What if the Manson Murders Weren’t What We Thought? (2025)

If you’re a fan of sophisticated, epistemologically intricate nonfiction filmmaking, it might not occur to you to click the thumbnail for something called Chaos: The Manson Murders when it pops up on your Netflix homepage this weekend. So put it this way: There’s a new Errol Morris movie in town. The Oscar-winning director of The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line has been in a bit of a rough patch of late: American Dharma, his controversial 2018 portrait of Steve Bannon, took more than a year to find theatrical distribution, and last year’s Separated, a politically urgent account of the Trump administration’s child-separation policy, was bought by MSNBC in October but not broadcast until a month after the presidential election. But between its subject matter and its streaming platform, Chaos is—as Morris’ own editor told him—all but certain to bring Morris his biggest audience in years, if not ever.

The movie is credited as an adaptation of Tom O’Neill’s book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, a sprawling, occasionally off-the-rails investigation that eventually ties Manson to the U.S. government’s experiments in using LSD for mind control. Or, depending on how you read O’Neill’s evidence and whether you share his obsessions, places the two in close proximity without proving any real connection. According to O’Neill, the commonly accepted narrative of the Manson case—that Manson compelled his followers to murder actress Sharon Tate and six others in supremely gruesome fashion in order to start a race war and bring about the end of the world—was a convenient fiction concocted by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi to secure an easy conviction and set the stage for his book Helter Skelter, which went on to become the bestselling true-crime title of all time. While Manson’s followers—the “Family” composed of teenage runaways who he would keep high for days while preaching them his gospel—may have believed that story, O’Neill believes that Manson’s own motives were murkier, and that a concerted effort has been made to keep the truth hidden for years.

“I believe there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, although if you ask me, I would be hard-pressed to tell you exactly the nature of that conspiracy.”

Morris’ movie, in a sense, splits the difference, letting O’Neill make his case—which eventually ropes in a scientist named Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, a subcontractor for the CIA’s Project MKUltra who also served as the court-appointed psychiatrist for Jack Ruby, the man who assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald—while drawing on recorded interviews with Manson and his followers, as well as new ones with prosecutor Stephen Kay and Manson disciple Bobby Beausoleil. Chaos doesn’t go as far as O’Neill’s book in suggesting that Manson deployed the same mind-control techniques that the CIA was using to develop brainwashed assassins who would kill on command with no memory of the act. (One of his subjects calls the Tate–LaBianca murders “an MKUltra experiment gone right.”) But Morris does suggest that in this case, as in many others, people are drawn more powerfully to stories than they are to the truth, and that important questions still remain unanswered.

Morris, whose Netflix miniseries Wormwood deals with a different MKUltra-related coverup, spoke to Slate from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sam Adams: You’ve often drawn on things your subjects have written: The Pigeon Tunnel, for example, shares its title with John Le Carré’s memoir. But Chaos and Separated are, I think, the first movies you’ve made that are credited as adaptations since A Brief History of Time, which was way back in 1991. So what drew you to Tom O’Neill’s book?

Errol Morris: [pause] I was just thinking about the whole book adaptation question. I would say that there are book adaptations and then there are book adaptations. It’s, at least as far as I’m concerned, a very large category. And I wouldn’t say, strictly speaking, that Separated or Chaos are straight book adaptations. But they have certainly been influenced and inspired by the books that they’re associated with. That I’m not going to quibble over.

Your own book, A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, was made into a series by a different director, who, although he was working from your material, seemed to come to a different conclusion. So you have experience from both sides of the transaction about how different versions can diverge. Still, you got into filmmaking in the first place through a fascination with Ed Gein, and Charles Manson is also a serial killer, at least of sorts. Was it an interest in that kind of figure that drew you in? Had you been looking to make a movie about Manson?

It happened in a very odd way. I had done these books with Penguin Press. My editor, Scott Moyers, called me and said that he had a problem project. The writer—as it turns out, Tom O’Neill—couldn’t finish his book on the Manson case. Would I help him finish it? Usually this is not something people ask me to do. So I said, “Sure, let me talk to Tom O’Neill,” and I did, and I suggested, “Why don’t we make a movie?” I interviewed him with I don’t know how many cameras, but a lot of cameras. This was at a time when I was obsessed with shooting interviews, not with one camera and not with two cameras but a dozen or more. So I shot this interview, which I rather liked—and I don’t really like everything I do, but I rather liked this interview. But Tom didn’t want to proceed. He wanted to finish the book. Fair enough. I had spent a fair amount of my own money, but in the end I was resigned that I would never get it back and I would never use this material. And time went on, as it has a tendency to do.

