The film's artful gaucheness saves it from prurience and gives the story its ghastly sense of godlessness. Yet beneath the non-interventionist style there is a wealth of symbolic or motivic detail.

[Director John McNaughton] shows few of Henry's dozen or so crimes. Instead he reveals the victims, at the scenes of their deaths, in slow zoom shots accompanied by elegiac music. He is a coroner with a touch of the poet.

In a world in which eight nearly identical Friday the 13th movies offer the adventures of Jason the ax-murderer as entertainment for teen-agers, maybe we do need this sobering alternative.

It’s a film that sticks with you and makes you feel dirty just watching it. This is because unlike most narrative driven Hollywood movies, this one has no glamour or spin. It is full of dread and terror even in scenes that on the surface are innocuous.