Part of Hoop-Tober

“I love you, Henry.” “I guess I love you too.”

Horror movies are a curious breed. If, as Roger Ebert suggested, movies serve their highest purpose as machines generating empathy, then horror movies are an especially high-functioning lot. They work in large part because they create empathy in the viewer, but in unconventional and disturbing ways. At its best, horror allows us to experience vicariously certain cathartic emotions—the very definition of empathy—and to process at a distance various traumas, both personal and societal. Audience identification with Marion Crane or Rosemary Woodhouse or Clarice Starling—or, perhaps more disturbingly, with Norman Bates or Minnie Castavet or Hannibal Lecter—gives horror films much of their (red-dyed corn syrup) juice.

At its…

I never watched this when I was younger during the “video store days” because honestly the VHS art did nothing to entice me. “He’s not Freddy, he’s not Jason...He’s real.” I mean, that’s a pretty eye rolly tagline. But then I started hearing about what a great movie it was and I just still never got around to it.

Well, I finally watched this with Joe Bob and it really is a borderline masterpiece, but with the intro JB gave it, I was really hoping for a shocking, appalling, and thoroughly disturbing experience and I guess  I truly am completely desensitized to movies because I just didn’t get that. Yeah, I’m just completely dead inside...but this was still great in spite…

“oh yeah, that’s right, i stabbed her.”

What stayed with me after Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was not just the disturbing last image, but the strange emotional knot the film tied itself into inside me afterward. The title itself already evokes the idea of authenticity: an observation seemingly rooted in reality. From the very beginning, John McNaughton establishes a world that feels as bleak and spiritually rotten as imaginable: screams layered over slowly drifting shots of dead bodies, filthy apartments and backstreet shots that seem stripped of anything human before the film even settles into its own brutality.

And then we suddenly find ourselves sitting at that kitchen table with Becky (Tracy Arnold) and Henry (Michael Rooker). In…

The central concept on Henry might be "the serial killer movie as docudrama", but the real radical movie by McNaughton is that despite that he never abandons exploitation. The strip down narrative, lack of psychology and heavy amount of naturalistic detail become tools of the horror movie within, they are a engine that contributes to Henry as a chilling thrilling experience. That is what makes it so disturbing. It is in a way a movie about the idea of movie realism and its effects, doing for movie "realism" a desconstruction not unlike what David Holzman's Diary does for the direct cinema diary. The many self-aware elements like the very horror movie score or the fascinaion with the idea of serial…