"It's a strange, surreal excursion into some no man's land of investigation," director Errol Morris says of the new documentary, which is based on Tom O'Neill's 2019 book
By Jon Blistein
February 21, 2025
When Errol Morris was a graduate student in philosophy at University of California Berkeley, he made a "pilgrimage" to the California Medical Facility prison in Vacaville. Interested in insanity pleas and murder, the future Oscar-winning documentarian was there to interview the serial killer Ed Kemper. But while at the CMF, he was given another unexpected opportunity.
"I was asked by the guard following my interview, 'You interested in meeting Charles Manson?'" Morris recalls in a recent interview. "And I said, 'Sure! Of course I am.'"
The meeting didn't amount to much, Morris says: "Manson wanted to complain to me about his lack of masturbation privileges," he quips. Still, this was the mid-Seventies, and Manson remained a phenomenon. In 1971, the wild-eyed Svengali had been convicted on murder charges related to the Tate-LaBianca killings, carried out two years earlier by members of his so-called Family. In 1974, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi published his best-selling book Helter Skelter, in which he recounted the case — centered around Manson's apparent desire to ignite an apocalyptic race-war — that had secured his conviction. "Everybody was aware of this case," Morris says. "It's one of the most famous cases in American history, if not world history. And a lot of people, including myself, had read more than one book about it." He cites Helter Skelter, as well as Ed Sanders' The Family, though it was the former that forward the narrative that would define the Manson murders for years — one centered on LSD, brainwashing, out of control hippies, race wars, and the Beatles.
Decades later, a new book would complicate that narrative. Tom O'Neill's Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, co-written with journalist Dan Piepenbring and published in 2019, punctured Bugliosi's case, arguing the prosecutor hid evidence, coerced witnesses into lying, and pushed falsehoods that may have provided cover for other dark forces swirling around Manson — chief among them, the Central Intelligence Agency and its top-secret MKULTRA mind-control program. O'Neill's reporting suggested the Manson killings weren't a product of poisoned free-love, but a kind of blowback from the CIA's own experiments with LSD and brainwashing. And a cover-up may have furthered the aims of domestic espionage operations like the CIA's CHAOS and the FBI's COINTELPRO, which targeted and discredited radical movements whether hippies, Black Panthers, or anti-war activists.
O'Neill's book serves as the basis for Morris' new documentary, Chaos: The Manson Murders, which hits Netflix March 7. (The film's trailer is also premiering today, exclusively via Rolling Stone.) O'Neill's book is thrilling but dense, filled with countless threads to pull and dark corridors to explore. It could've easily been turned into a multi-part series, but Morris instead distilled the book's essence and most significant arguments into a 90-minute documentary that elucidates the potential links between Manson and the CIA, while using the case's myriad unanswered questions as a jumping off point to "reflect on the nature of investigations and truth."
But O'Neill also acknowledges that his reporting encroaches upon a truth that remains elusive. He still cannot, for instance, place West and Manson in the same room together. This ambiguity leads Morris to describe Chaos as "a strange, surreal excursion into some no man's land of investigation." For his new film, Morris embraced the uncertainties and instead tried to "deal with various accounts of why Manson committed these murders."
Morris was first introduced to O'Neill, and his investigation, while the journalist was still struggling to finish his book. In fact, Morris says he was brought in to help O'Neil with this "labyrinthine enterprise." Morris spent three days interviewing O'Neill in his apartment, bursting with Manson research — "Folder after folder, box after box after box, cassette tape after cassette tape after cassette tape" — but O'Neill ultimately decided against the film. He went on to finish the book with Piepenbring, and after it became a hit, he reconnected with Morris to see if he wanted to finish the movie.
Morris was eager to do just that. "I've probably read [Chaos] more times than I would like to admit," Morris says, adding: "Reading Tom's book, knowing Tom, and interviewing Tom has been an experience in and of itself. It's a very odd thing to say but true: Tom's book has caused me to reflect on the nature of investigations and the nature of truth."
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| Tom O'Neill's 2019 book 'Chaos' introduced the theory that the CIA may have been studying the Manson Family long before the murders |
Morris knows what it's like to obsess over a confounding case or fall down a CIA-sized rabbit hole. He did both in his 2017 miniseries Wormwood, about the mysterious MKULTRA-linked death of scientist Frank Olson. And his 2012 book, Wilderness of Error, probed the case of former Green Beret surgeon, Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two daughters; while Morris believes he showed the prosecution of MacDonald was "a violation of what we take to be due process," he acknowledges he was not successful in proving MacDonald's guilt or innocence. Morris is drawn to the "strange gray area of hunches, suppositions, [and] strange beliefs," but remains committed to the truth, even though he knows attaining it, in full, is rarely possible. (Through "sheer, obsession, diligence, and luck," he says, he came closest in 1988's The Thin Blue Line, which helped exonerate convicted murderer Randall Dale Adams.)
