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Sophia Maddox spent her life hearing from her father how she never met her father. She would put him to bed as a child, she said, and tell him how much she wanted to know him.
Four years ago, following a match on a genealogy website, he learned a surprising truth: his father’s father – his grandfather – was. Charles Mansona well-known religious leader and terrorist.
“When my father found out, he couldn’t tell me for two months because it was dark,” Maddox told the Guardian.
This discovery is Maddox’s story documentsMy Grandfather is Charles Manson’s husband, which has been shown for the first time Hulu. Throughout the series, Maddox works hard to deal with one of the most notorious criminals in history. “I come from a murderer,” he says in the first few seconds of the film. “Who will accept me?”
But what begins as a philosophy about the origins of evil, where Maddox wants to understand his grandfather through interviews with members of the Manson Family cult, quickly turns into a habit of removing human suffering and making peace with the legacy of wrong figures.
It’s a personal experience that feels like attending a therapy session, which Maddox is filmed doing several times throughout the film. But the idea to write this for an audience came naturally, Maddox said.
“I grew up lonely and when you grow up lonely and lonely, you want to be heard and seen. I think it inspires you to want to tell people and shout from the rooftops who you are and your story,” said Maddox in an interview. “That’s how I was made and raised, to be a storyteller, and maybe hopefully this will allow someone to be a little less lonely.”
Maddox, 26, is young enough to have grown up away from the shadow that Manson – and the mysterious trials of members of the Manson Family – have cast on American culture. He only learned about his mistakes as a teenager and accidentally Googled “Helter Skelter” after listening to the Beatles’ White Album, but he didn’t understand the consequences of his mistakes until years later, when he saw Quentin Tarantino’s bloody blockbuster, Another time… in Hollywood.
As a svengali as the leader of the Manson Family cult, in August 1969 Manson instructed his followers of many disaffected girls to enter the house that Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant at the time, shared with her husband, Roman Polanski (Polanski was shooting a film in Europe). There, he brutally stabbed and killed Tate, along with Hollywood hairdresser Jay Sebring, heiress Abigail Folger and family friend Wojciech Frykowski. The attackers shot and killed a fifth person, resident Steven Parent. The next night, the Manson Family broke into the home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, and stabbed them as well.
Manson and three female followers, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, were convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, and another follower, Charles “Tex” Watson, was later convicted. Manson he died in prison in 2017 he is 83 years old.
Throughout the documentary, Maddox and his co-director, Alexandra Orton, film happy home videos of his father, Daniel Arguelles, laughing and looking at him like a cheeky baby, with images of Manson, sarcastic and eye-popping, a Nazi swastika tattooed on his forehead. The physical similarity between Manson and Arguelles is striking – they share the same sharp features and penetrating brown eyes – but throughout the film, Maddox has struggled with other tendencies that Manson shared with his father: childhood trauma, psychological problems, uncertainty that can manifest itself in unstable ways.
Arguelles, who Maddox described as a great father, was conceived overnight and raised by his mother and stepfather, who sent him to a military reform school at a young age. “My grandfather, God bless him, may he rest in peace – I knew him as a child, and he kept his grave a secret,” Maddox said. “But when she became a mother to my father, she didn’t treat him the way she should have and I think it was because of who her father was… the biggest pain I can think of with my father was how no one confirmed what he went through as a child, that’s why he felt the need to tell me about them when I was a child.”
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The compassionate Maddox has also dealt with and successfully dealt with his grandfather’s many victims while creating a character that has been described over the years as a symbol of true evil. He had to go through a lot of fun around his grandmother to get to the root of what he was looking for. “I’ve done a lot of true crime documentaries and I think people are interested in creating giants who are super powerful and can be in a blockbuster movie as a villain,” Orton said. But if you want to know how to prevent bad things from happening, you need to understand that every bad thing is man-made.
“My agent has been good to me and in the movie, he says that taking fun cuts isn’t how you deal with pain,” Maddox said. “I just had to figure out what to break.”
The final lesson Maddox learns on screen is that while evil cannot be passed down from generation to generation, horror can, and that’s what his father gave him. Arguelles also had a difficult time realizing that Manson was her father – and experiencing the similarities they shared. “I never knew him, but I know him, I’m him, but I’m not him,” he said in the film. A filmmaker and self-made artist, he supported his daughter’s desire to explore their history through film, but worried that she was healthy enough to do so. The rift culminated in a heated argument Maddox had with his father, whom he filmed, and he has not spoken to them since.
“You know, because of all the vulnerability that I have, I learned from my dad because he was lonely as well… I learned to be vulnerable and comfortable because my dad was there for me growing up,” Maddox said.
Maddox said that he hopes to be reunited with his father one day and that he himself will take the time to look at the document – to understand that it is a natural pain, he also gave it to him.
“I hope they feel seen,” he said. “I hope he sees because he spent most of his life with blind people. I also hope he’s proud of me, that I’ve dug deep into our pain, our hurt, and I hope he can see that if I can get through it, so can he.”
