Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Fred Leuchter is a strange fellow. Because his father worked in the prison system, he was still very young when he saw the electric chair up close for the first time. He found it so fascinating that he began a business in execution equipment. In his heavy Boston accent, Leuchter talks about it with gusto while home movies visualize his story. In the United States, you don’t need a college degree to begin a career repairing electric chairs, setting up gas chambers, building gallows and developing lethal injection apparatuses. In the title sequence, Errol Morris introduces Leuchter as a Dr. Frankenstein, a symbol of human hubris, but then allows him to tell his own story throughout the rest of the film. From his remarkable point of view, he considers his life’s work to be humanitarian. Thanks to his designs, the death row prisoner dies more painlessly than in the past. And his equipment is cheaper to boot! When the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel reaches out to him, Leuchter’s squeaky-clean reputation is called into question. Because of his ideas, Zündel is being prosecuted by the Canadian government and needs an expert to help him with his defense. It’s up to Leuchter to investigate if the gas chambers at Auschwitz really existed, and from this moment on things just get weirder.