The Manson murders refuse to rest. Every few years, a new book, documentary, or podcast attempts to prise open the case, seeking fresh revelations, alternative explanations, or simply a new way of telling the story. Errol Morris’s latest film, Chaos: The Manson Murders, draws from Tom O’Neill’s investigative Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, countering the dominant narrative established by Vincent Bugliosi in Helter Skelter, the prosecuting attorney’s definitive (and self-serving) account of the killings. But beyond another retelling of the case, Chaos probes something deeper, how the Manson murders fit into the wider American counterinsurgency against the 1960s left and the disturbing echoes of state control that ripple through the decades.
The film is structured in sections, alternating between O’Neill’s theories, Bugliosi’s legal narrative, archival footage, and documentary evidence. At a lean 1 hour 36 minutes, it feels almost slight, especially given the depth and complexity of O’Neill’s investigation and book, which took over 20 years to complete. O’ Neill painstakingly unravels inconsistencies in the official record, unearthing connections between Manson, intelligence operations, and the broader counterinsurgency against the left in the 1960s. The sheer weight of his findings makes the brevity of Morris’s documentary feel somewhat constrained, particularly in contrast to Wormwood, which used a longer, episodic structure to explore the CIA’s LSD experiments and the suspicious death of Frank Olson. A more expansive format might have allowed Morris to fully explore the labyrinthine contradictions O’Neill uncovered, rather than compressing them into a film that, at times, feels rushed, like it is only scratching the surface.
Where Chaos distinguishes itself (even if Morris doesn’t agree with the hypothesis) is in its focus on the clandestine operations of the US government in the 1960s, particularly MKUltra and COINTELPRO. MKUltra was a covert CIA program experimenting with mind control techniques, often using LSD, extreme psychological conditioning, and other coercive methods in an attempt to manipulate human behaviour. COINTELPRO, meanwhile, was the FBI’s counterintelligence programme aimed at disrupting, discrediting, and neutralising leftist movements, particularly Black radicals, anti-war activists, and socialists. Both were weapons in the state’s arsenal against the perceived chaos of the 1960s, an era of radical possibility, but also, one haunted by futures that never arrived.
By turning its gaze towards this shadow state, Chaos can be viewed as a companion piece to Wormwood. Both films probe the hidden architecture of American power, revealing how state-sanctioned psychological warfare bled into the everyday lives of citizens, shaping events in ways that remain obscured by official history. While Wormwood examines an individual caught in the machinery of intelligence operations, Chaos widens the lens, situating the Manson murders within a broader counterrevolution against the left, a war fought not just with informants and wiretaps, but with narratives designed to fracture the political imaginary of the era.
The official version of the Manson murders holds that they were the violent climax of the hippie dream, a drug-fuelled cult’s apocalyptic break from reality, shattering the countercultural idyll of free love and LSD. But Chaos suggests an alternative reading. Manson, far from being a chaotic force of nature, was instead a highly controlling figure who used LSD as a tool of domination rather than liberation, his methods eerily aligned with MKUltra’s experiments in suggestibility and mind control. His links to figures involved in intelligence operations, psychiatrists like Dr. Jolly West, who was deeply embedded in the CIA’s mind control experiments, raise disturbing questions about how much of his behaviour was facilitated, or even studied, by the state.
This is where the psychogeography of Los Angeles, specifically the Hollywood Hills and the wider terrain of 1960s California, takes on spectral significance. The murders were not just an eruption of violence but a rupture in the imagined landscape of the era. The counterculture’s utopian spaces, communes, crash pads, the drug-fuelled enclaves of Haight-Ashbury, were revealed as susceptible to manipulation and infiltration. The Manson Family operated in the liminal zones of the city, between the decayed glamour of old Hollywood (Spahn Movie Ranch) and the desert’s endless blank slate, spaces that had long been battlegrounds for control, whether through real estate speculation, police surveillance, or clandestine state operations.
Morris’s documentary makes these spaces tangible, returning again and again to the buildings and streets connected to the murders, filmed in that eerie, washed-out 1960s television glow. We never see the bodies, but we see the space they occupied at death, Los Angeles homes where violence permanently altered the air, the driveways and doorsteps where blood ran, the streets where the Family walked, already ghosts in their own time. The past lingers, not just in images but in sound: the brutal stabbing of the victims is evoked through the auditory puncture of a blade entering a body as the marks appear on an autopsy diagram, a visceral reminder of the violence written into the geography itself.
What Morris’s film ultimately gestures towards is a larger hauntological reading of the period: the 1960s as a site of lost futures, where the potential for radical transformation was systematically dismantled, co-opted, or destroyed. The Manson murders were folded into a wider counterrevolution, a means to discredit the counterculture and reinforce the notion that too much freedom inevitably led to horror. The presence of CIA and FBI operations in the background of this moment is not incidental, it is central to understanding why the radical dreams of the period dissolved into paranoia, burnout, and reactionary backlash.
Chaos: The Manson Murders does not provide a definitive answer to the lingering questions of the case, nor does it attempt to. Instead, it traces the outlines of a deeper, more unsettling narrative, one in which the state’s fear of disorder led to the systematic destruction of movements that sought real change. The ghosts of that moment still linger, in the surveillance state, in the managed spectacle of rebellion, in the controlled burn of subversion that is allowed only insofar as it serves the interests of power. The murders may belong to history, but the mechanisms that surrounded them remain frighteningly present.
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