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‘CHAOS: The Manson Murders’ Review: Errol Morris’ Manson Documentary Gets Lost in the Fog of Conspiracy
Errol Morris' film is built around the theory that Charles Manson learned mind-control techniques from the CIA. But guess what? There's no evidence.
So I sat down to watch “ CHAOS: The Manson Murders,” a new Netflix documentary directed by Errol Morris(“The Fog of War,” “The Thin Blue Line”), with what I would describe as a kind of skeptical curiosity. And we know the mythology that’s been built up around it — that Manson was a devious street-hustling criminal who exploited the new youth culture to turn himself into the garbage version of a hippie cult leader, using the psych-out tactics of a pimp combined with breaking down the egos of his followers through massive doses of LSD, spinning out his theory of “Helter Skelter” (an apocalyptic uprising against middle-class white “pigs,” which would be led by Black revolutionaries) as if it were a demonic catechism. Here’s Susan Atkins, the breathy WASP witch-princess of Manson’s followers, talking in an old interview about how she and Tex Watson got super-wired on speed the night of Sharon Tate’s murder (the drug factor is a major part of the explanation of how the girls could see the stabbings they were doing as “unreal”).
Or read this on Variety
