We're still mad about Manson
Another new movie plus a show on the Edinburgh Fringe. Mark Kermode asks why this cult killer continues to obsess us
Sunday July 11, 2004
The Observer
Before his followers committed a series of grisly killings in August 1969, Charles Manson was little more than a failed pop star, whose sole claim to fame was a writing credit on the obscure Beach Boys B-side 'Cease to Exist' aka 'Never Learn Not to Love'. Depressed by his lack of success (he was rumoured to have failed an audition for the Monkees), Manson dispatched a group of his devoted 'family' members to run riot in Los Angeles. They killed seven people in two upmarket homes in the areas around Hollywood, daubing the walls with blood-painted slogans apparently inspired by the Beatles' White Album : 'Rise'; 'Death to Pigs'; and the misspelt 'Healter Skelter'.
The resulting murder trial, which saw Manson and several of his cronies sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment) finally ended the years of obscurity and made Manson a star. Declared 'Man of the Year' by the underground publication Tuesday's Child, and plastered on the front cover of Life and Rolling Stone, Manson became a counterculture icon, an embodiment of the heart of darkness.
In the 34 years Manson has spent behind bars, he has seen his cult cachet continue to grow, particularly among teenagers. In 1976, he was listed as one of the top 50 individuals most admired by American schoolchildren, apparently keen to embrace anything which would shock their parents. In the Nineties, goth rocker Brian Warner courted money-making outrage with his adopted sobriquet 'Marilyn Manson', while Guns N' Roses increased their rebel credibility by sneaking out a cover version of the Manson composition 'Look at Your Game, Girl'.
As recently as July, 2000, the office of California state senator Adam Schiff was investigating the internet sale of strands of Manson's hair which were being snapped up by fans who had dubbed him 'the Elvis of serial killers'.
Next month, a one-man show bafflingly entitled Charles Manson, Where Are You? plays at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Before that, a new movie, The Manson Family, opens in the UK, further trading on Manson's notorious past. It's been a labour of love for director Jim Van Bebber, who started shooting back in 1989 but only completed his magnum opus last year. Sadly, the result of his efforts is an uneven sexploitation shocker, memorable less for the ambitious nature of its multilayered, multimedia structure than for the rank vulgarity of its restaged murder scenes. The Village Voice may have called it 'John Ashcroft's worst nightmare', but the more lurid segments of The Manson Family would seem like a bad dream to anyone with any sense of decency - moral, technical, or aesthetic.
It's easy to see why film-makers have long been drawn to the Manson legend. Prior to the Tate/LaBianca killings, the Manson family actually lived on a movie set, the Spahn Movie Ranch, which had once played host to such high-profile productions as David O Selznick's Forties classic Duel in the Sun. By the late Sixties, however, its prestige had waned, with Blood Feast director Herschell Gordon Lewis shooting his no-budget nudie western Linda and Abilene there around the same time that Manson's gang showed up.
The location of the murders, too, had bizarre cinematic resonance, with the killers striking first at the home of Roman Polanski, director of the occult thriller Rosemary's Baby. It was here at 10050 Cielo Drive that Charles 'Tex' Watson and a gaggle of Manson's knife-wielding groupies murdered Polanski's heavily pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, and four others. 'I'm the Devil,' Watson told his victims, 'and I'm here to do the Devil's work', a phrase which some would link to an alleged curse hanging over Rosemary's Baby.
Others pointed out that the house had previously been owned by Doris Day's son, Terry Melcher, a record producer who had allegedly angered Manson by failing to help him achieve pop stardom.
Another key player in this whole grisly drama was aspiring actor and musician Bobby Beausoleil. Before falling in with Manson, Beausoleil had worked with experimental film-maker Kenneth Anger, who cast him in the title role of his forthcoming Lucifer Rising . When the pair fell out, however, Beausoleil allegedly stole Anger's van and made off with negatives of the film. Furious, Anger cast a spell apparently intended to turn Beausoleil into a toad. The spell didn't work, but the stolen van promptly broke down outside Spahn Ranch, depositing Beausoleil into the bosom of the Manson gang, whose company he kept until being arrested in August 1969 for murdering music teacher Gary Hinman.
