Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

• Shot in the winter of 1985-86 on 16mm for roughly $110,000 in a brutal 28-day schedule. The crew couldn't afford much, so locations, vehicles, and clothes belonged to people working on the film, and the gray Chicago slush and back alleys you see is genuinely just the city.
• It's Michael Rooker's breakout screen role. He was working as a janitor and showed up to audition still in his janitor uniform, then wore that same uniform through the shoot. For research he tossed the serial-killer books as 'mostly crap' and got more out of the Texas Rangers who'd interviewed the real Henry Lee Lucas.
• Rooker stayed in character across the whole shoot, off-set too — refusing to socialize with cast or crew so they couldn't always tell if they were talking to the actor or the killer. McNaughton gave him the only private room on the production to hide between setups; it was lined with mirrors, which Rooker covered over with trash bags.
• The MPAA hit it with an X. When McNaughton asked what to cut for an R, the board told him nothing would do it — the X was for Henry's 'overall moral tone,' not any single shot. He refused to recut, and after years in distribution limbo it finally got a limited theatrical release on January 5, 1990.
• The living-room scene where Otis films Henry and Becky with the camcorder was completely improvised by Rooker, Tom Towles, and Tracy Arnold on set — and many of the insults the TV salesman hurls at Henry and Otis were improvised on the day too.
• It's one of the films credited with forcing the MPAA to create the NC-17 rating in 1990, cited alongside Almodóvar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Roger Ebert publicly championed it as a low-budget tour de force when most critics recoiled.

The camcorder scene is the film accusing the viewer. Henry and Otis rewind the home-invasion tape and watch it for pleasure — and we're watching them watch it, in the same chair. McNaughton frames our spectatorship as identical to theirs, which is exactly why the MPAA called the tone unfixable: the discomfort isn't the gore, it's being made complicit.

Henry survives because he refuses meaning while Otis dies chasing it. Henry kills randomly, never the same method twice, never bragging — pure logistics. Otis wants the ritual, the trophy, the rewatch, and his appetite for spectacle is what unravels them. The film argues that the truly uncatchable monster is the one with no signature and no story he needs to tell.

Becky is the film's cruelest tease: the one thread that looks like it could redeem Henry. Her tenderness reframes his blankness as something almost human, and the final shot — a suitcase left by the roadside — refuses even the satisfaction of seeing the act. Withholding the kill is the whole point; there's no arc to complete, just the next town.

Henry drifts through Chicago killing strangers with no pattern, no signature, no remorse — the smartest way to never get caught. He shares a flophouse with prison buddy Otis, whose sister Becky arrives carrying her own scars and starts mistaking Henry's flat calm for tenderness. When Otis catches the taste for it, the two start filming their home invasions and replaying the tape like a ballgame. There's no manhunt, no detective, no third act that makes it mean something. Just appetite, a camcorder, and a man who packs light and keeps moving.