Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) Review
8/10
A man lives in a Chicago apartment with a former prison acquaintance. He works occasionally. He kills people, in different ways, in different places, and stops for a meal afterward. The film opens on bodies and works backward to the ordinary evenings that produced them.
The 8 is for a film that does the hardest available thing, which is to depict this subject without a structure that makes it bearable. There is no detective, no investigation, no capture and no explanation, and the absence of all four is the argument.
It is also genuinely difficult to watch and I would not recommend it to most people. That is a statement about the film succeeding instead of about it failing.
It runs eighty-three minutes and was shot in Chicago in about a month on 16mm, which is visible in every frame and is doing the same work the black and white does in Man Bites Dog. Cheapness reads as unmediated.
No Investigation
Almost every film on this page has a detective in it. That figure exists to give an audience somewhere to stand, a person whose curiosity mirrors their own and whose eventual success restores an order.
This film has nobody. There is no police presence of any consequence, no sequence of discovery, and no point at which anybody is closing in. The audience is placed with Henry and left there for eighty-three minutes.
That single structural decision is what separates it from everything that followed. A procedural converts murder into a puzzle, and a puzzle is a pleasure, and the pleasure is what makes the genre commercially viable.
Remove it and what remains is the thing itself, observed at close range, with no promise that anybody is coming.
The film also opens with the results instead of the acts. Bodies in fields and rooms, held in long static shots with the sound of the killing laid over them, which establishes the pattern before the audience has met anybody.
The investigator in crime fiction is a comfort mechanism as much as a plot device. They convert an atrocity into a problem, and problems have solutions. If you remove them deliberately, understand what you are removing and what the reader will do without it.
An audience needs a position. This film gives them the worst available one on purpose, which is a legitimate choice and will cost you most of your readership.
Ask what your structure promises. A procedural promises resolution before the first body is cold, and the promise is doing more work than the plot is.
The Ordinariness
Michael Rooker plays Henry as a quiet, polite, slightly awkward man who is pleasant to have in a room.
That is the performance’s entire achievement and it took a career to be understood. He is not charismatic, not theatrical, not obviously damaged, and delivers almost everything in the same flat register. The scene where he explains to Becky how his mother died is played as a man making conversation over a table.
The kills are staged the same way. There is no build, no music, no warning and no aftermath, and the film consistently cuts to what happens next, which is usually eating or driving. Two men buy a television. Later they use it on somebody.
What that produces is the film’s actual horror. The audience learns that nothing in Henry’s demeanor predicts anything, which means every ordinary scene is now potentially the moment before, and the film never has to raise its voice.
The Home Invasion
The film’s most discussed sequence is a family murder recorded by the two men on a stolen video camera, and then watched back by them on the sofa.
It is presented as a single static shot of a television screen, with the two of them in frame, and Otis rewinding to watch part of it again.
That construction is the film’s argument stated as a formal device. The audience is not watching the murder, they are watching two men watch it, which makes the act of viewing the subject of the scene. Anybody uncomfortable is being made aware of what they are doing.
It is also the sequence that got the film shelved. It received an X rating in the United States, sat unreleased for several years, and reached audiences through festivals and eventually an unrated release.
Roger Ebert argued for it publicly during that period and the argument he made is the one worth repeating. The film is not enjoyable, does not want to be, and its refusal to entertain is precisely what separates it from the slasher material it was being grouped with by a ratings board that had no category for a film that contained quite this much refusal in it.
A scene about somebody watching something is more implicating than the thing itself. The reader is placed one step back and made aware of their own position. Use it sparingly. It only works once, and it works because the reader has been comfortable up to that point.
Formal devices carry arguments. A static shot with no cutting says something about refusal that a description cannot, and the equivalent in prose is a paragraph that will not look away.
Know what your device costs. This one kept the film unreleased for four years.
Otis and Becky
Tom Towles plays Otis as the more conventionally repellent of the two, and the contrast is the film’s second structural idea.
Otis is loud, stupid, cruel and enthusiastic. He enjoys it, escalates, and wants more, and he is far easier to place than Henry, who is doing something the film never makes legible. An audience can dismiss Otis. Henry offers nothing to dismiss.
Henry also has rules, which is the most unsettling thing about him. Never the same method twice, never a pattern, keep moving, and he explains all of it to Otis as a craftsman explaining a trade to an apprentice who is not paying attention.
Tracy Arnold’s Becky is the closest the film comes to a sympathetic center. She has left a violent marriage, has a daughter she cannot reach, likes Henry, and is the one person in the film with a future she is trying to reach.
What the film does with her is the hardest thing in it, and I will not describe the ending except to say that it offers no relief of any kind and that the last shot is the film’s thesis delivered without a word.
The three of them together produce the film’s only sustained domestic material, and it is worse than the violence. They watch television, they eat, Becky talks about her daughter, and the audience knows what two of the people in the room are.
The Real Case and the Problem With It
The film draws on Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to hundreds of murders across the 1970s and 1980s, and whose confessions were later shown to be largely false.
That is a genuinely strange foundation and the film mostly avoids it. It does not claim accuracy, does not use victims’ names, and does not present itself as a true account of anything. McNaughton has said the intention was to make something about the type instead of the man.
The distinction matters for anybody writing about real crime. Using a case as a departure point is different from dramatizing identifiable people, and the ethical position is clearer when nobody’s family can recognize their own loss on screen.
This is also the first film on this page about the subject and the one that avoids the trap most completely. Later work in the category grew increasingly comfortable using real victims’ deaths as content, and this one declined at the outset.
That trajectory is worth tracking across this page. A film in 1986 that refuses to name anybody, and a streaming series thirty-six years later that dramatizes identifiable deaths with the families objecting publicly, are the two ends of the same commercial logic.
When you build on real crime, the first question is whether identifiable victims are being used. A composite, a fictionalized figure or a type carries the same argument without the same cost to living people. The commercial pressure runs the other way, because names sell.
Refusing to explain is a defensible position and it is not the same as having nothing to say. This film’s position is that explanation is a comfort and the comfort is false.
If you cannot write the subject without an audience surrogate who survives it, you may not be ready to write the subject.
Should you watch Henry?
Yes, with a warning, and once. Made for a hundred thousand dollars, shelved for four years, and still the most rigorous film anybody has made about this subject, because it removes the detective, removes the explanation, and refuses to let the audience stand anywhere comfortable.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists