Before proceeding with my argument on theatricality in horror cinema, it is important to address the fact that many horror films adopt a realistic style to depict terrifying actions performed by ordinary people in commonplace settings, seemingly rejecting ostentatious artifice. From Roberta and Michael Findlay's psycho- voyeur experiment, Take Me Naked (1966), to M. Night Shyamalan's gerontophobic The Visit (2015), cinematic tales of terror often rely on documentary realism to create unsettling worst- case scenarios where normality suddenly becomes petrifyingly bizarre. Perhaps the most notorious example of this trend is Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986, John McNaughton), which at the time of its release “was marketed as an authentic account of the serial killer due to its social realist tendencies and faux documentary style” (Aston 2018, 118). On the face of it, the film does appear to be straightforwardly documenting, from a coldly detached perspective, the actions of the eponymous murderer, played by the disconcertingly appealing Michael Rooker. Shot on location in and around Chicago in 1985, Henry avoids the over- the- top histrionics of masked killers common to contemporary slashers of the 1980s. Rather, it presents a slice- of- life narrative which drearily follows Henry as he hangs out with his roommates, brother and sister Otis (Tom Towles) and Becky (Tracy Arnold), or proceeds to randomly kill strangers. However, as Jon Nelson Wagner and Tracy Biga MacLean point out in Television at the Movies: Cinematic and Critical Responses to American Broadcasting (2008), Henry is a carefully constructed text that “draws on melodrama, role playing, and serial form, despite the trappings of gritty cinematic realism” (155).

Indeed, Henry is surprisingly reliant on artifice to create the horrifying effects behind its realist surface. Most noticeably from the beginning of the film, the soundtrack brazenly draws attention to itself as it underscores Henry's homicidal deeds. In the first several minutes of the film, interspersed among shots of Henry eating in a diner, driving his car or working as a bug exterminator, images of his victims are accompanied by hauntingly menacing music and sound effects that stylistically isolate tableaus of slain bodies from the documentary depiction of Henry's mundane existence. Visually, some of the killings strikingly depart from gritty realism, sometimes verging on slapstick comedy, as when Henry and Otis kill a man by hysterically stabbing him and smashing a TV over his head.