With Manson, the case is replete with — to paraphrase another Morris subject, Donald Rumsfeld — known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. "There will be so many questions about this murder that will never be answered," Morris says. "Or let's just put it this way: I don't have answers to them, and I'm not sure when those answers will be forthcoming. I guess never say never."
What Morris feels he can say definitively is that Chaos dismantles the Helter Skelter theory. "I find Bugliosi's version far-fetched," Morris says. "Do I believe the Beatles and 'Helter Skelter' and the whole dream of a race war motivated this story? I think it's unlikely."
More far-fetched than a version involving MKULTRA and CIA experiments?
"I think it is," Morris says with a smile. "Was that stuff going on? Yes. Was it going on with Manson? Maybe."
In lieu of concrete answers, Morris latched onto other people and elements of the mystery, like Manson's music. The film is partly soundtracked by Manson demo recordings, and features an interview with Gregg Jakobson, a talent scout and close friends of the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson, who famously wound up in Manson's orbit. (Wilson earned Manson's ire when he remade Manson's song "Cease to Exist" as the Beach Boys' "Never Learn Not to Love," without giving Manson credit.)
"I like Manson's music!" Morris exclaims. "Call me a fool. But I think there's something really interesting [about it], and a lot of other people were interested in his music."
Morris pushes back against what he calls the "default position that Manson was deeply untalented" and suggests his songs reveal "the desperation of the man." He's also partial to the theory that Manson's rejection by the record producer Terry Melcher played a role in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Melcher famously lived at the house at 10050 Cielo Drive before Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate moved in. Revenge — not unlike MKULTRA and LSD mind control — feels less far-fetched than "Helter Skelter."
"We've all heard the argument that we should default to the simplest explanation, but maybe there is no simple explanation," Morris says. "Maybe there's just a stupid explanation. The explanation of confusion, cross purposes, people who don't know what they're doing, and have mixed, confused reasons for doing anything."
Bobby Beausoleil was arrested for murder a day before the Tate massacre took place.
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| Bobby Beausoleil was arrested for murder a day before the Tate massacre took place |
Morris found this thread, too, in the story of Bobby Beausoleil, the Family member serving a life sentence for murdering Gary Hinman in July 1969, a few weeks before the Tate-LaBianca killings. As Beausoleil recalls in the doc, he was confronting Hinman over a drug deal gone bad when Manson barged in, slashed Hinman's face, then left Beausoleil to deal with his mess. Worried Hinman would snitch if he took him to an emergency room, Beausoleil says he called Manson and demanded he fix the problem. Manson allegedly told Beausoleil that he "knew what to do as well as" Manson did, then hung up the phone.
"I've asked Bobby several times, 'You kill Hinman, you take his car, you put the murder weapon in the car, so that when you're ultimately arrested, they have the car, the murder weapon, and you! Who does that kind of thing?' The only explanation that I have, and I've said this many times to Bobby, is it's all incredibly so stupid. But not so stupid that it didn't actually happen."
While Morris says O'Neill "discounts" much of what Beausoleil says, the filmmaker found him "entirely compelling" — not because he believed everything Beausoleil told him, but because, over 50 years later, he was still "trying desperately to come to terms with what he had done and what happened to him."
He adds, "In everything that Bobby says to me, he too is trying to grapple with, if you like, the stupidity of it all. I sometimes look back on my life and I think, 'My god, this was stupid. How could you have ever lived it?' And the fact that Bobby is grappling with it still, I find endlessly interesting and moving."
Morris even gives Beausoleil the penultimate word in Chaos (Manson, obviously, gets the last), as he succinctly meditates on peoples' fondness for fantasy, speculation, and conspiracy when reality is often so much more mundane — even stupid.
"Could it be that some things are just a result of confusion and ignorance?" Morris wonders. "Rather than some kind of grand conspiracy that's being played out and orchestrated by one person, or a group of few people working in consort." Extrapolating to the chaos engulfing the world now, he adds, "I suppose when the history is written of our current era, and we ask questions about why our democracy fell apart, the feelings that I'm left with — maybe this shows my own inclinations — is that we're looking at the machinations of total incompetence thrashing around in reality."
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