In 1993 on death row in Chester, Illinois, John Wayne Gacy said: “If you serve other people, it will come back to serve you.” A chilling quote from a man who used his trusted position in Cook County as a construction contractor and a volunteer in the local community— often dressing up as either Pogo or Patches the Clown to entertain children at hospitals and birthday parties— to throw people off the trail of what he was really doing: raping, torturing, and murdering. From 1972 until he confessed on December 22nd, 1978, Gacy killed at least 33 teen boys and young men in Cook County. He was sentenced to death and eventually executed on the morning of May 9th, 1994 after being fed a last meal consisting of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a dozen fried shrimp, french fries, fresh strawberries, and a Diet Coke. He left behind a hideous legacy right alongside one of philanthropy, illustrating how public image can blind people to the horrors of men.

Gacy (2003) isn’t a good movie. It isn’t offensive, neither does it disrespect the victims. It does a big disservice to the subject matter by not exploring much of Gacy’s psychology, at least not in any significant sense. Films about murderers can easily devolve into nothing more than exploitation, which is generally where Clive Saunders goes with this story, though even the exploitative elements aren’t particularly disturbing or graphic. There’s a lot of wasted time spent lingering on the soupy sludge that Gacy’s victims became after years buried under the floorboards of his home. The one thing Saunders and co-writer David Birke do well with their screenplay is explore how Gacy (played by Mark Holton) used a Dr. Jekyll-like persona by day to conceal his Mr. Hyde life as a serial killer by night.

The opening scene is the closest Saunders and Birke make it to touching on the psychological sore spots in Gacy’s past. It depicts a camping trip a teenage Gacy took in the 1950s with his father, John Gacy Sr. (played by Adam Baldwin). We see Gacy Sr. berate his son for simple things, veering into physical abuse briefly. There’s no real elaboration on their relationship which was far darker than what’s only briefly shown in this one scene. The real Gacy Sr. would emotionally abuse his son by telling the child he was stupid constantly, as well as taunting him about his sexuality, telling him he would grow up “queer” and often calling him a “he-she.” His mother Marion didn’t help her boy much, either. A young, confused Gacy once took some of his mother’s underwear from her drawer and hid it in a paper bag in a secret space he considered his playhouse under the front porch— there, he could hide and be alone. When confronted, John told his parents he wasn’t using the underwear sexually, he simply enjoyed the feel and smell of it. This didn’t matter to his father, who beat him mercilessly, and his mother made it worse by forcing him to wear women’s underwear beneath his clothes to school for a day. So, although the first scene in Gacy does suggest an abusive relationship between father and son, there’s a whole world of twisted psychology below that surface that would have made for a more compelling story.

Another unsettling aspect about Gacy Sr. plays into the best part of the film, regarding his son John’s dual lives later in life. The patriarch abusive, and he was, as it is so often with violent men, a bad alcoholic. His home in northwest Chicago had a big basement and he made this what some people today would call his man-cave. This place was only for him, under strict orders. He would sit down there, get drunk, and listen to Wagner. Occasionally, when he was very drunk, he would speak to himself in two different voices, which his son could hear while eavesdropping on him from the door at the top of the stairs. This would’ve made a perfect scene as an opener rather than the relatively dull camping scene that Saunders and Birke chose instead. Their screenplay focuses a good deal on the duality in Gacy, going from celebrated man of the neighbourhood and community to sadistic, murderous maniac in, sometimes, a split second. Leaving out the depths of Gacy Sr.’s depravity was a missed opportunity, not because Gacy Jr. deserves sympathy— his disgusting crimes are unforgivable— but because the father’s behaviour speaks so much to the way the son would act later in life.

A major misconception about Gacy, which the film helps perpetuate, is the idea of the ‘killer clown.’ He did dress up as Patches and Pogo, and he reportedly told psychiatrists his Pogo character was both “good and evil”— he said one side of Pogo was the “compassion clown” and the other was the “hatred clown.” Despite this, there’s never been any evidence to suggest he was dressed in one of his clown outfits while committing a murder. One scene in the film depicts Gacy wearing the costume when he coincidentally ends up killing a young man. It’s extremely creepy to imagine this occurring, and there’s little doubt this image of Gacy has contributed to a certain amount of the American fear of clowns. That doesn’t change the fact it isn’t true, nor is it the scariest thing about the serial killer. Nevertheless, it again speaks to the idea of someone disguising themselves as something they’re not, which is the general story of Gacy.

So beloved was Gacy that in spite of being indicted in 1968 for sodomy on a 15-year-old boy, his reputation didn’t seem to follow him to Cook county. Prior to this he’d managed three Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Waterloo, Iowa, and he was a well-known member of the United States Junior Chamber, a leadership training organisation also known as the Jaycees— in the public eye, Gacy was a heteronormative, law-abiding, philanthropic man. They didn’t believe John was gay, let alone a sex offender. His image helped him operate without suspicion, and his image only got better in the eyes of the public nearly right up until his capture by police. A great scene in the film takes place during a July 4th celebration, when John has all sorts of people over for a barbecue and a costume party. This is based on some of the real parties Gacy threw. One of his politician buddies drops by briefly and makes a toast to their host, calling the man who was, at the time, already killing people “a good man” and a “great Democrat.” In 1978, seven months prior to his arrest, he met First Lady Rosalynn Carter through his work as director of the Polish Constitution Day Parade. Mrs. Carter had no way of knowing that a picture of the two of them together would be immortalised in the wake of his grisly trail of murder. Instances like these show just how well connected Gacy was, and the extent to which he was able to fool everybody around him, right to the literal upper echelons of power in the U.S.

All the regular moments of John’s life are perfectly contrasted against the other side of his personality which emerges out in his garage. In and around the house, John plays the role of husband and father, carving the turkey at the dinner table, reluctantly sleeping with his wife, and throwing block parties in the yard. In the garage, he rapes and tortures young men before killing them. The house and the garage come to represent the duality in Gacy, each a side of his warring identity, two sides of a terrifying coin. The crawlspace itself— where the bodies barely stayed hidden due to John’s constant efforts to keep the stench and resulting insects suppressed— can be taken as an obvious metaphor for how Gacy kept his deadly secrets camouflaged with only a thin veil between the gruesome evidence of his crimes and his quaint neighbourhood.

Gacy’s story and the better aspects of the 2003 film are relevant in 2019, as we’re seeing more people in positions of power and trust exposed after years of getting away with abusive, destructive, and criminal behaviour due to the fact their public lives shield the darkness in their private ones. It remains a shame Gacy’s family history, and what it did to his psychological state, wasn’t explored to the fullest extent. The opening scene with him and his father connects so well to the first scene with an adult Gacy: a teenage John crawls into his tent, dejected after being humiliated by his father, and Saunders cuts to adult John crawling under the floorboards where the decomposing bodies of his victims are causing maggots to writhe out of the dirt, as if he crawled right out of his tortured past right into the mess of his killing spree. The maggots in the crawlspace have the feel of an image like David Lynch’s use of the insects in the initial scene of Blue Velvet, signifying the rot existing barely underneath the surface of an outwardly idyllic all-American suburb. Sadly, this metaphor isn’t developed fully. Gacy remains a repetitive, undercooked biopic that skims over a wealth of theme and subject matter. Serial killer films based on the lives of actual murderers can make for compelling stories. They can just as easily be bad, for a variety of reasons. This one doesn’t feel disrespectful. It does feel exploitative to an extent, like other biopics of its kind, in its failure to probe any deeper than surface level into the killer’s psychology, and if attempting to understand the motives or the nature of these crimes isn’t the point, then the purpose of the whole exercise begins to feel troubling.

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