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Chaos: The Manson Murders is recognizably the work of the same director as The Thin Blue Line. The visual style of Errol Morris’ latest documentary feature, released earlier this month on Netflix, can be described as “FOIA chic,” using the aesthetics of photocopied documents—a vertical white light that scans the screen, smudged text, photographs sliced down the middle—to evoke deep dives into dusty vaults full of secrets. It’s a technique Morris has used before, incorporating newspaper headlines, forensic sketches, and other official documentation into his films to give them an aura of truth.

Something has changed, however. Where The Thin Blue Line methodically lays out the case for  Randall Dale Adams’ innocence—so effectively, in fact, that Adams was released from prison after the film’s release—Chaos: The Manson Murders dispenses with the evidence. It leads with the most explosive allegations in the book it’s based on, then backtracks into a familiar narrative reveling in the gory details of one of the 20th century’s most sensational crime sprees. Key pieces and players are excised, creating a narrative that’s splashy, entertaining, and totally nuts. 

That’s counter to the spirit not only of Morris’ most celebrated works, but of the doc’s source material. Tom O’Neill’s Chaos: Charles Manson, The CIA, And The Secret History Of The ’60s is a meticulously researched piece of journalism, providing documentation to support its assertions whenever it can. When it can’t, it notes the absence of said documents; at several points throughout the book, O’Neill remarks that the exact file he needs to definitively prove a circumstantial claim is missing, which he interprets as a sign that he’s on the right track. 

O’Neill frets over the implications of his research, writing that “if I got it wrong, or took too much on faith, I’d beco*e someone who made people glaze over at parties.” The middle section of Chaos is a carefully attributed paper trail, documenting numerous occasions where the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department arrested Manson and his “family” on serious charges—including a gun raid that was the department’s biggest ever up to that point—and then letting them go a few days later. That it happened is difficult to dispute. Why it happened is impossible to prove. 

O’Neill takes a boiling-the-frog approach, structuring the book around his descent from conducting celebrity interviews for a magazine piece to obtaining unredacted classified documents through unnamed sources. The story gets weirder and more conspiratorial as it digs into the “secret history” of the title, but by that point, O’Neill has provided reams of evidence that the official narrative of the Manson murders—basically, the story that prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and co-writer Curt Gentry laid out in their bestselling book Helter Skelter—is wrong. 

Ultimately, O’Neill’s wildest implication—that Charles Manson was a hybrid police informant/CIA guinea pig, and that the Tate-LaBianca murders were the culmination of a years-long experiment in mind control—is based on a single line in the personal archives of Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist, cult expert, and (proven!) longtime CIA contractor. O’Neill knows this is flimsy, writing, “I could poke a thousand holes in the official story, but I couldn’t say what really happened. In fact, the major arms of my research were often in contradiction with one another…at the end of the day, I was a lousy conspiracy theorist, because I wanted nothing left to the realm of the theoretical.”

There’s nothing theoretical about the idea that the ’60s counterculture was infiltrated by undercover feds: The existence of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS (in short, illegal domestic sabotage and surveillance projects) have been public knowledge since the 1970s. What’s new about O’Neill’s argument is tying them to Charles Manson. COINTELPRO was exposed when an activist group lifted records from an FBI field office in Pennsylvania in 1971, while CHAOS was revealed on the front page of The New York Times in December 1974 in an article by Seymour Hersh. 

Morris has also explored this material in his previous documentary work. He even talked to Hersh, at great length, in his expansive six-part docuseries Wormwood. That was Morris’ first project for Netflix, released in 2017 for the streamer; it also covered the CIA’s covert experiments with LSD, namely the death of military scientist Frank Olson and Olson’s ties to the MKUltra program. 

The visual styles of Wormwood and Chaos: The Manson Murders are similar, down to the framing of 16mm film clips and cheeky animations on forensic sketches. Two things set them apart: One, Wormwood makes extensive use of reenactments, so much so that Peter Sarsgaard gets credit for his “starring” role as Olson. Secondly, and more importantly, Wormwood also actually investigates its claims. It can only prove so much; one may have to accept that any inquiry into CIA malfeasance will inevitably end on an inconclusive note. (All official documentation of MKUltra was destroyed in 1973.) But it doesn’t settle for the initial explanation, either. 

To be fair, neither does O’Neill. In the book, he describes the thick binders full of photocopied pages that line the walls of his office; these are briefly seen in the documentary as well, as a visual shorthand for the depth of his research. But the doc does not show the same rigor when it co*es to backing up O’Neill’s claims. West appears only briefly, as does Bugliosi, whose aggressive pushback to O’Neill’s claims is key to the author’s argument. And Morris omits other figures—like shady fixer Reeve Whitson, who ties together the book’s celebrity and espionage threads—entirely. 

But why? If Tom O’Neill did the legwork for the source material, and Errol Morris has done the legwork for previous documentaries, why does Chaos do such a poor job in this area? Structurally, there’s a reason: The shift from proven to unproven claims means that O’Neill’s book spends much longer on its diligent setup than its unsatisfying payoff. By putting events on a timeline—a fractured timeline, but a timeline nonetheless—Morris makes the story more legible. Less credible, but more digestible.

