henry portrait of a serial killer images

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With that alone Henry is able to continue on as an apex predator with an unquenchable thirst for misery. His modus operandi is simple change your weapons, change your method of disposing of the body and don’t stay in any one place for too long. As Lecter delights in his recollections of murdering a man and eating his liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti, Henry cannot remember whether he shot or stabbed his mother. He is a paragon of purposeless, mundane evil.

Henry (Michael Rooker) is barely literate and has none of the style, intelligence or integrity of Lecter. It begs the question, why are we more accepting of violence when it is committed by an ingenious criminal mastermind than a mundane everyman? This is a film with a comparable level of violence and murder to Henry, and to which the BBFC had no objection, having since downgraded its classification from ‘18’ to ‘15’. The film’s title is misleading as it evokes the kind of artistic gentleman killer that Anthony Hopkins would win an Oscar for in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. But while those shows can shield the viewer from violence with veils of fantasy, style or camp, there is something in Henry that is inescapably bone-chilling. The violence and gore onscreen is not particularly gratuitous milder than any of the films in the Saw franchise and many episodes of serialised prestige television such as Game of Thrones, Hannibal or American Horror Story. Watching it now, it’s hard to see the justification for such outrage from the state authorities. It even became a mainstay discussion point of Media Studies classrooms across the country. All this worrying about the fragile sensibilities of the British public eventually served to frame Henry as being emblematic of a moral panic at the centre of society, and the BBFC’s finicky excisions served the adverse effect of turning the film into a cause célèbre. It was not until 2003 that the film was available in the UK in its uncut form.

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After insisting on a series of edits to remove images of a dead woman with a broken bottle embedded in her face, and another woman being groped as she is murdered, the BBFC agreed to release the film as an ‘18’ in 1992, but then in 1993 they requested the removal of two additional murder scenes. In the UK, the road to release was even more protracted and drawn out. It eventually received a theatrical release in North America in January 1990. Even its poster, by outsider artist Joe Coleman, was deemed too disturbing and outré, and was promptly withdrawn.Īlongside Pedro Almodóvar’s erotic farce Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Peter Greenaway’s grotesque gastro-satire The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Henry was responsible for the creation of the NC-17 rating. They advised McNaughton the rating would not change no matter what edits were made. The Motion Picture Association classified Henry with an ‘X’ rating, normally reserved for pornographic films. Loosely based on real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, whose crimes spanned 1960 to 1983 (he was convicted of the murder of 11 people but confessed to hundreds more), the film debuted at the Chicago International Film Festival and gained infamy on the festival circuit where it was championed by Roger Ebert.

In 1986, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a micro-budget horror film from first-time director John McNaughton, disturbed critics and audiences so much that it challenged the paradigms for on-screen violence.

Henry portrait of a serial killer images