Horror Unearthed: The Return of Confessions of a Serial Killer (2024)

It’s said that after the failure of his debut feature, the artsy Eggshells, Tobe Hooper realized that the best way to make money as a filmmaker was horror movies. That was very much on John Dwyer‘s mind a decade later when he made Confessions of a Serial Killer.

For anyone who thinks that there was nothing made in Austin by Austin filmmakers between The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974 and Slacker in 1990, Confessions of a Serial Killer is a lost, grisly gem. Shot in 1985 on a budget of $350,000, it was planned as a career boost for some of the graduates of the UT Radio-Television-Film program who were scraping by making commercials and government information shorts.

Their ranks included Dwyer, who admits that he was hoping to follow in Hooper's footsteps when he started making movies. He noted that his fellow UT alum “lit up the idea that the easiest ticket to a career in theatrical filmmaking was to do a low-budget horror.” However, Dwyer was to have nowhere near that level of acclaim or commercial success.

As much true crime as slasher, overlooked and suffering from poor releases since it originally appeared in butchered form on VHS in 1992, now Confessions has received a restoration of the long-lost director’s cut from underground horror experts Unearthed Films.

Once Upon a Time in Texas

Audiences misguidedly thought that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was based on a real event, but Confessions really was. When Dwyer first came up with the movie, the name Henry Lee Lucas was on front pages across the nation. When Lucas was arrested in Texas in 1983, he confessed to more than 250 murders – many of them committed with his friend Ottis Toole. Lucas was finally convicted of 11, but his true body count is still heavily debated, as he seemed to lie freely about both the murders that he did commit and the ones that he didn’t.

But let’s take a step back. This wasn’t even the film Dwyer planned on making. His original idea was for a different Texas-set horror called Cedar Choppers, which Dwyer described as being “about these local, Central Texas types who lived out in the woods.” A video teaser snagged an investor, Frank Smith, but three weeks before shooting “he got cold feet and decided he did not want to do it. He thought the story would be too shocking, and we would have to come up with something else or he was going to pull out all together.” Under the gun, Dwyer was inspired by the news and pitched a thinly veiled retelling of Lucas’ crime spree. Even though it was “salacious and hard hitting,” Smith was thrilled – much to Dwyer’s surprise. “I actually thought the story was kind of terrible,” he said.

With only a month to go before filming began, Dwyer had a script, budget, and cast all set up to go – until the actor he’d hired to play the Lucas character, Daniel Ray Hawkins, suddenly dropped out. That’s when a weird giggle changed the direction of the film.

Genius? Mad Man? Or Both?

That laugh came from Bob Burns, best known as the art director for (you guessed it) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He’d met Dwyer in the edit bays at Texas Motion Picture Services where he was finishing his directorial debut, Mongrel, and Dwyer was doing his commercial work, and the pair had hit it off. So when the young filmmaker got the money for Confessions, he hired the best art director in town.

When the team heard that their lead actor had dropped out, they had a meeting in the small framed house being used as their production office (actually Dwyer's house, just off Speedway). At that precise moment, Burns was in the back room, shooting the fake crime scene photos that would be used as props in the movie. Dwyer recalled, “There were three young gals, and Bob had all sorts of blood-making stuff he was using – literally buckets of it – and machetes, knives, he had a chainsaw. He had someone taking the snap shots, but he would have them in contorted positions with a knife or something poised over them.” That was when Dwyer realized he had his killer. “It was a hundred degrees in July, Bob had his shirt off, he was sweating, but he was having a grand time, cackling.” Dwyer looked at producer Cecyle Osgood Rexrode, and Rexrode looked at him, “and we both had the same idea. And that’s how we came to cast Bob.”

“Casting Bob was the best decision we made,” Rexrode said, but she still insisted on a screen test. “Bob was so good, so right, it was thrilling.”

And Burns leapt at the chance. He had always planned to be an actor, even studying drama for his BFA from UT Austin, but after creating the unique and haunting look of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, art direction ended up paying the bills. Indeed, prior to Confessions his biggest onscreen acting roles were as an uncredited extra in The Howling (“p*rn Store Patron”) and Microwave Massacre (“Homeless Man”). Yet even with only a couple of tests, the Confessions producers knew they had their guy. “He knew how to evoke creepiness with a mere look,” Dwyer said, “but he was unprepossessing and comes across as this harmless, mousy-like character – which, actually, was very similar to the real Henry Lee Lucas.”

Moreover, there was incredible chemistry between Burns and Dennis Hill, who played Moon Lewton, the character based on Ottis Toole. Rexrode said, “[Hill] brought his A game too. There's some very sly and dark humor in it due to them.”

