True crime documentaries and docuseries continue to thrive, especially on Netflix. While the subjects and topics at hand may be different, almost all of these docs share a familiar formula: there will be talking head interviews cut in between both archival news footage and stylish dramatic recreations of events. More often than not, these recreations also follow a familiar formula: the faces of the actors portraying real figures are usually obscured, and their movements often happen in slow motion for extra effect.

If you’ve ever wondered why so much true crime material sticks to this familiar approach, the answer can be traced back to Errol Morris’ groundbreaking 1988 documentary “The Thin Blue Line.” Morris’ film followed the story of Randall Dale Adams, a man convicted of murdering a Dallas police officer. Morris’ film made it clear that Adams was innocent of the crime, and the documentary was so effective it actually helped lead to Adams’ exoneration a year after its release.

While “The Thin Blue Line” is held in high regard these days, Morris’ movie was actually controversial when it first arrived. When Morris made “The Thin Blue Line,” he chose to use stylish, dramatic recreations of certain of events, and while modern viewers tend to think of this approach as standard (and even cliche) in the true crime documentary genre, at the time the film was released, such an approach was highly unusual. Some critics even claimed that the film didn’t count as a “real” documentary since it used so many recreations. And yet, despite all of this, the film’s reputation only increased in the years since its release, and its approach to its material became highly influential among other true crime doc filmmakers.

Because of the influence of “The Thin Blue Line,” Morris can be seen as the father of the true crime documentary genre — virtually every modern true crime doc is following his blueprint. Now, Morris is back with a brand new true crime documentary, covering a topic that will be very familiar to aficionados: the Manson Family murders. 

But Morris’ new Netflix film, “CHAOS: The Manson Murders,” isn’t telling the same old familiar story that was made so popular by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s book “Helter Skelter.” Instead, Morris is tackling material covered Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s book “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,” which offers up a rather shocking conspiracy theory that suggests maybe, just maybe, CIA mind control had something to do with the Manson murders.

Most people probably know the basic details of the Manson story. In the 1960s, a short, wannabe musician named Charles Manson gathered together a cult of mostly female hippies to form a kind of commune in California. With hopes of starting a race war, Manson sent some of his followers out over the course of two nights in August 1969 to commit a series of gruesome murders, including the murder of pregnant actress Sharon Tate. While Manson didn’t physically commit any of these murders himself, he was seen as the ringleader of the entire situation. Manson was ultimately sentenced to life in prison, and died in 2017 while still incarcerated.

Manson still looms large over the pop culture landscape for various reasons. His family’s crimes, coming in 1969, signaled a kind of end of the free love hippie era. The fact that the crimes also took the life of a young, beautiful (and pregnant) actress also made them heavy fodder for media consumption, as did the sensationalized trial of Manson and his follows. The “Helter Skelter” book only increased this attention, as have various other books and movies, including Quentin Tarantino’s recent “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which dared to offer an alternate history approach in which Manson’s stab-happy disciples were ultimately (and violently) defeated before they could hurt anyone.

Despite so much media and pop culture coverage of the events surrounding Manson, several unanswered questions linger around the case. The biggest question that tends to get asked again and again is: “How?” How, exactly, did Charles Manson talk a bunch of kids into committing a series of horrific murders? The common consensus, including among Manson’s family members themselves, is that Manson was somehow able to brainwash them. But again, the question lingers: how?

In 1999, journalist Tom O’Neill was hired by Premiere magazine to write about the Manson murders. O’Neill had three months to file the piece, but in the end, he missed his deadline — and kept digging. The end result of O’Neill’s work was the sprawling book “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.” I’ve read it, an while I found it fascinating, I also must confess that it gave me a bit of a headache. O’Neill’s book goes down some wild avenues and ends up feeling like the printed word recreation of the famous “Pepe Silvia” moment from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

In the book, O’Neill and co-writer Dan Piepenbring posit that there’s a chance that the Manson murders had something to do with the CIA’s infamous MKUltra program. While it sounds like the stuff of pulp fiction, MKUltra was very real: the CIA really experimented with ways to control people’s minds via drugs and other methods. The “CHAOS” book tries to connect the dots by drawing in a figure named Dr. Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist working for the CIA who was hanging out in the Haight-Ashbury area around the time Manson was lurking about, still assembling his family. The only problem is that despite his best efforts, O’Neill was never able to connect Manson and West.

To be clear, O’Neill’s book never comes right out and blatantly says something like, “Charles Manson was working with the CIA!” He’s simply pointing out that Manson’s supposed brainwashing of his family, which involved copious amounts of hallucinogenic drugs, bears a striking similarity to the work the CIA was doing with MKUltra. It could all be a coincidence. Or it could be something more sinister.

Having read the book, I was very curious to see how Morris would tackle the material of “CHAOS.” Disappointingly, Morris’ approach is surprisingly straightforward. The filmmaker has worked with Netflix before on the underseen and rather brilliant “Wormwood,” a miniseries that blended documentary and fiction. That work felt truly groundbreaking (and, like “CHAOS,” also focused on potential CIA mind control elements), whereas “CHAOS” is more or less a standard true crime doc laying out the case. Morris seems more interested in presenting the timeline of events rather than going too deep into the weeds of the mind control stuff, and it’s pretty clear from the get-go that the filmmaker doesn’t buy into any of it.

“Do I believe that Manson was programmed by MKUltra, by the government – a Manchurian candidate programmed to kill?” the filmmaker said to The Guardian. “Not quite. Can it be proven? I don’t think so. But can it be disproven? I don’t think it can be. One can provide the requisite scepticism.”

While I wish Morris had been a little more formally daring with this documentary, “CHAOS” still makes for a captivating watch that will leave you with more than a few uneasy questions.

“CHAOS: The Manson Murders” is streaming on Netflix on March 7th, 2025.