Tom completed the book, not with Penguin, a different publisher, and the book was successful. I assumed that it would be turned into some kind of movie. It wasn’t. Tom came back to me, this is 10 years or so later, asking me if I was still interested in making a movie.
And I have the proof that I was.

Are those initial interviews with Tom O’Neill still in Chaos? Because you use a lot of different visual setups in the film.

They’re very much there.

Is it the stuff in the beginning, where you have him sitting in blackness with this very dramatic lighting, and then his dog walks through the shot?

Yes. I love those shots.

Tom O’Neill is a classic Errol Morris protagonist, a guy who took a 5,000-word assignment for Premiere magazine and spent 20 years turning it into a 450-page book. I can easily see a more first-person, Interrotron-style approach that’s more focused on his personal obsession, which is kind of the driving force of the book. But instead you bring in a number of other figures. How did your version of Chaos arrive at the form it has now?

Netflix certainly played some role in all of this. Originally, I had seen it as a series. Netflix was interested in it as a one-off feature, and that’s how it was made. There’s certainly enough material on the Manson case and in Tom’s book alone to imagine a whole number of different movies. And I had made a series for Netflix connected with MKUltra, this CIA program—for want of a better way to describe it, call it the Manchurian Candidate program. Can we induce false memories? Can we control human behavior to the extent—can we induce violent behavior? A willingness, if you like, to kill? And the question for Tom … I suppose it’s a legitimate question, because did MKUltra exist? It did. No foolin’! Was the CIA interested in mind control, programmed assassins, et cetera? They were! But those facts alone don’t prove to us that Charles Manson was a vehicle for the CIA. It’s truly suggestive, but not proven. And that itself I find really interesting. Did Tom go down a rabbit hole? Clearly he went down a rabbit hole. But in the process of going down that rabbit hole, he discovered all kinds of interesting things.

As a former detective—and I suppose a current detective as well, I like to think of it as an ongoing habit—I can very, very well understand the frustration of not being able to prove your case. The Jeffrey MacDonald story is a perfect example of that sort of thing. Wanting so badly to prove something and not being able to and instead becoming obsessed with finding out why I couldn’t prove it. In this story there are a lot of potential protagonists. I became very much interested, of course, in Tom. And Bobby Beausoleil, who was one of the Manson killers. He probably would not like me to refer to him as such, but he was connected with Manson.

In one of the more recent interviews with Tom O’Neill, you’re talking to him in his home, and in some of the shots, you’re visible as well, sitting on the couch across from him with a camera next to you. In the film, you sometimes put images of him from opposite angles on screen at the same time, so it’s almost like he’s confronting himself face-to-face.

When we made this agreement to make Chaos, Tom shared with me a lot of his work product, his original interviews, his research,and so on and so forth. I was aware from the very beginning of the extraordinary amount of work that he had done. We filmed in Tom’s house in California, and you have a house just filled with folders, documents, cassette tapes, and on and on. And in all of it, there’s this strong desire, of course, to prove his case, and his case is ultimately an MKUltra case. And he felt tantalizingly close with Jolly West, who somehow was involved in so many diverse things, particularly Jack Ruby, the murderer of Lee Harvey Oswald, his connection with the assassination of JFK. Talk about another dark story which may never ever have any kind of satisfactory solution.

I think we all have this idea that if you work hard enough and long enough, you’re going to crack the case. Maybe you just haven’t looked in the right closet or under the right bed or talked to the right people, but a solution will be at hand, because we’re talking about the world in which real things happen and they leave evidence. But I’ve long since realized that evidence can be manipulated, can be lost, can be changed. And if that’s what’s happening, can you ever really, really get back to what really happened?There’s a passage that I really like in Helter Skelter, and the passage compares an investigation to a jigsaw puzzle. The idea is that somehow we’re going to find the missing pieces and we’re going to put them all together and a picture is going to emerge. And even Bugliosi tells us that people who are intimately acquainted with investigations know that isn’t always true. Sometimes people have introduced false pieces of the puzzle. Sometimes the puzzle gets mixed up with a different puzzle. Sometimes the pieces just don’t fit together properly and never will.

I’ve read about Donald Trump’s repeated claims he’s going to release all of the hidden material about the JFK assassination. But what do we know about this material? Do we know that it hasn’t been planted, adulterated, manipulated? We don’t.

Let me clue you in to a certain bias that I have. Do people conspire to do things with each other? Yeah. Do I think that that is the best explanation usually for why things happen? I don’t. But for me to say that there are no conspiracies, that’s not quite right either. There are conspiracies. Clearly, there are conspiracies. I believe there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, although if you ask me, I would be hard-pressed to tell you exactly the nature of that conspiracy.