Morris’ work has engaged with the concept of truth for decades, notably in the Academy Award-winning The Fog Of War. In that film, Vietnam-era Secretary Of Defense Robert McNamara says that he’s made mistakes, that people did die because of them, and that the difference between perception and reality is negligible, even when human lives are at stake. 2013’s The Unknown Known acco*plishes similar goals by allowing Donald Rumsfeld’s doublespeak to expose his indifference towards human life. Both films are political, investigating power, how it’s wielded in the United States, and how those mechanisms influence our perceptions of the truth.

Those themes are all present in O’Neill’s work. But the tone of Netflix’s Chaos is more like Morris’ 2010 film Tabloid, which also dealt with evasive truths in a non-serious way. That film found dry amusement in the rantings of Joyce McKinney, whose “love story” with a Mormon missionary in 1970s England sure sounds like kidnapping and se*ual assault to anyone who isn’t her. Interviewees co*ment on how attractive Joyce was at the time of her trial; cheeky animations and whimsical sound effects underline how cuckoo this lady is.

Chaos also has a playful streak, but here it’s flippant and misplaced. The sound of chewing acco*panies an interview subject’s description of a murder victim being devoured by maggots; animated stab wounds puncture a generic human form meant to represent Sharon Tate as one of the killers narrates the event in voiceover. The use of real crime-scene photographs—spookily enhanced with strategic cutouts replacing bloodied bodies with ghostly white shapes—sits distastefully alongside these whimsical touches. At least there are no reenactments of the murders.

The plummet from Morris’ use of forensic illustrations in Thin Blue Line to the same technique in Chaos is precipitous. Morris no longer seems interested in truth. Instead, he’s having fun with conspiracy theories, making references to his own CIA-op extended universe by reusing B-roll from Wormwood. He maintains a plausible distance from his subjects, allowing O’Neill (quoted out of context) and acid-damaged former “family” member Bobby Beausoleil to make the more explosive allegations on his behalf. The film begs for analysis around the role racism—both individual and institutional—played in these events, but it never appears. Instead, it’s “Sharon Tate was stabbed 16 times while she pleaded for the life of her baby,” over and over again. 

But while O’Neill is done a disservice by the documentary version of Chaos, Morris’ biggest misstep is giving Charles Manson air time. When Manson died in 2017, The A.V. Club opted for a purely factual approach, no “R.I.P.” attached. (Too respectful.) Manson is a peripheral figure in O’Neill’s work as well: He doesn’t appear until page 432 of the 436-page book, and he’s painted as an evasive con artist who has nothing to contribute to a story that’s ostensibly about him. 

In the documentary version of Chaos, Manson is front and center, ranting and rambling and saying cryptic things that seem to support O’Neill’s claims when they’re placed next to one another in the edit. It doesn’t recall anything in Morris’ filmography as much as Joe Berlinger’s Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, another Netflix docuseries that allowed a bullshit artist to bullshit for as long as it pleased him, as long as the footage was juicy. 

That series was a turning point in the career of its director. Like Morris, Berlinger was a pioneer of the “elevated” style of true-crime filmmaking. And like Morris, he’s on a very short list of documentarians whose work has changed the outco*e of a criminal case: The Paradise Lost series led to the reopening of the murder case against the so-called “West Memphis Three,” and the eventual freeing of the accused. Now Berlinger churns out salacious true-crime docuseries for Netflix—10 of them since 2019, including two more self-mythologizing serial-killer docs on John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer. 

Is this the future for Errol Morris? Streaming bloat is a factor here. Imitators of the style pioneered by Berlinger and Morris have proliferated on Netflix, making those filmmakers’ own efforts for the streamer seem less impressive by co*parison. That leads to another unprovable paradox: Is one of the most celebrated documentarians of all time selling out, or have sellouts made careers out of aping one of the most celebrated documentarians of all time?

Morris’ artful approach to re-enactments predates the “elevated B-roll” Charlie Shackleton references in his cynical deconstruction of contemporary true-crime docs, Zodiac Killer Project. As Mike D’Angelo notes in his coverage of Morris’ work for The A.V. Club, The Thin Blue Line was rejected by the documentary establishment when it premiered in 1988. The Academy Awards co*mittee declined to consider it for Best Documentary Feature, arguing that it wasn’t a documentary at all. It’s a sign of a major cultural shift, then, that The Thin Blue Line looks like a dry deposition co*pared to Morris’ most recent streaming work. 

Morris’ own participation in the true-crime streaming industrial co*plex is both understandable—it’s harder than ever to get funding for independent documentaries—and damaging, given that Netflix money co*es with its own unspoken set of expectations. Maybe they’re spoken internally, but those on the outside wouldn’t know that: Netflix is famously opaque when it co*es to data, and how it determines the success of any given piece of “content.” It was finally revealed in 2023 that Netflix counts a work as “viewed” if a member streams 70 percent of any given piece of media. Netflix cares if its subscribers keep watching, but only up to a point. That doesn’t matter as much with fictional narratives, but is a serious liability for documentarians. O’Neill’s factual approach, and indeed any deliberate case-building effort, won’t work for Netflix, where directors have to hook ’em early. Truth stops being a priority for true crime when there are clicks on the line.