While John McNaughton made this low-budget drama in 1986 on a shoe-string budget of $110,000 in 1986, it was caught up in a ratings limbo for three years as the MPAA refused to give it anything less than a “X” for its moral tone. The film was not a slasher film, or a thriller, but a gristly straight-faced portrait of a murderer based on the life of convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who’d claimed to have done away with more than 300 people over his lifetime. The idea for the film came to McNaughton while watching a 20/20 segment on Lucas when he noticed how eerily normal Lucas sounded. Adapting a gruesomely realistic approach, McNaughton captured in banal detail the gristly routine of murder. Michael Rooker, who was cast for the lead, was working as a janitor at the time and wore his work jacket as his costume. After opting to release the film without a rating, the distributor took the film theater to theater, garnering violently opposed reviews along the way. Many championed the indie film as a cinematic masterpiece; others labeled the film and its filmmakers as pure evil. Caryn James neatly summed up the debate in her New York Times’ review: “It is profoundly disturbing, even more for the questions it raises about the use of film than for the mutilated bodies that litter the screen.” But the film went on to be a box-office hit, earning 8 times its production costs and being cited as one of the most influential films of the 80s.