Hunt for the Baby-Faced Killer

It took a lot more than a maniacal laugh to convince Dwyer that he’d found one of his other central characters: Molly Lewton, based on teenager Becky Powell, who Lucas claimed was in on his crimes until he finally killed her too. Dwyer was having problems casting the part when local actress Sidney Brammer was recommended to him. He called her in for an audition and immediately thought she was completely wrong for it. “She was delightful, and my first thought was, ‘No way.’ She was just too cheery and effusive, almost innocent-looking.” Filled with doubts, he gave her the sides, she gave them a quick glance, and he started the video rolling. “She immediately went into this menacing, horrifying character. After about two minutes we went, ‘You’re hired.’”

“I’d already had one friend who said, ‘The script is so horrible. It’s really well written, but it’s so disturbing. You don’t want to be in it.’”

However, Dwyer was kind of set up. Brammer recalled that her old friend Rexrode had called her, begging her to audition, and she initially wasn't interested. First, she said, “It was awful hot in the summer of 1985.” Second, she wasn't exactly waiting for a movie role to fall out of the sky. The daughter of The Gay Place writer Billy Lee Brammer, she was already a fixture on the Austin creative scene, and had only recently left her old job as managing editor for the Austin Chronicle (“I’d left in a huff, but that’s ancient history”). She'd also just got a job as a secretary at UT, and that was helping pay for the new theatre troupe she had cofounded, Big State Productions.

Moreover, the project was also reaching a certain level of notoriety among Austin's actors. “I’d already had one friend who said, ‘The script is so horrible. It’s really well written, but it’s so disturbing. You don’t want to be in it.’” But Rexrode kept calling and calling, and finally she auditioned.

Brammer had her own reasons for not thinking she was right for the part: She was twice the age of 17-year-old Molly, “but I have a babyface, so I got cast.” She was so impressed by Dwyer as a director in that audition that she called UT and took her two weeks' vacation for the shoot.

She wasn't thrown when the part of Hawkins was recast because she already knew Burns. They'd been neighbors for several years in South Austin and became fast friends. “He was like the little boy who always liked horny toads,” she recalled. “He was always making some kind of wonderfully creepy thing, showing me something that he’d discovered that was really good and grisly and awful.” However, while film professionals knew him as an art director, Brammer also recognized that he was “a great actor” who had become a fixture on local stages as a supporting actor. In 1984, she and her sister, Shelby, had drafted a screenplay adaptation of their father’s novel, “and we had several staged readings, and we always cast Bob because he was so good at playing wonderfully oddball Texas guys.”

So that’s why she was thrilled when Dwyer cast Burns – for herself, for the production, and especially for Burns. “He threw his arms around John. 'Oh, yes, thank you, thank you, thank you.’ It was the dream of his lifetime to have a part like that.”

The Case of the Missing Director

The key to the script was that this wasn’t shot as a traditional slasher or a manhunt movie. Instead, Dwyer wanted a “semi-documentary-type feel, to enhance the realism and maybe make a little more suspense.” It begins with Hawkins already arrested and playing unreliable narrator, recounting his version of his crimes to the cops. So deceptiveness was baked into Confessions before freshman director Mark Blair stepped behind the lens.

There’s one slight problem. There’s no such person as Mark Blair.

Horror movies may make money, but Dwyer was getting some interest from Disney in some other scripts he had written, and so his agent at William Morris told him to use a pseudonym for Confessions. Since he was trying to make sure his real identity was never publicly connected with the movie, he came up with the “most anodyne name” he could imagine. “I was just trying to find something so bland and unmemorable that people wouldn’t pay attention to it.”

“My secretary comes in and said, ‘Hey, there’s someone from The New York Times wants to speak to you.’ I pick up the phone and a voice goes, ‘Is this John Dwyer, the director of Confessions of a Serial Killer?’”

However, the secret was almost spoiled. Just after Confessions was released, Dwyer was in his office “and my secretary comes in and said, ‘Hey, there’s someone from The New York Times wants to speak to you.’ I pick up the phone and a voice goes, ‘Is this John Dwyer, the director of Confessions of a Serial Killer?'”

It turned out that a college friend and fellow filmmaker, Richard Gibbe, was in New York with his wife, fashion director and model Harriet Kelly, for one of her runway shows. Gibbe had chatted with the reporter about how they’d both appeared in Dwyer's proof-of-concept video for Cedar Choppers and how that film had become Confessions. With the jig seemingly up, Dwyer had to pretend to the Times that he had merely been a consultant to Blair, who couldn’t be reached because he had gone off to Nepal to join the Dalai Lama “and last we heard, he’d had an accident and no one had seen him since!”

Later, Dwyer told that story to Burns, “and next thing I know, Bob – he was a shameless self-promoter – he goes to a horror startup magazine in the UK and he ends up telling that story, and the British magazine ends up printing it.”

“No More Actresses Will Be Shot on This Set!”

