This year marks the 30th anniversary of John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Dark Sky Films will celebrate the seminal film's birthday with a theatrical release of the movie's 4K restoration on October 21st. Before that day arrives, though, star Michael Rooker and McNaughton will bring Henry home tonight with a screening and Q&A at the event where it premiered 30 years ago: the Chicago International Film Festival. Ahead of the special occasion, Daily Dead caught up with McNaughton to reflect on the making of his cult classic and the creation of one of cinema's most cold-blooded killers.

The performances and the way you shot Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer make it feel so real while watching it. It feels like we found a tape from a real-life killer. When you were making the movie, was that one of your biggest objectives, to make it seem as real as possible?

John McNaughton: I'll backtrack a little bit. The late Waleed Ali, who gave us the money to make the film, basically the mandate was to make a horror film. He didn't care if it was monsters from outer space or whatever, as long as they could sell horror films at that time. He gave us $100,000, which wasn't a lot for special effects, along with getting paid and things like that. The idea was, in my mind and Richard Fire especially, the writer who died last year, was to make it real. The most horrific thing is the reality of darkness available to human beings in the own depths of their souls. Then it was just a matter of making it look real, as if the audience were just dropped into the rooms with these people, into the cars, and you are there.

The shooting locations, too, add a guerrilla style to the filmmaking. Did you use the city and those environments organically when you were filming? Did you shoot wherever it looked like it would be best because you had to take such a low-budget approach to making this movie?

John McNaughton: It was interesting. There's a scene where [Henry and Otis] are shooting with a video camera and a woman's running down the street. We called the Chicago Police Department, we blocked the intersection from Michigan Avenue and Oak Street, and we paid $110 for the cop and they let us block the intersection for a couple of hours. At that point, Chicago was very happy to have somebody making the film. They left us alone for the most part, or if we absolutely needed help, they gave us more than we needed.

I will say this, I did study. I grew up in the south side of Chicago, which is a very unique place, and I went to a school called Columbia College, which had a great still photography department in the day, and that's my minor, but that's where my passion was, still photography on the streets of Chicago. Paris is more beautiful, but Chicago is one of the most photogenic towns, and I can just hold up my camera and click it, look, and just go, "Wow, is that cool."

All those locations had been places I'd had my eye on for years, and it was just a matter of picking and choosing. "Here's a scene, oh, I know where we can shoot that, it'll be perfect." It was the knowledge of the city of Chicago, a lot of those locations, when we wrote the scenes I knew where probably the best possible place to shoot them would be.

As you mentioned, you didn't have the biggest budget in the world to make Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, so how savvy did you have to be when you were filming to stretch your budget as far as possible? Did you get family and friends involved and do whatever you could to save a buck?

John McNaughton: It's interesting, because there's a woman that worked for me, a personal assistant for quite a few years, and my father used to hang around with her father and her uncle, many, many, many years ago, so the families go way back. As we were doing the color correction for the remastering, I just realized there's a scene where Henry's hunting in a shopping center and he's just looking at the people, and it's Anita, 30 years ago, with her daughter, 30 years ago, and then another scene—there are so many friends. A couple of locations were houses of friends. We had a lot of that type of thing, believe me. It's amazing how many people, I look at them and they're still my friends, people I still know, if they're alive.

There's a scene where Henry goes into the little bodega store to buy a pack of cigarettes and the man behind the counter says to him, "Hey, how about them Bears?" and Henry sends things flying. To me, in Chicago, you could kill people, you could do a lot of bad things, but if you say, "Fuck the Bears," then you're a really bad person. That's that famous line. The man who's selling him the cigarettes is Waleed Ali, who put up the money for the film. There is a certain metaphor there, Waleed was the man who was minding the store, so to speak, metaphorically. He gave us the money. Also, he had an acting minor when he was in school, so he was good, he was fine. Throughout the picture, old friends and family and acquaintances are sprinkled throughout, borrowing people's houses and cars. The famous "Henrymobile," that big green Chevy, that belonged to one of our two-man crew. Dave, the head of our crew, that was his personal car. All the cars were somebody's car. We didn't rent any cars, we had no teamsters or anything like that.