One popular theory about the 'real' motive for the Tate/LaBianca murders was they were an attempt to spring Beausoleil from jail, creating diversionary crimes to suggest that Hinman's real killers were still at large. Beausoleil subsequently made up with Anger and wound up composing a haunting score for the relaunched Lucifer Rising from Tracy Prison.
Even before the Manson gang were caught, their crimes were becoming the stuff of big-screen legend. Trash maestro John Waters began shooting Multiple Maniacs in 1969 after the Tate/LaBianca killings, with which he became obsessed. 'Since the real killers hadn't been apprehended yet,' he wrote in his autobiography Shock Value, 'I decided that [transvestite performer] Divine would take credit for the murders in the film. I figured that if the murderers were never caught, there would always be the possibility that maybe Divine really did do it. We wanted to scare the world, just like the unheard-of Manson family, but we used a movie camera instead of deadly weapons.'
A few years later, Waters dedicated his shock-filled romp Pink Flamingos to the convicted Manson murderers Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, and Leslie van Houten, a dedication which he later told me he regretted.
At around the same time, Robert Hendrickson and Laurence Merrick were unveiling their Oscar-nominated documentary Manson, with publicity promising audiences that 'YOU WILL ACTUALLY SEE each member of the Manson family and HEAR their horrifying philosophy of sex, perversion, murder and suicide.' Concentrating mainly on family life at both the Spahn Ranch, and the Barker Ranch in Death Valley, Manson included family member 'Brenda' telling America: 'We are what you have made us. We were brought up on your TV. We were brought up watching Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, FBI, Combat. Combat was my favourite show.'
To date, the most high-profile film about the Manson case is still Helter Skelter, a surprisingly gripping 1976 TV movie based on prosecuting DA Vincent Bugliosi's bestseller which was released at cinemas here in the UK. Despite its small-screen origins, Helter Skelter benefited from a chilling central performance by Steve Railsback.
In May of this year, CBS TV premiered a remake of Helter Skelter in the US, with Jeremy Davies taking the Manson role. According to its producers: 'The original movie focused on the investigation of the gruesome slayings and the trial of Charles Manson. This new adaptation focuses on who Manson was, why he did what he did, and how this morally corrupt ex-con persuaded the members of his family to commit such horrifying acts.'
Less 'professional' projects inspired by the Manson murders included Seventies horrors such as The Helter Skelter Murders and The Manson Massacre, and Eighties oddities such as Manson Family Movies, all of which remain little seen and even less respected.
Yet the dumbest and most depressing Manson spin-off was surely Slaughter, an ultra-cheap Seventies exploitation movie from husband and wife film-makers Michael and Roberta Findlay. Loosely based on the Manson murders, and replete with a Charlie-style satanic guru, Slaughter was deemed 'really awful' by its makers and left on a shelf to rot. A few years later, however, marketing whizz Allan Shackleton decided to cash in on news stories about snuff movies (an apocryphal genre in which people are really killed) by replacing Slaughter 's final reel with a faked murder scene.
Cannily retitled Snuff, the resulting film was quickly identified as a hoax by New York DA Robert Morgenthau, although in the UK, videos of Snuff became the subject of prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. Many film historians now trace the origins of the snuff myth back to Ed Sanders's book, The Family, in which a Manson associate claimed that the gang had filmed their crimes with cameras stolen from NBC and then buried the evidence in the desert. No such films have ever been found. Last year, however, the British censors dealt Snuff a killer blow by granting it an uncut 18 certificate, destroying whatever 'outlaw' cult status it still retained.
Other recent Manson movies include Nikolas Schreck's 1989 video documentary, Charles Manson Superstar, which offers a glib apologia for Manson's involvement in the Tate/LaBianca killings before allowing a cell-bound Charlie to do what he does best: spout off at great length about his latest philosophical insights. The video's credits include Zeena LaVey, daughter of renowned satanist Anton LaVey, whose disciples once included future Manson murderer Susan Atkins.
More recently, producer Don Murphy, whose credits include Natural Born Killers, came close to mounting a big-budget Manson biopic based on Sanders's book, but lost funding at the last moment. Whether the world really needs another Manson movie remains to be seen.
Paradoxically, those most opposed to such ventures include the killers themselves, who regularly complain that any publicity lessens their chances of parole. Perhaps there is some good in all those rotten movies after all.
· The Manson Family opens on 23 July
