HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER
With Michael Rooker, Tracy Arnold, and Tom Towles.
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Psychomania is an obsessive, persistent legacy that warrants some uneasy reflection. The movie has never been one of my favorite Hitchcock pictures, but even if it were, I doubt that I would have looked forward with much enthusiasm to two sequels and dozens of strict imitations made over the next three decades. (For that matter, who would welcome as many direct rip-offs of Citizen Kane or Casablanca?) The public has an insatiable appetite for such imitations–from the relatively better ones by John Carpenter and Brian De Palma to countless others, mainly by more faceless directors. This appetite goes beyond even the popularity of sequels and cycles that already makes contemporary moviegoing an extended exercise in deja vu, or that makes the perennial revivals of favorites like The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, and Disney cartoon features a treasured national pastime.
Even more than these, the slasher movie suggests a kind of ritualistic repetition compulsion. It admits virtually no broadening or deepening of insight, and only minimal refinement of technique or content. It seems predicated simply on the desire of a mainly male audience to see women torn apart by maniacs, again and again, and preferably to see these attacks drawn out each time at some length. One might think that Hitchcock said it all back in 1960, but it’s a subgenre that has spawned entire cycles of sub-subgenres–all the Halloweens and Friday the 13ths and Nightmare on Elm Streets that have used essentially the same base ingredients (with supernatural elements added) for more or less the same ends, almost always less effectively. (A whole slew of other movies have been made about Ed Gein, the deranged mass murderer who inspired the Robert Block novel that Psycho was based on, ranging from documentaries to James Benning’s excellent experimental film, Landscape Suicide.)
Financed three years ago by MPI Home Video of Oak Forest, and shot over a four-week period in 16-millimeter, Henry surfaced briefly at the 1986 Chicago film festival but has not been heard from since. After it was on the verge of being bought for theatrical release, the MPAA gave it an “X” rating for being “disturbing” (which it certainly is), reportedly without suggesting any cuts that would grant it an “R”; it has remained more or less in limbo ever since. Now it is being floated as a midnight movie for three consecutive Fridays at the Music Box, with midnight screenings in other major cities planned.
As an explanation, this paradoxically seems both overdetermined and insufficient; but once the movie proffers this information, it more or less drops the project of trying to explain Henry, and for the rest of the film he remains as much of an enigma as he was before. Indeed, the only apparent function of the story about Henry’s mother is to prevent us–as well as Becky–from asking further questions. The ineffable quality of Henry’s sickness is thus assumed rather than dangled in front of us as a false mystery.