With the lack of money, you have to crank up on the creativity to make up for it, and in one of my favorite shots—if not my favorite shot of the movie—is the shot where they're [Henry and Becky] driving at the end, they're driving away from Chicago after killing Otis, and the camera is looking in the window as the two of them have a conversation. Any other thing I've ever done in my life that car would have [been towed]. We're out on the freeway, you would have been towed, it would have been a tow rig. What we did was illegal, basically. We had Charlie Lieberman, the cinematographer, we had his van and the camera on a tripod with the rear doors open shooting out of the back of the van, which is illegal. At the end of the shot, whoever was driving just hit the gas, and they [Henry and Becky] let off on the gas a little bit and they recede. Anyone who's ever directed a film or been a cinematographer, their jaws drop, because, "You weren't towing them?" "Nope." No tow rig, and the car had no brakes at that point, it was really dangerous.

The audio tracks were funky because they were in traffic, so what we did, while the actors were still warm, we rode up and there was some kind of parking lot up above the freeway. I don't know if it was for a mall or something, but we went up there where you could see the freeway and hear it distantly, and then we just re-recorded them doing the lines a few times so the tracks were almost clean, and then Elena [Maganini], our editor, reinserted those lines because they were still warm, with the same rhythm. That is not the original voice track, those were the tracks that were just recorded while off on the side of the road later at the end of the evening.

Wow, you really did have to get creative.

John McNaughton: Our sound man, Tom Yore—normally you have a sound crew. You have the boom person holding the boom with the mike, and then the other person with the recording equipment. In those days, it was a Nagra or a reel-to-reel recorder. Tom Yore wore the Nagra over his shoulder on a strap. He boomed and modulated simultaneously, and we literally had no looping. The tracks were really good. Tom did an amazing job, I've never seen anybody do that before or after.

One of the things I just love about this movie is that you use the found footage element way before it became popular. Otis and Henry love to film their murders and re-watch them, and it's really interesting that Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer used found footage so effectively years before it really blew up. Did you always intend to have Tom and Michael film themselves as much as they did, or did that come about more organically?

John McNaughton: I read a lot. I have my own taste and you can tell by my stack of books what things interest me, but occasionally I like to just pick up a book that a friend left behind that I wouldn't have picked up myself. I had a big old loft in Chicago for many years and I was off in Los Angeles or somewhere doing something, and I sublet it to a friend. When they left, there was a bunch of books left around and I picked up Red Dragon [by Thomas Harris] and I read it, and it was fantastic. The conceit, with Francis Dolarhyde, the killer, worked. He had a bad disfigurement of the face, and so he liked to not be seen very much and he worked in a photo processing lab where he was in the dark most of the time. They processed still photographs and that was in the days when people still shot film. People would bring their film to the drugstores, the Walgreens of the world, and then they would send the film to central processing labs that would process for a four- or five-state area—huge commercial labs, and he worked in one of those labs.

He was an orphan as a child and was adopted by this family that mistreated him badly. The family was two brothers and a sister, a mom and a dad, I don't remember exactly, but whenever he would get a roll of film that was a similar family, often, if the family matched the family that he was raised in, he would then get in his car, go to where they lived, and murder them, take pictures of it, and then savor the event through the use of the pictures. I stole that from Thomas Harris, but just upped the stakes by making it video rather than still photography.

The same idea, but a different medium.

John McNaughton: Growing up, when we used to watch the news during Vietnam, the news itself was produced and it was very formal, and then they would cut to the live footage from combat. In those days it was live footage from combat and it was 16mm. It was all handheld and it just had a raw quality that made you believe that it was very real. To me, there's a big difference between film and video. Film, I love it dearly, but it always implies a distance in time. It may have been shot ten minutes ago, it may be Robin Hood, it may have been shot centuries ago. Film is not immediate, there's always, to me, a distance in time, whereas video is now. Video tells you, by the quality of its image, you're seeing this now as it happens. It just has an immediacy and film has a distance. Film is more beautiful, video is more powerful in some ways.

I wrote a paper on the difference between film and video my senior year in college, and spent a good deal of time analyzing. That was my premise, and that was the proof in the way that the video was used in Henry. It's one thing to see them in their day-to-day lives, but when you see the actual footage they've created, while they're creating it, it's now. You're there, there is no place to hide.

You almost feel like an accomplice. You can't look away.

