What ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ gets right about Charles Manson

The following article contains spoilers for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. 

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a purposefully fantastical rewriting of the infamous Manson Family murders. So it’s ironic that this alternate history is also one of the more honest depictions of America’s favorite true-crime legend, revealing the perception of Charles Manson as evil incarnate to be more sensationalized myth than fact.

When people learned the premise of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood revolved around the Manson murders, it raised some eyebrows. Tarantino himself expressed the care he took to avoid yet another distasteful scavenging of Sharon Tate’s tragic death to sell movie tickets — even managing to convince Tate’s sister that his approach would be unlike any other. 

The film’s Cannes premiere turned still more heads when critics revealed that the cult ring leader appears in only a single, brief, inconsequential scene, unnamed despite being the popular namesake of the brutal murders. But by the end of the film, Tarantino’s throwaway portrayal of Manson proves to be a stroke of this fairytale reimagining’s genius.

Unlike nearly every other pop culture exploration of the Manson murders, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood totally demystifies his dark celebrity. Manson’s shadow too often eclipses that of the Hollywood starlet he victimized, to say nothing of the others killed that night. But here, Manson is painted as not particularly special, charismatic, or diabolical. He’s just some scraggly-bearded hippie loser. And that’s spot on. 

The real Charles Manson was an aspiring musician circling the fringes of the Los Angeles elite. Using drugs and his “Manson girls” to show them a good time, Manson formed connections with big industry people like the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson and producer Terry Melcher (also Hollywood royalty, as Doris Day’s son). Suddenly, this petty career criminal who’d spent most of his earlier life in jail found himself with a modicum of potential power, both through his followers and his brushes with influential people.

But that power was short-lived. 

Manson kept promising the Family he’d make it big soon, even as those industry elites began freezing him out due to his lack of talent, potential, or mental stability. That’s why Manson’s one scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has him showing up at Tate and Roman Polanski’s place asking for Terry (which really happened). The music producer had lent his rental home on Cielo Drive to Polanski, and Manson went there looking for Melcher after he started ghosting him.

None of that backstory is explicit in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But the time the movie spends on the Family itself already speaks volumes about its leader. Many are literal children, and all of them are lost and easily manipulated souls buying wholeheartedly into the flower power fantasy. 

With just a few lines of insignificant dialogue, and actor Damon Herriman’s crazed look of desperation, Manson is revealed in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for what he really was: a pathetically small and unimposing figure, hungry for fame, with failed criminal and musical careers, flying by the seat of his pants to maintain the control and adoration of those drug-addled youths. 

Manson’s near-total absence from the movie also corrects the common misconception that he took part in the murders. While he still bears much of the blame, Manson admitted in his autobiography to having trouble killing in cold blood or executing the more gruesome acts. Instead, all accounts from followers have him directing Manson Family members to commit them, then often fleeing the scene before things got really bloody.

The events that set off the killing spree in 1969 are highly disputed (accounts vary between the trial prosecutor, follower testimonies and autobiographies, and Manson himself), but most agree they were exactly as random, drug-fueled, poorly planned, and spur-of-the-moment as depicted in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Manson really did tell his followers to go out and make the murders look “witchy,” in all likelihood not even knowing who the targets would be.

Most accounts agree that the Satanic aspects of the murders — like writing “piggy” in blood on the wall — were staged with the intention of throwing off the cops, either in an idiotic attempt to start the supposedly impending race war Manson dubbed “Helter Skelter” or to try and get a jailed Family member out of prison.

But the senselessness of these murders is too often rewritten as something decidedly juicier and more cinematic: Manson’s diabolical revenge on a Hollywood that rejected him.

During the arrest and trial, both the prosecution and the tabloids painted Manson as a remorseless master manipulator leading a family of brainwashed devil-worshippers through carefully coordinated attacks. Manson himself often played into this myth throughout his well-documented decades of imprisonment, acting the part of violent Satanic psycho during interviews and even carving a swastika into his forehead.

When we mythologize Manson as some sort of unstoppable Satanic cult leader, we give him what he wanted: fame and influence.

Most pop culture depictions of the Manson Family also abide by this characterization, like in NBC’s short-lived detective series Aquarius, the 2016 horror movie The Wolves at the Door, or the 2016 season of American Horror Story Cult, which featured a modernized Manson-like psychopath who can charm anyone into committing murder.

But Once Upon a Time in Hollywood makes clear that when we mythologize Manson as some sort of unstoppable Satanic cult leader, we give him what he wanted: fame and influence. Instead, in this movie, we see the Manson Family as comically inept, highlighting the true horror of these murders — which is that if things had been even slightly different, these idiots would’ve been easily thwarted. 

The reality Once Upon a Time in Hollywood gets right is that Manson gained power by taking advantage of the very particular conditions of the era he was born into, in which goodwill, mind-altering drugs, and lost kids were plentiful. As biographer Jeff Guinn described it, he’s the perfect storm of “the wrong man in the right place at the right time.”

Some critique the portrayal of Tate in the movie as shallow, but it’s clear Tarantino intended it to be a celebration of what she represents about that time. She and Polanski were the true cultural influencers of the ’60s, an embodiment of the idyllic fantasy of Hollywood life.

It was a fantasy that Manson, a pathetic lowlife, could only ever play at. Yet in our rewritings of the horrific tragedy he caused, we’ve rendered him the larger-than-life figure in the story, allowing his celebrity to overshadow hers.

With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino asks the audience to reconsider which of those two legends we let live: the one of a mass murderer, or of a starlet who brought people joy and laughter at the movie theater. 

Tarantino not only reimagines history as he wishes it had happened, but retells it like it should be told.