Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer, Is Finally Getting the 4K It Deserves

Why does one grim little film from 1986, shot on pennies in Chicago, still make people's voices do that thing where they trail off halfway through a sentence? Because Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer still works, forty years on, and this October it is finally getting the restoration a film that disturbing has earned.

What Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer actually is

If you have never seen it, here is the shape of it without spoiling the part that makes it awful. John McNaughton's film follows Henry, played by Michael Rooker in the performance that still gets his name said in a particular tone at horror quizzes, a drifter loosely shaped by the real confessions of killer Henry Lee Lucas. He moves in with an old prison cellmate and the cellmate's sister in a grey, ordinary Chicago, and the film simply watches him. There is no score swelling to warn you, no villain speech, no clean moral waiting at the end to tidy it up for you. It plays like a documentary that wandered into the wrong house by accident, and that flatness is exactly why nobody has managed to stop talking about it.

It is worth knowing, too, that the film almost did not get a cinema life at all. It was made in the mid-1980s and then sat on a shelf for years because the American ratings board kept slapping it with an X, the same category used for films nobody wanted their name near. It eventually went out unrated, which is its own small piece of horror history: a film too honest for the system built to grade it.

Why a restoration of this one feels different

I will be honest, most anniversary 4K announcements make me shrug. A shinier picture of a film I already love is nice. It is not news. This one is different because Henry was never meant to look pristine in the first place. It was made cheap, it circulated for years on grainy VHS and early DVD copies, and that murk is part of how most of us first met it, late at night, slightly illegally, feeling like we were watching something we were not meant to see. Clean that up too much and you risk losing the thing that made it feel dangerous.

Dread Central covered the details of this release landing in October, and I would rather send you to read their report than pretend I have information I do not: Dread Central's report on the 4K release. What I can tell you from my own sofa is that a cleaner transfer of a film built on discomfort is a strange, slightly thrilling idea. You lose the murk. You should not lose the dread, and that is the thing worth watching for when it actually lands.

Where it sits for a night in

This is not a film to put on with a bowl of popcorn and a group of mates shouting at the screen. It is a one-person, lights-low, nobody-talk-to-me watch, closer to the feeling of reading a true crime book you probably should not finish right before bed. It belongs on the shelf next to the other American horror of its decade that decided atmosphere and stillness do more damage than a jump scare ever could. If you already know your slashers back to front and want to see where the genre's much colder, quieter cousin lives, this is the one.

I think what gets me about a fortieth anniversary like this one is the reminder that the films that unsettle us properly rarely shout. Henry never raises its voice once, and that is precisely why I still think about it on nights when the flat is too quiet and the kettle has just clicked off. Has anyone else here actually sat through it, or is it one of those titles everyone has heard whispered about but nobody in your group chat has actually watched? Tell me honestly, because I have a feeling I know the answer already.