John McNaughton: That was the intent. "You like violence? You like films about violence? Here. Look at this. How do you like this? Is it fun?" As I tell friends, I didn't go to film school, I went to art school. I studied art for two-and-a-half years. To me, this is my medium, and one of the things was to explore the power of the medium of entertainment films and storytelling, because I don't consider Henry necessarily entertainment. It's like, "Look how powerful this medium is. Look how deeply it can make you feel and fear." Past just entertaining you, past just amusing you.

I'm still amazed at how good Michael Rooker, Tracy Arnold, and the late, great Tom Towles are together. The stars just really aligned with them. What was it like getting them all together and seeing them work in this film? 

John McNaughton: It's like so many things. Henry was made for $100,000, yet we're getting ready to perhaps publish the original storyboard illustrations as a book. There wasn't enough money to do shot-by-shot, but Frank Coronado, did one drawing per scene, 122 drawings. I actually prefer that to shot-by-shot at this point. Then, we had two weeks of rehearsal because no one had other jobs to go to. The late Richard Fire, who came out of the theater, and I wrote it, and the influence of the theater on that movie, the longer I think back and think about it from this perspective, this distance, [I see] the influence of the theater. They were all theater-trained actors and Tommy [Towles] had worked with Richard for years in the Organic Theater, which was Stuart Gordon's company here in Chicago.

Tracy had come in from Texas to work in a play called E/R that the Organic Theater had done. The Organic Theater invented the E/R story, believe me. It was a huge hit in Chicago—a huge hit play. Tracy had come in once the play had had its run at the Organic space, because they were getting ready to put up the new show—it was so successful, they moved it out to to the suburbs to a dinner theater and it ran for years. Richard recommended Tracy because he felt she was a really strong actress. We brought Tommy in originally for Henry, and I said, "No, he's not Henry, but he sure is Otis."

Then our makeup man, Jeff Segal, had worked with Michael in a play somewhere, and we were looking, but we just weren't hitting the Henrys, and Michael showed up one day. Basically, the only thing different about him the day he showed up for his audition than he is onscreen is that he changed out his shoes. He came wearing the Carhartt jacket, the blue work shirt, the Dickies work pants. He came as Henry. I opened the door, I almost dropped dead. "There he is."

A spitting image.

John McNaughton: Yeah, I've told this story many times. We're at Richard's apartment, waiting to interview Michael. There's a knock at the door, I went up and answered the door, I open the door, I looked, my jaw dropped, and I said a prayer, "Oh, God, please let him be able to act, because this is the guy." It was, "Look, this is Henry, here he is." Anyway, we had two weeks of rehearsal with him, and it was very much more like a theater rehearsal. Richard Fire insisted they all go home and write bios, and Michael doesn't like writing, so he did a tape recording.

A certain amount of the words that each of them had written in their bios, we pulled a phrase here and a word there. It got woven into their dialogue. I love rehearsals with the writer in film, because you get to custom tailor the roles. If you let actors say, "Oh, I don't like that, I don't want to say that, I want to say this," if you open that door, you're sunk. But if the actor has a genuine problem, "I can't get my mouth around this, this isn't the way my character..." "Okay, fine, here's the writer, let's you and the writer and me work on this until you like it and the writer likes it. Until everyone's happy." So we did. In each case, for all three of them, their bios they brought in, bits and pieces found their way back into the written dialogue.

When we hit the stage, they were ready to go and they had a working relationship and they had a rapport. You just can't beat that, in my opinion, but again, as the years roll by: less storyboards, less rehearsals, more money. Why do we get so much more money and have so much less time? I can't figure it out.

Are there any projects that you have coming up that you can tease?

John McNaughton: I'm working on another Bill Murray picture called The King of Counterfeit that I been working on for years with Bill. We appear to be getting close. I just finished a script from a novel called Pursuit by a man named Steve Monroe and it's a crime/cop story set in Chicago. Steve has written a number of Chicago-based books. I'm getting ready to start a company called Mr. Punch Productions because I love Punch and Judy. I put together a portfolio of about eight projects that I've either written, own the rights to, or have co-written, and that's going to be the coming thrust going out into the marketplace with those projects, looking for backing. In the meantime, I have two more premieres, New York and LA, with the 30 anniversary [of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer].

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To learn more about the Chicago International Film Festival, which kicks off today, visit their official website. To see if Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer will be playing in a theater near you later this month, go to Dark Sky Films' website.

  • Derek Anderson
    About the Author - Derek Anderson

    Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.

    When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.