McNaughton told Paul Sherman of the Boston Herald, “This is your typical film murder. By the time they stab him the audience is saying, ‘Get him, Henry.’”
But then comes the scene—the one that prompts at least half a dozen walkouts every time Henry is shown. Using a video camera stolen from the murdered fence, Henry and Otis have taped their murder of a suburban family (wife, husband, and son). It is the tape we see, as they play it back on their VCR; the video image tells us that there is already no hope of rescue, that the action is over and cannot be altered. And the absence of cutting—the camera lies on the floor, where Henry has dropped it after lunging to catch the just-arriving boy—tells us that nothing will be spared, but also (and somehow more threateningly) that nothing will be artificially enhanced or exaggerated for our enjoyment.
By inserting this passage of cinema degree zero within a genre as rhetorically supercharged as the thriller, McNaughton betrays a trust—the basic agreement between horror-film-maker and horror-film patron that style will always act as a buffer, transforming act into effect, substance into flourish. That transformation does not happen in Henry, and the results are nearly unbearable. The viewer is trapped in the dead-eyed stare of the videocam, forced into a position of passive endurance. There is no release here, no purging of anger or resentment, only a growing revulsion.
In the end, who is Henry? In most slasher movies the symbolic identity of the killer is obvious and inflexible. Whether he’s named Jason or Freddy, he’s the incarnation of adult authority come down to punish guilty teens for sexually precocious behavior.
Henry, however, carries little psychological resonance; his coding is more cultural or social, marking him as a product of a dying rural underclass, uneducated, desperately poor, precivilized. Henry, Otis, and Becky seem the last survivors of a condemned tribe, whose final migration has led them into a hostile urban landscape. The film contains a strangely touching sequence in which Becky ventures into downtown Chicago in search of a job; surrounded by skyscrapers and rushing crowds, she is a refugee from another world, one that has long since been passed by.
It’s as if McNaughton had discovered a new kind of monster in Henry: no longer supernatural, no longer psychotic, but somehow sociological—the specter of an extinguished class. As such, there is no resisting him, no talismans to wave or Freudian phrases to invoke. Henry is as inevitable as history, and indeed the film does away with any notion of suspense. There is no real chance that Henry’s victims might elude him, and no possibility at all that he will be caught. The film’s sole representative of law and order is a comically distracted parole officer; Henry operates in complete freedom.
In Henry, McNaughton suggests that suspense is just sentimentality—a bit of wishful thinking that we’re better off without. Real horror exists without suspense, without thrills, without any physical release. It is emotion with no place to go, and Henry allows no escape.
Film Comment, May-June 1990
