The Making of Charles Manson, Monster

As a child in Southern California, I was scared of hippies, and not just because they looked weird, listened to creepy music and were reputed to flip out regularly on drugs — though those things certainly didn’t help. The fear that I (and most of my little friends) felt toward hippies derived from a single, two-word taproot: Manson Family. In the late ’60s and early ’70s all the anxiety surrounding the counterculture seemed to crystalize in this freaky, zombified, nihilistic band of spree murderers and their wild-eyed guru, Charles Manson, complete with that X he cut into the flesh between his own eyes. They arrived in the news just when my friends and I reached the prime age for trafficking in sensationalistic playground legends, and we made the most of them.