Sophia Maddox spent her life hearing from her father about how he had never met his father. He would tuck her into bed as a child, she said, and tell her about how much he wanted to know him.
Four years ago, following a match on a genealogy website, they finally learned the shocking truth: her father’s father – her grandfather – was Charles Manson, the notorious cult leader and criminal.
“When my dad found out, he couldn’t bring himself to tell me for two months because it was so dark,” Maddox told the Guardian.
This discovery is the subject of Maddox’s documentary, My Grandfather Charles Manson, which premieres on Hulu. Throughout the documentary, Maddox works through complex feelings around being related to one of the most infamous criminals in history. “I come from a murderer,” she says in the first few seconds of the film. “Who the fuck would accept me?”
But what begins as almost a philosophical exercise on the origins of evil, with Maddox seeking to understand her grandfather through interviews with members of the Manson Family cult, evolves quickly into a practice of unpacking generational trauma and making peace with a legacy inherited from flawed figures.
It’s a highly personal process that feels akin to sitting in on a therapy session, which Maddox is filmed doing several times throughout the film. But the decision to document this for an audience came almost instinctually, Maddox said.
“I grew up kind of lonely and when you grow up pretty isolated and lonely, you want to be heard and seen. I think it nurtures you to want to tell people and shout from the rooftops who you are and what your story is,” Maddox said in an interview. “That’s just how I was built and raised, to be a storyteller, and maybe hopefully this allows someone else to feel a little less lonely.”
Maddox, 26, is young enough that she was able to grow up away from the shadow that Manson – and the bizarre trial of the Manson Family members – has cast over the collective psyche of American culture. She only learned of his crimes when she was a teenager and Googled “Helter Skelter” by chance after listening to the Beatles’ White Album, but she didn’t truly comprehend the impact of his crimes until a few years later, when she watched Quentin Tarantino’s bloody blockbuster, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.
As the svengali-like leader of the Manson Family cult, in August 1969 Manson had instructed his followers of mostly disaffected young women to enter the home that the actor Sharon Tate, who at the time was eight and a half months pregnant, shared with her husband, Roman Polanski (Polanski had been shooting a movie in Europe). There, they brutally stabbed and killed Tate, alongside the Hollywood hairdresser Jay Sebring, heiress Abigail Folger and family friend Wojciech Frykowski. The followers also shot and killed a fifth person, houseguest Steven Parent. The next night, the Manson Family broke into the home of the supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, and stabbed them to death as well.
Manson and three female followers, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, were convicted of murder and conspiracy to murder, with another follower, Charles “Tex” Watson, convicted later. Manson died in prison in 2017 at the age of 83.
Throughout the documentary, Maddox and her co-director, Alexandra Orton, juxtapose happy home videos of her father, Daniel Arguelles, laughing and doting on her as a chubby-cheeked baby, with clips of Manson, raving and wild-eyed, a Nazi swastika carved into his forehead. The physical similarities between Manson and Arguelles are striking – they share the same sharp features and penetrating brown eyes – but throughout the film, Maddox grappled with other traits Manson shared with her father: childhood trauma, mental health issues, a certain unpredictability that could manifest in volatile ways.
Arguelles, who Maddox described as a great dad, had been conceived during a one- or two-night stand and was raised by his mother and stepfather, who sent him to military reform school when he was young. “My grandma, God bless her, rest in peace – I knew her as a kid, and she kept the secret to her grave,” Maddox said. “But when she was a mother to my father, she didn’t treat him the way he deserved to be and I think it was because of who his dad was … the biggest trauma that I could think of with my dad was how no one validated his experiences in childhood, and so that’s why he felt the need to tell me about them when I was a kid.”
The deeply empathetic Maddox also clearly struggled with doing right by her grandfather’s many victims while also humanizing someone who has been depicted for decades as a symbol of pure evil. She had to suss through a lot of sensationalism surrounding her grandfather to really get to the root of what she was searching for. “I’ve made a lot of true-crime documentaries and I think society has this fascination with making monsters that are superhuman that could be in a superhero movie as the villain,” Orton said. “But if you want to understand how to stop bad things from happening, you have to understand that every monstrous thing is done by a human being.
“My therapist has been great for me and in the movie, she says that inheriting sensational wounds is not how you break generational traumas,” Maddox added. “I just had to find out what I had to break.”
The ultimate lesson Maddox learns on screen is that while evil cannot be passed on generation to generation, trauma can, and that was what her father passed on to her. Arguelles also had a very difficult time with the discovery that Manson was his father – as well as facing the similarities that they shared. “I never knew him, but I know him. I am him, but I’m not him,” he said in the documentary. A film-maker and creative himself, he supported his daughter’s quest to explore their background through film, but worried about how healthy it was for her to do so. Tensions came to a head in a hard-to-watch confrontation Maddox has with her father that she captured on film, and she hasn’t spoken to him since.
“You know, for all the vulnerability and openness that I have, I really learned it from my dad because he was quite lonely too … I learned how to be vulnerable and open because my dad was to me growing up,” Maddox said.
Maddox said she hoped to reconcile with her father one day and that he himself will take the time to watch the documentary – to understand that with the generational trauma, he also passed on goodness to her.
“I hope he feels seen,” she said. “I hope he feels seen because he lived a lot of his life with people turning a blind eye. I also hope he’s proud of me, that I’ve dug deep into our generational trauma, our mental health generational trauma as well, and I hope he can see that if I am able to get past it, he can too.”
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My Grandfather Charles Manson is available now on Hulu in the US and Disney+ elsewhere