Over the years, the older I get, the clearer it becomes how lucky I was in The Thin Blue Line. I stumbled on a story. It wasn’t any story that people were interested in. The guy who they believed shot a cop had been arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. He had come within a couple of days of a visit with Old Sparky in the Texas death chamber. I stumbled on a case and spent three years investigating it, and bit by bit as I interviewed more people and found more documents, two things happened. On one hand, it became clear that the guy convicted of the murder hadn’t done it—he was sentenced to death, almost electrocuted, but he didn’t do it. And then there was a 16-year-old kid who, it became clearer and clearer as more and more evidence piled up, that he was the one who had committed the murder. The chief prosecution witness—it’s kind of handy—was the person who had actually done the killing. The fact that everything opened up in that way, it doesn’t happen all the time. It spoiled me into embracing this idea that somehow every case can be cracked.

And here you have Helter Skelter. One of the things that Tom achieved is that he shows that Bugliosi was a lunatic, and the case that Bugliosi prosecuted was probably a fake case that he invented in order to secure a death penalty against Charles Manson and the other members of the family. He needed a kind of hook on which to hang his hat. If you ask me, do I believe that the Beatles’ White Album was ultimately responsible for all of these deaths? I confess I do not. And so, then, what was the cause? Hopefully what Chaos does is it takes you in a meaningful way deep into the mysteries of the Manson case. And the most important alternative, never to be ignored—just look at what’s going on in America at the moment—is that chaos can be the result of real chaos, of stupidity, of people at cross-purposes with each other, of people not really understanding what they’re doing. Happenstance. Chance. Was there one big conspiracy? A lot of little conspiracies? Was there just sheer confusion? I made a movie about it.

People who know your movies know to expect a certain amount of uncertainty. Even in The Thin Blue Line, where you stage reenactments of several different versions of the crime, you never show the one you believe to be the truth. But it’s still quite a moment as we’re nearing the end of Chaos to have you turn to Tom O’Neill and say you’re not sure you believe the entire premise of his book, which is that Manson, directly or indirectly, learned the techniques he used to control his followers from the U.S. government.

“I find his policies repellent, but I found Steve Bannon really, really interesting, and stilldo.”

In fairness to Tom, can you rule out MKUltra? Perhaps not. I used to live in Berkeley as a graduate student in philosophy, and often I would drive from Berkeley to San Francisco. I’d drive across the Bay Bridge, and I’d pick up hitchhikers. And I remember one hitchhiker that I picked up was a Chariots of the Gods guy. I think it had just come out. And he’s saying to me, “How do you explain the existence of an electric toaster oven that is 12,700 years old found in the Gobi Desert?” And I said, “I can’t.” Now, I have to confess I don’t believe that there was any such thing. But if there was, could I explain it? Not so much. Tom does something a little bit like that. How do you explain the fact that Manson’s parole officer just let him go again and again and again? He was just free to do whatever he chose to do. Can I explain it? I can’t. It could be meaningful or not. Is it suggestive of something peculiar? It is. But does it tell us that somehow they were all in league with the government? It doesn’t. I think it’s one of the most fascinating stories about investigation and the desire to believe and how hard it is really to investigate anything.

As you point out in the film, it isn’t the murders, as horrific as they are, that have kept this fascination alive for more than 50 years. It’s the story around them: the Helter Skelter story. Your title could be referring to Operation CHAOS, the CIA surveillance program, or to small-c chaos, what Bobby Beausoleil calls “blunder after blunder after blunder.” Maybe the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department raided Spahn Ranch a week after the murders and then let everyone go because they were government informants, or maybe it was because the police misdated the warrant. Maybe someone just did their job badly.

Right. And I like to keep that act of juggling them alive because it’s a better way to understand the case than just to pretend that those possibilities don’t exist.

The thumbnail art Netflix is using for Chaos doesn’t use your name—in fact, it makes it look much like any other entry in their extremely well-populated True Crime section. Which raises the interesting possibility, maybe likelihood, of people watching it without realizing it’s a new Errol Morris movie. What do you think about that?

Often people will say they have a great idea for a movie, and I say, “That’s terrific. You have a great idea how to pay for it?” Whatever you want to say about it, Netflix has changed the documentary game entirely. I always quote a line that I love from Conan the Barbarian. One penitent says to another, “Used to be just another snake cult. Now you see it everywhere.” And that’s certainly true of documentary.

As a filmmaker, I would rather people see what I do rather than know that I made it. Yeah, I wish my name was on it, but it’s not. And I’m glad that you’re talking to me and that you’re interested in the fact that I made this film, and I’m also interested in the fact that a lot of people will see it. So I’m grateful to Netflix for that.

