How did 3 young women become involved in the Manson Family murders, asks new film

Director Mary Harron was 16 the summer of the Manson Family murders. Too young to have joined the counterculture of the ’60s, but old enough to have felt its impact on her life by 1969, and sense, as news of the murders reached her home in Toronto, that the world had changed overnight in the darkness that blanketed Los Angeles.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that’s it now. It’s over,’” Harron says. “It was like every nightmare the straight society had about the counterculture and hippies come true.”

Harron’s new film, “Charlie Says,” opens on Friday, May 10, and while it paints within the frame of the familiar Charles Manson facts – his cult of hippie followers, the brutal murders of seven people over two nights in L.A. – it does so with fresh colors

“Charlie Says” focuses its narrative on Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel, three Manson followers who participated in the killings, both before the crimes when the commune was based at Spahn Ranch in the San Fernando Valley, and three years later when they were inmates in the California Institution for Women.

Harron says her images of the Manson women had long been formed by the iconic images of them at their trials.

“They’re holding hands, they’re dressed up, and they’re smiling, which is what Charlie told them to do,” she says. “And then the images of them with the shaved heads, too.

“So my image of them was pretty psycho,” Harron says. “The curiosity level was more, ‘Well, look at these crazy girls!’ Who were they? The expressions were so blank and strange.”

And that impression stuck, Harron says, until she read Guinevere Turner’s screenplay for “Charlie Says,” and came to a realization that excited her as a filmmaker: Maybe, Harron thought, behind the monstrous facade of the Manson women as we think we know them were people not unlike anyone else, who, but for the twists of fate that led them to Manson’s door, might never have ended up where they did.

The screenplay was based on a pair of books – “The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion,” by Ed Sanders, and “The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten,” by Karlene Faith, a scholar and activist who in the early ’70s worked through a prison program with Van Houten, Atkins and Krenwinkel.

“They weren’t these sort of blank, smiling zombies, but they were brainwashed,” Harron says of the way in which her views shifted. “And they were very different people before they joined the Manson Family.”

In the movie, Matt Smith, best known for playing Doctor Who and Prince Philip in “The Crown,” is a chilling Charlie Manson, a seductive prophet of his hippie philosophies to his followers, who turns increasingly dark and scary as his madness takes over.

Meritt Wever, a two-time Emmy winner for “Nurse Jackie” and “Godless,” plays Faith, who tries to break through the brainwashing of Van Houten, Atkins and Krenwinkel, who are played by Hannah Murray of “Game of Thrones” and relatively newcomers Marianne Rendón and Sosie Bacon, respectively.

Harron, whose previous films include “The Notorious Bettie Page” and “American Psycho,” is no stranger to controversies around her work, and says she recognized the potential for backlash in portraying the three convicted murders as victims of Manson themselves.

“That was part of the appeal, actually,” she says. “This story’s been done so often kind of in a TV movie way it’s not worth taking on if you don’t tackle the hardest part of it, and the hardest questions are to take them seriously. Treat them as human beings and ask, ‘How did they get there?’

“And once you do that then you have to acknowledge the fact that maybe you could get there or maybe your daughter or your sister,” Harron says. “That these aren’t ‘others.’ These aren’t another species, these are human beings like us.

“Imagine if you’d given up your life to someone like that, and ended up doing terrible things, and then had to face the consequences of that for the rest of your life. These are painful questions that you want to try to open yourself up to examining. The human capacity of regular people to do terrible things.”

If that last line – regular folks doing evil acts – sounds like a description of participants in everything from the Nazi crimes of World War II to the Rwandan genocide to fill-in-the-name-of-the-next-atrocity, you’re not far from Harron’s own thoughts. The young age of the Manson followers made her think most specifically of Isis and its fresh-faced recruits to terror, she says.

“I do think the most vulnerable people are young adults, late teens, early 20s,” she says. “You really don’t know who you are, and it’s a time of great lack of confidence in many ways, especially in a time of great cultural upheaval.

“Maybe you’re the sort of person who needs certainty,” Harron says. “Looking for answers and a sure path. And someone a few years older comes along, and he seems to have a completely worked-out philosophy, and he looks at you and he says, ‘I see something in you, I know who you are.’”

It can be a persuasive thing, she says, and by the time the darkness within the leader and the group emerge, it might be too late.

Harron says she expects there will be critics of the choices she made in making “Charlie Says,” or the fact that she made it at all. It is one of at least four movies this year to touch on the same story – “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” was released in early April – but she believes it balances its empathy for Van Houten, Krenwinkel and Atkins by not excusing the horrors of the crimes they committed.

“I’m sure I’ll be criticized but I wanted to show the Lo Bianca murders in some detail,” she says. “It is actually out of respect to the victims, because if you are going to present a sympathetic portrait of the Manson followers, during the Family as well as in prison later, you have to balance that with what they did. The audience has to carry both those things in their mind.”

Atkins died in prison in 2009. Van Houten and Krenwinkel remain in prison. Van Houten’s most recent three parole hearings resulted in recommendations she be released. Former Gov. Jerry Brown overruled the first two, while the third is pending before Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Neither Van Houten, 69, or Krenwinkel, 71, had any involvement with “Charlie Says” or contact with the filmmakers, Harron says.

She says she’s not sure whether they would be allowed to see it in prison either, though she’s heard one asked a friend to watch it for her.

“Just because they’re curious what the film is like,” Harron says.