Did the CIA Help Charles Manson Control His Family’s Minds? Errol Morris’ ‘CHAOS: The Manson Murders’ Attempts to Find Out

In Errol Morris’ new Netflix documentary “CHAOS: The Manson Murders,” the Oscar-winning director explores how Charles Manson was able to convince four “Manson girls” along with Tex Watson to savagely kill for him.

Based on Tom O’Neill’s 2019 book “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,” the film explores the covert motives that may have sparked the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. The doc is built around O’Neill’s theory that Manson learned mind-control techniques from the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control program and was programmed to become an assassin.

“It’s surprising, I believe, on Manson because it takes you deeply into the mysteries rather than lecturing you or telling you that this is what happened or that is why it happened,” says Morris. “It’s asking you to actually consider the evidence and to think about what the motivation might have been.”

Variety spoke to Morris about “CHAOS: The Manson Murders,” which is currently streaming on Netflix.

What was it about Tom O’Neill’s book that made you want to turn it into a documentary?

There are so many mysteries connected with Charlie Manson, and it’s almost unending. People are deeply fascinated by that crime, not just because it was so violent and so repulsive and involved celebrities, but because no one could figure out how Manson was able to convince these members of the family to kill for him. It’s not something I could do.

In O’Neill’s book, he has a lot of hunches about Manson and the CIA, but he can’t prove that there was any connection between CIA’s MKUltra and Manson. Was that a concern while you were making this movie?

Of course. But I identify with Tom O’Neill. In many ways, it is a story of a detective who won’t give up and speaking as a detective and a person who has worked on detective stories and as a person who was a private investigator for years, the desire to actually solve a case, whatever solving a case may mean, but that desire to finish the sentence and put a period at the end, and say case closed, is overwhelming. It becomes even more overwhelming the harder it is to finish that sentence and put the period at the end. Tom asked this question: How did Manson convince these women and men to kill for him? How did he do this? Tom’s answer is that you need some kind of external conspiracy in order to make sense out of it. But can we prove that Manson was programmed as an assassin? Let’s put it this way, there’s stuff that suggests something like that, but it is far from proven.

So, essentially, his take is a conspiracy theory?

We love conspiracies when we are confronted by something we can’t understand. Conspiracy gives us solace. It’s an optimistic idea. It tells us, this may seem random, this may seem insane, this may seem unmotivated by anything I can possibly understand, but if we say it’s a conspiracy, then everything becomes clear. The government orchestrated all of this. The government made it happen; the government planned it and carried it out. But it could be grasping at straws of a frustrated investigator. “Chaos” the film plays with these ideas. It asks you to become an investigator and to think about the case maybe in a way that people have never thought about before. Who was Charlie Manson? How did he convince people to kill? Could it be a conspiracy, or was it just a whole series of confusion, stupidities, and errors?

In the doc, O’Neill criticizes Vincent Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter,” the best-selling crime book in history. In the book, Bugliosi, who successfully prosecuted Manson and the other defendants accused of the Tate–LaBianca murders, explains how the Beatles’ White Album was influential in the murders. O’Neill says that it was something Bugliosi came up with just to sell books. Do you agree?

I think the strongest part of Tom O’Neill’s book is discrediting Bugliosi. Do I believe that the Beatles’ “White Album” caused these murders? I don’t. I share that belief with Tom. To me, it is farfetched, and there are probably lots of explanations other than just the “White Album” and the Beatles that can account for these crimes. I’m not sure, but it’s my hunch. What do we know about prosecutors in general? We know that they are hired to be storytellers. They tell stories to the jury. Hopefully, true stories. But most importantly, they tell stories that will enable them to get a conviction. Bugliosi was saddled with a problem – how to convict Manson of all of these murders if he hadn’t been present for any of them. How do you do it? And for him, it was a conspiracy and a conspiracy based on the “White Album” and “Helter Skelter.”

Your last doc was “Separated,” which focused on the Trump administration’s inhumane policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. MSNBC Films acquired the film in October, which was significant because not many distributors are buying political docs these days. How did you feel about that film’s release?

It was extraordinarily hard to get that movie out there, despite the fact that I had the cooperation of Jacob Soboroff, who wrote a book about that issue by the same title, and despite the fact that I was able to appear in a whole number of NBC interviews. NBC really wasn’t willing to show the film for a long time. I wanted it to be shown before the election, and they wouldn’t do it. And when they did do it, it was shown in such a way that it was very difficult to watch. It wasn’t like a film being presented on Netflix; quite the contrary. It was endlessly interrupted, it seemed like every couple of minutes or so by commercials. The movie really has not been properly seen.

You are currently working on a documentary about Ukraine, which does not yet have distribution. Are you worried about finding a distributor?

I have to finish it. But I feel like I had to make this film because the issues in Ukraine, as we all know, are extraordinarily important. In my opinion, Volodymyr Zelensky is a hero.