The Optimum Wound Profile: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as Atrocity Exhibition

Abstract

This essay examines John McNaughton’s *Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer* (1990) through the theoretical frameworks of J. G. Ballard’s *The Atrocity Exhibition* and Mark Seltzer’s concept of “wound culture,” arguing that the film exposes the intersections of violence, spectatorship, identity, and mass-mediated representation in late-capitalist American society. Drawing on film theory, cultural criticism, and psychoanalytic interpretations of trauma, the analysis positions serial murder as both an expression of fractured individual subjectivity and a manifestation of broader cultural anxieties surrounding violence and its technological reproduction. Henry’s unstable identity, traumatic history, and compulsive violence are examined alongside the film’s detached, pseudo-documentary aesthetic, which formally reproduces the psychological disconnection of its protagonist. Particular attention is given to the film’s use of videotaped murder, through which spectators become implicated in the consumption of violence as entertainment. The essay argues that McNaughton systematically subverts conventional horror-film expectations, withholding psychological explanations, moral resolution, and stable points of identification. In doing so, *Henry* transforms cinematic violence into a critique of the cultural mechanisms through which atrocity becomes spectacle. Ultimately, the film functions as an atrocity exhibition in Ballard’s sense: a disturbing representation of a society in which the boundaries between private trauma and public spectacle, reality and simulation, and violence and entertainment have become increasingly unstable.