As a kid on the northwest side, John Borowski made monster masks and couldn’t get enough of films like Psycho and Jaws. When he was 13 he bought an eight-millimeter camera with money saved from odd jobs and started making his own rudimentary horror movies. A couple of years later a friend came across some gruesome pictures that belonged to his father, a police detective. “We were both into that horrific stuff, making masks and gore effects,” Borowski recalls. “He thought it was people with masks, or a special-effects catalog, before he realized what it really was”–photocopies of pictures that serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer had taken of his victims after he’d dismembered them. “There were various body parts,” says Borowski: “a head on a sink, a body in a bathtub. They were pretty awful. I couldn’t get them out of my head.”
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They were still haunting him in 1993, when as a film major at Columbia College he made a short film loosely based on Dahmer called State of Mind. Around then Borowski also found a passage in a history book that mentioned 19th-century serial killer H.H. Holmes, more recently the subject of Erik Larson’s best-seller The Devil in the White City. Holmes, a pharmacist who lived in Englewood, lured his victims (many of them women visiting the 1893 Columbian Exposition) to a three-story “murder castle” equipped with a dissection table, a crematorium, and other horrors. He sold his victims’ skeletons to medical schools and in some cases managed to collect on their insurance policies. Borowski was intrigued, but “it would have been too cliche to make a horror/gore story about this building where this mad doctor was killing people.”
“I’m hoping Harold Schechter and myself will get some more exposure from the Hollywood films,” says Borowski, who’d like to one day make a feature about 1950s Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein. “In a way that’s what I’m banking on.” Still, he says, “there’s something special about firsts. Even if I’m in debt forever, I’ll be remembered as the first person to make a film about H.H. Holmes.”
