THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS @ 35 and HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER @ 40

Serial killer movies have been with us for a long time. Claims of which is the first interest me less than who was the first punk band. Both punk and serial killer movies peaked in their turn after any identifiable ancestors and the main task is to separate the cultural trend from the technically included. So, instead of doing that, I'm going to compare one from before the trend in the '90s with the one that started the trend. 

By the time Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the term was known but not really hammered into the parlance. What became the joke about anyone a little awkward or withdrawn was more like a reference to a dark and grave phenomenon. John McNaughton's film keeps to that understanding. Its unflinching look at the violence is painful to the eye and its mood is grim.

Drifter Henry stops by Chicago to catch up with his friend Otis. Otis's sister Becky has also knocked on the door, escaping her husband's physical abuse. Becky is drawn to Henry's quiet power, partially because it stands between her and her carnally unrestrained brother. Meanwhile, Henry leads Otis into a life of murder as a leisure activity. I'm not going to spoil either of these movies, here, but you can already see where this is heading and, while you won't be surprised, I guarantee you will be horrified.

John McNaughton's film is stark and dour. Every surface looks like it would soil the lightest touch. These are people whose life decisions were formed in trauma and poverty. The Chicago of the setting is not the metropolis but the lightless apartment blocks and empty nocturnal streets. Becky's attempts to brighten her circumstances with chirpy optimism stop well short of the kind of grotesquerie that David Lynch might have imagined, this deep darkness feels far too grim for such whimsy and her cheery voice only reinforces the dread.

Henry, polite and personable in daily life transforms into an ultraviolent monster at any encountered slight. He goes from tipping the waitress at a diner and paying her a compliment to murdering the married couple at a liquor store. When Becky points out that his story of how he killed his mother changed in the same conversation the tension is unbearble. The moment is crossed, unsatisfactorily but cleared and marked for any future reference Henry might need. With Otis things are much worse. Henry is hard work. Can't suck up to him, can't deviate. In charge but without a plan.

At first the violence is depicted by a collision of lingering shots of the victims' corpses and the audio of the action played back. Eventually, we do see the acts and they are brutal but undramatic. A home invasion scene is dehumanisingly cruel and near impossible to watch without wincing or covering. Henry's policy is to vary the M.O., making detection difficult. This will only continue until Henry is stopped and that might take his own death. 

In The Silence of the Lambs young FBI trainee is pitted against the dangerous mind of a cannibalistic serial monster (now imprisoned) to help with a current case of near equal ghastliness. A bargain forms between the pair, a quid pro quo of expert opinion and personal trauma. While this hazardous pathway is negotiated, young Clarice is heading for a baptism of terror.

Really? Five paragraphs on an obscruity and just one for one of the most influential crime thrillers of all time? Yeah, but that's to do with that influence. The Silence of the Lambs is a film I didn't revere even as I first saw it, out with friends at the cinema on first release. My second viewing was for this blog. While I've softened on my disdain for it because of that, I still think its value lies in what it started, not what it was.

Jonathan Demme's film was made to hit and did so. It spawned a decade of copycat movies, each entering an arms race to produce a killer more brutal, ingenious and impossibly well resourced. I note two exceptions to this: Seven and The Ugly. While both plug in to the exploitative nature of the sub-genre they also both deviate from it in ways that distinguish them from the source point. The rest, The Cell, The Bone Collector, Kiss the Girls, and so many more, filled the form and played along with little to tell them apart by. 

And they mostly hit big, as well, with genius level criminals, elaborate murder methods and forbidding lairs. The dread in Henry had become the Grand Guignol of the big nihilistic '90s. In case you think I'm gittin' all judgey, be informed that I was first in line to see most of these at the cinema and those I missed got rented on VHS. I also got burned out by them and by the time Tarsem's eyepopping art-direction exercise The Cell appeared I tapped out and left the hall.

I am making this comparison because it highlights the irony that the earlier no-budget film is always grim but never sensational and the later one is a massive A-list cast extravaganza masking a tawdry exploitation movie. Silence is, at its best a well crafted dark crime thriller but it is also a movie that happily invites its audience to cheer the choice of victims by a killer who is nothing but an extended open target for othering. There is carefully placed dialogue in the film, between Clarice and Hannibal, that Buffalo Bill is not a transsexual but scenes of him have all the subtlety of bait. The sleaze is not Bill's, it's Demme's and source novelist Thomas Harris'. It's the popcorn and choctop selling sleaze of mega suits tripping on a goldmine. 

What's new? Not that but if any of us is going to laud a movie as near perfect or subtle or profound as Silence has been regarded, where is the love for the first big screen Hannibal in Michael Mann's more complex and harder to love Manhunter from the same year as Henry? It's the Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster pairing along with a massive budget that did that. Next to that, the modestly made but severe and brutal Henry can never compete, though its violence has none of the scary titillation of Demme's film (if you are aroused by the murders in Henry the problem is not in the film). 

Silence created a trend of mounting depravity that licenced its audiences to switch sides after the devil stand-in got too bad and cheered on the good guys when they kicked down the door. No wonder Seven's refusal to allow John Doe genius (he's actually more of an a proto sovereign citizen) made it stand out. No wonder Simon's fear of self is more striking than a committee-designed super-psycho.

I was ready to be humbled by a revisit to The Silence of the Lambs, hoping I'd see more to it a second time, but it just wasn't there. Then again, it did give the TV great The X-Files its base aesthetic (tellingly). Henry, on the other hand punched me in the gut all over again. Its power is palpable in the notes its not playing and that never turns into TV.

Viewing notes: I turned to my old DVD for Henry (scrubs up well for an oldie) and watched Silence on Prime (but its licence just ran out so it's not there anymore. You can rent both through Prime and VOD. You can still get a Blu-Ray or DVD of Silence but you'll have to look online for any phsycial copy of Henry.