After reading Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, I was transfixed with the biography of Midwestern grown serial killer H.H. Holmes. Some may call this fascination morbid but, whenever a murder mystery springs up in the news (Lacey Peterson, Robert Blake’s wife), people all around become obsessed with the “how?” and “why?”. While Devil in the White City began my thirst for knowledge regarding the life of H.H. Holmes, John Borowski’s documentary, while a tad redundant to anyone familiar with the Holmes’s murders, quenched it.
For those of you un-familiar with the story of Holmes, he was the American equivalent of Jack the Ripper. He constructed a hotel dubbed “The Castle” by passersby and attempted to profit in on the rush of people coming to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. People involved in its construction would be mysteriously fired or, in some cases, would even disappear. Why? Holmes wanted to be the only one with a knowledge of how his torture chambers were constructed. He would kill many of those renting rooms from him, much of the time by gassing them, would dump their bodies down hidden chutes in the house, would burn the evidence in his make-shift crematorium and, in some cases, would sell their remains to medical colleges.
Aside from being a murderer, Holmes was also a swindler. He would find victims to sign their life insurance over to him and, as many of them began to crop up murdered, would collect his keep. The documentary follows many of these strands: the scams, the murders, and some of the people who crossed paths with Holmes. For being slightly over an hour in length, Borowski’s documentary is extremely comprehensive.
The reason that Borowski’s documentary is so effective is not because of the content. Style aside, the documentary plays out life any A&E “Biography”, giving background and following the main events in Holmes’s life. What sells the documentary is the retro style Borowski brings to the film. The film won numerous awards at the Horror Film Festival before being graced with the award for best director by Chicago Community Cinema and it is easy to see why. Like Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, Borowski relies on black and white, expressionist cinematography for his re-enactments of key events and the end result is frightening, both in terms of the effect it has on the audience and that it is the product of a first-time director working with a low budget.
The DVD comes complete with commentary, documentary, outtakes and an epilogue. While the commentary and especially the documentary prove adequate, the main attraction here is the film. It is a must-see for anyone interested in murder mysteries and, from the way its told, it can also function as a form of horror film. Quite simply, the film will scare you while you learn about one of the most overlooked dark spots in American history.
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