Evil beyond belief

I'm working my way through Granada Television's two-part SEE NO EVIL: THE MOORS MURDERS (2006), first broadcast by ITV in the spring of 2006 and based on the horrific murders of three children and two teenagers by Manchester stock clerk Ian Brady and his lover Myra Hindley. What the miniseries (produced to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1966 "the trial of the century") lacks in graphic violence (thanks for that, lads) it makes up for in a wealth of period details and provincial texture that tie these events to a specific place and time, to the poverty of the principals, to their taste in films and music and the world events that bracketed the crimes. (One of the murders took place the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy). The Moors Murders have never lost their power to horrify absolutely and to inspire nightmares on the level of Grimm's original fairy tales, due in large part to the victims being mostly young children who in their innocence never could have suspected that the pretty lady who enticed them into her car (in one instance to help her find a lost glove, in another with the offer of a few shillings to haul some boxes) meant them harm.

Sean Harris (the albino tunnel dweller who ruined Franka Potente's commute in CREEP) and Maxine Peake are inspired choices to play Brady and Hindley. Peake is a bit too angular for the doughy bottle blonde that was Myra Hindley but Sean Harris has precisely Ian Brady's merciless fishmouth, while Matthew McNulty is a perfect fit for Hindley's brother-in-law David Smith, whom Brady had hoped he could draw into their web of cruelty but who instead turned out to be his chief accuser. While the sweat work of fleshing out the particular personalities of the sociopathic Brady (who idolized the Nazis and the Marquis de Sade) and Hindley (who later claimed Brady subjugated her to his will) will likely go unappreciated by many who remember those terrible crimes, SEE NO EVIL gives us some idea of where this particular evil sprang from, arguing that monsters aren't born they're made.

While the names may be obscure to many forty years down the pike, Ian Brady, Myra Hindley and their accomplices and victims still raise pulses in the United Kingdom (at the 1980 funeral of Myra Hindley's sister, the father of one of the victims showed up with a knife and stabbed one of the mourners) and have inspired no less than six nonfiction accounts of the crimes (the first by playwright Emlyn Williams) as well as a surprising amount of art, from Edward Gorey's The Loathsome Couple (pictured above) to Myra, the controversial 1997 portrait by artist Marcus Harvey that recreated Hindley's famous mug shot from the hand prints of children...

... to songs by The Smiths and The Sex Pistols and a Sonic Youth album cover that made use of a famous Raymond Pettibon drawing of key witness David Smith and his wife being driven away from court. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were also characters LONGFORD (2006), although the focus of that 2006 film (produced jointly by Channel 4, Granada and HBO) was the relationship between the older, imprisoned Hindley (played by Samantha Morton) and social reformer Francis Aungier Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford (played by Jim Broadbent). In that account of the crimes, Andy Serkis makes for an entertainingly venal Ian Brady, whose evil genius borders on the Lector-like, robbing the story of the irony that Ian Brady was very much like the Nazis he idolized... an unimportant little man whose craving for greatness urged him to do things so horrible that no one will ever forget.