Film · 1986 · Films · 1980s
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
Scored from 204 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
A drifter named Henry roams Chicago committing random, brutal murders with cold detachment. When his prison buddy Otis moves in along with Otis's sister Becky, Henry draws Otis into his killings while Becky, fleeing an abusive past, is drawn to Henry. Loosely inspired by confessed killer Henry Lee Lucas, the film offers an unflinching, near-documentary portrait of violence without moralizing.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) is a film IMDb files under the biography, crime and drama genres.
204 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 207 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 895 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 204.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