I’ve just come back from the True/False documentary festival, and one thing you hear constantly from documentary filmmakers is, “The only job offers I get are for true-crime projects.” Given that The Thin Blue Line remains one of the landmarks of the form, and yet also quite distinct from the way many people have approached it since, I wonder what thoughts you have about the massive place true crime has come to occupy in the field.

Well, I’ve always been interested in true crime. In fact, I have a drama project, as we speak, which is about how I met my wife, and it’s a love story that includes Ed Gein: I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, and I came back after I graduated because I wanted to meet Ed Gein. I wanted to investigate the Gein murders. And this is before the advent of all of this stuff. Of course, Psycho had been made in 1960 and remains one of my very favorite films. But I wanted to meet Gein, and I did. As far as I know, I’m the only non-psychiatric journalist, if you will, who’s ever interviewed him. The story has so many weird angles. I arranged with Werner Herzog that we would go and we would try to exhume Augusta Gein’s grave in Plainfield Cemetery. It’s in Werner’s autobiography, and it’s certainly in my film. The movie is called Digging Up the Past, and I’m hoping that I make that as a next film. I’ve also been in Ukraine several times, and I’m going back to Kyiv very soon, and we’ve been shooting for a different film.

Zelensky seems like a great Errol Morris subject, almost as good as Tom O’Neill. Speaking of subjects: You’ve been making documentaries for almost 50 years, and I wonder how you think the audience has changed. There were certainly people who criticized you for making movies about Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, but whatever they said about The Fog of War or The Unknown Known, I don’t think it was the same way they reacted to your Steve Bannon movie American Dharma, which was much closer to arguing that it shouldn’t exist at all. Perhaps it would have been different if you’d released the earlier films when their subjects were still in power, but do you think people’s expectations have shifted?

Well, it’s all contextual, unavoidably. It’s self-serving of me to say so, but I think that American Dharma, my film about Steve Bannon, is one of the best films I’ve ever done. And among other things, I think it quite successfully predicts Jan. 6 long before it happened. It tells you something very deep about this impulse, which I still believe to be true, which is this impulse at the heart of MAGA to destroy. It’s a destructive movement. And American Dharma shows the underpinning of many of these ideas. It’s a movie that I think I needed to make and I’m really, really glad I did make. It’s hard as a documentary filmmaker—what’s the Yeats line? How do you tell the dancer from the dance? Movies become evaluated by their subject matter rather than any inherent merit that they might have. People say they like my film about Robert McNamara much more than my film about Donald Rumsfeld. Why? I have my own theories. Not because I think it’s a better film. I don’t. But because one person is remorseful and obviously a much more likable character. McNamara is a war criminal. I always refer to him as my favorite war criminal. I came to really like the man. I did not come to really like Donald Rumsfeld. And Donald Rumsfeld is not remorseful or contrite. People like it less because people like stories about redemption. And I’m not sure I do.

Do you like Steve Bannon?

I find his policies repellent, but I found Steve Bannon really, really interesting, and still do. I know that I was criticized. Someone said to me, “How dare you put all of these great American movies in a movie? Why do I want to see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and associate it with Steve Bannon?” But we all watch these movies, left and right alike. And the movies to me were a way of teasing out ideas, which I think they do remarkably, particularly in our differences, how I might see a movie and how Steve Bannon sees a movie.

There are people who watch The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and come away thinking the moral is “Print the legend.” But having a character say “Print the legend” isn’t the same as actually printing the legend. It’s the opposite.

I deeply agree. And let’s not forget that John Ford shows us what really happened. We know that the legend is a legend and it’s a legend which is untrue.That’s also part of what Liberty Valance has to tell us, and it’s a deeply important and profound movie.

I wanted to end by asking you about Separated, which was your movie about the first Trump administration’s child-separation policy. It played briefly in theaters, but MSNBC decided to schedule the broadcast a month after the presidential election, which I assume was not when you would have wanted people to see it.

Yes, you’re correct. I felt that what was really, really interesting about Separated, and is still interesting to me, is that it was a movie, among other things, about bureaucracy and about self-deception and lying. I think it’s a very important movie in that regard. I like that aspect of it very much. I know it was criticized by some people. They did not like the use of drama in it, as if using drama in a documentary is an absolute no-no. But why do I even make documentaries? This is an argument I made years ago, I’d make it over and over and over again, that each time you make a documentary, you get to reinvent the form. And if someone is telling me that because you put drama in a documentary that it’s no longer true or false, I say “Uh-uh.” It’s not the case. We’re still telling a story that is deeply anchored in the real world and a story that I am using all of my techniques as a filmmaker to make you think about and to engage with. So I think I did a good thing. At least that time.