Special note: this is a post about terrible things that have happened in Chicago and how they have been represented on film. Terrible things are happening in Chicago right now in broad daylight with not a serial killer in sight. If you live in Illinois and are concerned about or have witnessed human rights violations contact the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) Family Support Network and Hotline at icirr.org or 855-435-7693. They run regular trainings and alert text network. They could absolutely use your help.

Prefer to listen to this post? (It’s really me, not AI!)

Greetings, travelers! I hope you’re ready for another itinerary of place-based frights. Today we’re heading to the land that made me in a segment called The Nightmares of Illinois.

Every state has examples of real depravity exhibited by real people. Illinois is of course not unique. But it is where I am from, which is all the qualification needed to be your tour guide. So let’s get walkin’!

If you wanted to rank states by some metric of horror you could look at total serial killings. California leads the pack by a mile, followed by New York, Texas and Florida. Which is exactly what you’d expect. These are our four most populous states. But there’s something about serial killers from the American Midwest that captures the public imagination — and serves as inspiration for movies — in a way that other regions do not. For example, some of the most classic cinematic horror of the 20th century comes from the gruesome exploits of the grave-robbing skin-wearing murderer Ed Gein. Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs — all from Gein, at least in part. And then there’s Jeffrey Dahmer, Milwwaukee’s most infamous cannibal predator. But that’s up in Wisconsin. Let’s travel about 89 miles south.

Chicago may be the origin for the idea of a serial killer. Or at least the earliest documented archetype of the behavior of what we’d later call a serial killer. Those of you who have read Erik Larson’s The Devil in The White City will know H. H. Holmes, pseudonym of a man who never met a category of crime he did not undertake: fraud, forgery, bigamy, horse thievery, and of course murder. Lots of murder. He confessed to killing 27 people — many of which have been disproven, but others are likely to which he did not confess. Part of the Holmes’ notoriety comes from his “Murder Castle”, a building on the south side of Chicago used to house visitors for the World’s Columbian Exposition held there in 1893. Contemporary journalists reported that Holmes asphyxiated his victims with gas lines, suffocated them in sealed vaults, and tortured them with various medical experiments. Many of these methods seem questionable based on modern research which says as much about journalistic sensationalism and the public’s fascination with it as it does about Holmes’ pathological inability to tell the truth. But H. H. Holmes was a sadistic killer — that much is indisputable. He was eventually caught, tried, and executed. In a possibly poetic ending his death by hanging did not come from a broken neck but rather slow, twitching asphyxiation after dangling from the gallows for twenty minutes. 

Now, my tourists, if you were a visitor to the Columbian Exposition at this time and you craved the best encased meats Chicago could provide you would have headed 12 miles north to find Adolph Luetgert, the “sausage king of Chicago” and his factory. Hope you got a nice brat during the time of the Expo because in 1897 Luetgert was convicted of killing his wife and dissolving her in one of his sausage vats filled with lye. Rumors abounded that he ground up what remained as sausage and sold her off. This was not true, though it did demonstrably depress sausage sales in Chicago for some time. (Sidenote: remember that scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where he claims to be Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago? No relation.) 

Mail-order catalogs were all the rage at this time, having been invented by Montgomery Ward in Chicago in 1872 followed soon by Spiegel and Sears & Roebuck. This may have been the inspiration for the mail-order murders of the first female serial killer of our journey, Belle Gunness — known as Hell’s Belle in the press. Belle, a former butcher, collected her victims by placing marriage ads in Chicago newspapers. Interested suitors would be lured to her farm across the border in Indiana. And they would never return. Belle seemed mostly interested in the men’s belongings and wealth, which she would keep after dismembering them and burying them all around her property. Once discovered it was determined that due to the amount of body parts positive identification and even a total victim count would be impossible. It is thought Gunness died in a fire she ordered her farmhand to start in order to kill her children, though the headless corpse said to be hers was 5” shorter and 50 pounds lighter than Gunness. She never definitively reappeared though, despite rumors of escape.

Many murders have claimed to be the Crime of the Century (and most of these end up spawning numerous documentaries and films), but one of the first may be those committed by Nathan Leopold and Ricard Loeb, two students at the University of Chicago in 1924. Motivated by gross privilege and Nietzsche’s concept of Übermenschen, Leopold and Loeb devised a plan to commit what they considered the perfect crime. This ended up being the kidnapping of 14-year-old Bobby Franks as he walked home from school. TLDR; this was not the perfect crime. Leopold and Loeb murdered the child, attempted to disguise his identity with acid, and dumped him in a culvert. But they weren’t done. Part of their perfect crime included providing misdirection by sending a ransom note to Franks’ family. Through some remarkable forensics for the era a pair of eyeglasses found by the body was determined to be Leopold’s based on the uniqueness of its hinge mechanism. Also a typewriter used for the note was fished from a lagoon nearby and linked to the crime by analyzing its strike patterns. The boys confessed. At trial they were represented by super-lawyer Clarence Darrow of Scopes Monkey Trial fame who succeeded in obtaining 99 year sentences instead of execution. Jailhouse justice being what it is Loeb was murdered by a fellow inmate in 1936, purportedly after offering sex. The Chicago Daily News is said to have run the following headline which somehow did not win a Pulitzer: “Richard Loeb, despite his erudition, today ended his sentence with a proposition”. Leopold died a free man, paroled after 33 years. Boo.