After those initial casting hiccups, and having to invent a director, the actual shoot went surprisingly smoothly for Dwyer (cough, Blair, cough). Austin was filled with eager young filmmakers wanting their first credit, locations were plentiful, “and if you were in a neighborhood environment, people were usually thrilled. ‘Ooh, look, here’s Hollywood.’ The only real problem we ever had was with the Teamsters.”

Back then, word spread fast if someone was making a movie, and so a delegation from the union turned up at the production office where the Confessions producers explained they were a low-budget production and couldn’t afford union drivers. Dwyer explained, “They said, ‘OK, we understand, we’re sympathetic. We’re only going to demand that you hire three drivers.” The producers replied that they couldn’t afford any and thought that was the end of it – until the first night of shooting interiors. Suddenly, there was the sound of lawnmowers, and they sent a production assistant to ask the neighbor if they could mow later. She got a very surprising answer: “Go ask them how many drivers they’re going to hire.” Turns out that the Teamsters had sent someone to offer to mow the neighbor’s lawn for free at exactly the same time as they were filming. “Next thing we know, we bargained and hired one driver – at a rate that was more than three production assistants.”

There was one big difference between Confessions and most other mid-Eighties productions in Austin: the number of women on set. Texas filmmakers may have called themselves "the Third Coast" but the reality was that there were very few Hollywood productions here at that time. Most of the productions were local, and most of the filmmakers were coming out of UT-RTF, and most of the directors and producers coming out of that program were men. "I can't think of a single female filmmaker coming out of the RTF department at that point," said Brammer.

But on the set of Confessions there was Rexrode as producer, while Susan Elkins was production manager and Kathie Redmond served as production coordinator. In the crafts there was hair stylist Estreya Kesler, prop master Catherine Rhodes, “[and] Jo Edna Boldin for casting was a great find,” Rexrode said. In charge of editing was Sheri Galloway, who would go onto be an assistant editor on several Richard Linklater projects including Dazed and Confused, Before Sunset, and another "lost" Austin horror, 1991's Scary Movie before becoming an in-demand animation editor on films like The Croods, How to Train Your Dragon, and another film with deep Austin connections, The Iron Giant.

"It was a female management team," Brammer said, but the whole crew was fantastic. "I was always just impressed by the caliber."

What Brammer remembers most from the shoot was "the unbearable heat." After all, this was filming outdoors in Austin in July and August, and the only break was at night. She recalled that a young Randy Ostrow (who would later go on to be a producer at Orion and October Films) was an assistant director on the film, and the native New Yorker was suffering in the Texas heat. “He just sat on a camp stool all the time doing his set management.”

It was even more miserable for Brammer because she spent most of her time sweating, sticky with artificial blood, and with her head covered in baby oil. "I have really glorious hair, autumn blond and naturally thick and wavy," she said, "so they'd use a whole bottle of baby oil on my hair every day. Estreya Kesler would run out between shots and pour more baby oil on my head, trying to get my hair to look greasy and old and nasty."

It was one of those blistering Texas summer days when Brammer acted in Molly's death scene, where an enraged Hawkins shoots her in the chest. Dwyer wasn’t happy with how the shot was going and kept demanding that the rookie special effects guy add more blood. Finally, Brammer was strapped up with so many blood packs that Kesler was struggling to get her shirt closed. Time comes for the shot, and blam! “It broke the leather protective strap on the squib and it imploded into my back,” Brammer said. “It raised an inch-tall welt. It didn’t break the skin, it just really hurt, but I popped right back up off that mattress going ‘Aaaaaah.’ The last thing I remember before I blacked out was Estreya running up to me and going, ‘Put it out! Put it out!’ because it was on fire.”

Everyone panicked and got her into the makeup trailer but, like a trouper, an hour later she was back out on set to get the reverse shot “and damned if he didn’t shoot me again! I was wearing cutoffs, and it was burning my legs.”

Suddenly, Ostrow yelled out from his camp chair, “and I’ll never forget this: ‘No more actresses will be shot on this set!’”

Have You Seen This Missing Film?

Filming wrapped in August 1985, and by January 1986 Dwyer had assembled a rough cut to show to distributors. There was a bicoastal bidding war between two of the most recognizable names in exploitation and B-grade movies: In New York there was Lloyd Kaufman, head of Troma, and over in California there was Roger Corman. He'd just launched a new company, Concorde, and wanted Confessions to be the first film distributed by Corman that he hadn’t also made. Dwyer referred to the Troma bid as “pretty paltry,” so he went with Corman’s promise of a full 35mm theatrical release. Since the movie was shot on 16mm, Dwyer had budgeted $40,000 to do the blowup himself, but Corman said he’d cover the cost.

Three 35mm prints were struck – and never shown.

Instead, Concorde hacked the film down by 15 minutes, sold the international rights, and finally dumped it in the U.S. on video in 1992 with a bafflingly bad cover. “It was like a Hannibal Lecter-type character,” said Dwyer. “We were just, ‘How did they come up with that?’”

Part of the problem was that, unbeknownst to the Confessions team, there had been another fictionalized version of the Henry Lee Lucas story in production at exactly the same time as they were shooting: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. That film caught fire during its three-year festival run, making Michael Rooker a star and completely overshadowing Confessions.

Years later, Rexrode moved to Los Angeles and was invited to a party by an old friend from UT who was living there at the time. Of course, who should she meet there but Rooker. “Nice guy,” she said. “I never told him it was his movie that put the kibosh on Confessions getting a theatrical release."

When Confessions was finally released, reactions were mixed. Audiences seeing the poster thought it was a The Silence of the Lambs knockoff, while anyone who watched it thought if was a Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer knockoff. Dwyer said, “If you were a horror fan, you would tend to like it. If you were anyone else, you would tend to look at it and feel like you needed to go get a bath afterwards.”

Brammer laughed. “My mother used to say, ‘This is the worst, most disturbing film I’ve ever seen.’ But she watched it several times.”

Reopening the Confessions Case Files

Yet almost 40 years after filming, Confessions of a Serial Killer has come out from the shadow of The Silence of the Lambs and Henry, and now stands as its own work, a seething, septic dip into nightmarish depravity and the mundanity of evil.

What's more, over the years, the film has been reappraised, a process aided by a DVD release in the 2000s and a 2017 restoration and festival run. So while it's been a long time coming, Rexrode said she is still glad it's happened. “The cast and crew deserve to know those long hours in the Texas sun were not in vain.”

The new release from Unearthed also includes Rondo and Bob, Joe O'Connell's hybrid bio-doc about Burns. Indeed, if it wasn't for Confessions, then he never would have made the documentary. He'd never really heard much about Confessions until local filmmaker and film historian Kirk Hunter sent him a clip of a partial cast-and-crew reunion, and then another of Burns in Seguin. O'Connell had been looking to make a follow-up to his first film, Danger God (aka Love and Other Stunts), about stuntman Gary Kent. Those clips, and finally getting to see Confessions at a rare public screening at Austin Film Festival in 2017, convinced him he had the subject for his second feature.

After all, this was a side of Burns that O'Connell had never seen. As art director, his unique vision shaped some of the most important horror movies of the Seventies and Eighties: not just Chain Saw, but The Hills Have Eyes, Tourist Trap, The Howling, and Re-Animator, “but he was not a fan of horror films,” O'Connell said. “It was just his bread and butter. He liked to create. He liked to make things.” However, O’Connell sees that signature aesthetic in Burns’ performance, and most especially in a memorable scene at Top Notch on Burnet, in which a handcuffed Hawkins flirts with a car hop from the back of a police cruiser. "He's terrifying."

Yet there's something bittersweet about that newfound fanbase, as the film's biggest advocate who never really got to see its success. Brammer recalled that, throughout the years, it was Burns who kept the old cast and crew up to date on whatever was happening with the movie. On Sunday, May 31, 2004, he called her out of the blue, “and he said, ‘Oh, I just want to catch you up on the progress of Confessions of a Serial Killer.'” They chatted for a while, “and he suddenly goes, ‘Well, I’ve got to go. I have a bunch more calls to make.’ I said, ‘Well, OK, I’m going to come out to Seguin and bug you,’ and he said, ‘Oh, alright, I’ll talk to you later’ and he hung up.’”

The next day, Brammer got another unexpected call, this time from local filmmaker Shane Scott, who had taken her classes when she was lecturing at Austin Community College. “He said, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your friend,’ and I said, ‘What friend?’ He said, ‘Bob Burns is dead.’”

Burns had been diagnosed with kidney cancer a month earlier and had decided to commit suicide. He left a note on his website (accompanied, in perfect Burnsian fashion, by a picture of him lying next to a homemade tombstone that just said “Burns") and sent a letter to all his friends, explaining his decision.

When Brammer got hers, it came with a handwritten note that she still has to this day. In it, he wrote, “’Dear Sidney, I always treasured your friendship even though I had to kill you.' And that was so Bob, just that wonderful, grim sense of humor.” For Brammer, those calls and that note are a sign of how rightfully proud her friend was of his work. “He did a masterful performance.”

O’Connell sees this new release as a way to restore Confessions to its rightful place in both horror and Austin film history. “There's an audience in Austin that's not aware of it that should be," he said. But just as importantly, it may change perceptions of Robert A. Burns. “I think he would have been tickled to be known better as an actor.”

Confessions of a Serial Killer is available now from Unearthed Films on Blu-ray and DVD.