Creepy messages written on mirrors in lipstick? Yeah, that’s Illinois too. Travelers, meet William Heirens, the “Lipstick Killer” of the suburbs. Starting in 1945 Heirens would break into women’s apartments, murder them apparently for the sheer thrill of it. He nom-de-guerre came about from a strangely-capitalized line scrawled on his second victim’s mirror: “For heAVens SAKe cAtch me BeFore I Kill More I cAnnot control MyselF.” This may be the first killer fulfilling the modern clinical definition of serial killer: someone pathologically driven to murder with no apparent motive. The tale of Heirens is mostly a legal one as he was eventually caught, confessed multiple times, and ultimately recanted. He died as Illinois’ longest-serving prisoner having spent 65 years in the clink, always petitioning for clemency or parole. Something I find humorous is that, having taken nearly every course available to inmates (and being the first Illinois prisoner to earn a four-year college degree) authorities forbade him from taking a course in celestial navigation — as if he was going to sail his way out of prison, Magellan-style.

A personal digression, if you will permit me. On the night of July 13, 1966 Richard Speck broke into a dormitory housing student nurses. He killed eight women that night, using only a knife. A ninth escaped by hiding under a bed. Also in July of 1966 my mother was a student nurse, though not with the same program and thankfully not involved in Speck’s atrocity. After the murders but before he was convicted, nurses throughout Chicago were assigned security guards to walk them from their hospitals to their cars or the subway. My mother befriended her guard who eventually invited her to a party he was throwing. She and her girlfriends showed up to find my father splayed out on a dining room table, presumably drunk but certainly having a good time. Thus began the relationship that would become a marriage and bring me into the world six years later. So … thanks Richard Speck? Still, if there’s a hell I hope you’re rotting in it. Music nerd sidenote: Cheap Trick’s first album contains a song about Speck called “The Ballad of TV Violence (I’m Not the Only Boy)”. And before you ask, yeah, that whole album is dark. Cheap Trick got lighter as time went on.

And now we arrive at our final destination, the clown-artist-monster John Wayne Gacy. Let’s make this a short visit as these crimes turn my stomach in a way that the others do not. And maybe this is because Gacy is a core childhood memory. I was old enough to follow the news by the time his crimes (and victims) were uncovered. And I was about the same age as most of them. Gacy killed at least 33 young men after raping and torturing them. 26 of these victims he buried in the crawlspace of his home just outside of Chicago. He also performed as a clown at various performances throughout the suburbs. So if clowns were not already terrifying to young me they became so when I learned this. John Wayne Gacy was convicted and eventually executed on May 9, 1994 — two days after I graduated from college. The only good to come from this devil: his crimes were the motivation behind the removal of a waiting period before law enforcement could begin the search for a missing child. Other states followed Illinois’ lead and would eventually link up efforts in a national network for locating missing children.

So that’s one particular kind of horror from Illinois. There are plenty of others that don’t involve murder. Interested travelers should take side trips to explore the sinking of the S.S. Eastland, the Iroquois Theatre fire, and The Great Chicago Fire. But here we turn briefly to movies. While Chicago ranks pretty high in the unenviable serial killer sweepstakes it ranks comparatively low for its population in the list of horror movie settings, #9 out of 50. (You’re telling me there are more horror movies set in New Jersey? Wait, that makes sense.) 

Probably the most important horror movie set in Illinois is the original Halloween from 1978. Located in the fictional, presumably downstate town of Haddonfield, this film does a pretty good job of presenting semi-rural Illinois. I mean, minus the unstoppable killer. Most semi-rural towns in Illinois lack unstoppable killers. Except those discussed above. And even those were eventually stopped. Notably, Halloween was not filmed in Illinois — as the mountains you can see in the distance in some scenes will prove. This is the source of “the mountains of Illinois” TV trope that is well-documented.

Child’s Play from 1998 finds a Chicago detective pursuing a serial killer into a toy store. The killer is shot but not before transferring his soul via voodoo into a nearby doll. And thus was born a seven-film franchise, a TV series, and a reboot. The original film was fun. Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky sells the whole conceit. But it doesn’t have a ton to do with Chicago except maybe the idea that there are enough serial killers running around that one of them might conceivably know voodoo and die in a toy store?

In my opinion the quintessential Illinois horror has to be Candyman from 1992. Shot in the real-life horror of Chicago’s despicable approach to public housing known as Cabrini-Green, it deftly weaves street-level verisimilitude, urban legend, and folklore. Come for the scenes of a Chicago near north side just before gentrification; stay for the exceptional performances of Tony Todd and Virginia Madsen. 

The Relic from 1997 uses Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History as the setting for what I will call anthropology horror. Basically this a creature-in-the-crate story like so many before it, but set almost entirely inside the museum. It’s an under-loved film in my opinion, featuring a decent monster and wonderful performances by Penelope Ann Miller, Tom Sizemore, and Linda Hunt. And the only reason it is set in Chicago is because New York’s American Museum of Natural History refused to let it be filmed there. Your loss, New York City! 

Lastly, I must note Poltergeist III from 1988 not because it is a good movie — because it is not a good movie — but it is one of the few horror films I know of that takes place almost exclusively in a skyscraper anywhere. By the third film the idea of a house spirit was getting old, which I understand, but to this day I chuckle to think of someone proposing the idea of transplanting it to a luxe condo in the sky. Poltergeist III was filmed on location in the John Hancock building, using both its interiors and exterior scaffolding — real stunts — for effect.

Look, my travelers, there are plenty of other frights to explore in Illinois. If interested check out Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) , Flatliners (1990) , The Unborn (2009) and The Rite (2011).

So that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed this tour through the Land of Lincoln. Only 48 more states to go for this Terror Tourist. Thank you!

---

A full list of the movies mentioned above can be found at Letterboxd. Find out where to watch there.

The Terror Tourist is my occasional segment on the Heavy Leather Horror Show, a weekly podcast about all things horror out of Salem, Massachusetts. These segments are also available as an email newsletter. Sign up here, if interested. The segment begins at 16:30 in this episode: