by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Fortunately, after The Bad Seed Returns Lifetime showed one of their better efforts, House of Chains, produced by Neshama Entertainment and MarVista Entertainment and both written and directed by Stephen Tolkin. Tolkin’s film was based on a true story that made national headlines in 2018, about a family headed by David and Louise Turpin in Perris, California. Though David Turpin was a computer programmer and engineer for two major defense contractors, he and Louise turned their home into a prison for their 13 children, one of whom they kept under lock and key so long that when they were finally rescued, their eldest daughter was 29 but so severely underdeveloped she weighed just 82 pounds. The Turpins told their children they could eat only once a day and bathe only once a year, and whey they disobeyed the rules, which was predictably often, they were chained to walls or bedposts and forced to endure such punishment for days on end. From these raw events (narrated online at
https://allthatsinteresting.com/turpin-family-children), Tolkin formed a chilling story of itinerant street preacher Tye McGrath (Greyston Holt, whose most important previous roles were on the TV series Batwoman and Riverdale and who deserves a major career since he’s both sexy and a fine actor), who in the opening sequence is delivering a street sermon holding some seeds and declaring they are the symbols of humanity’s innocence from the Garden of Eden before the serpent entered the scene and started spreading evil like a virus.
A young woman named Laura Truscott (Mena Suvari) shows up at his sermon with a boyfriend in tow. The boyfriend scoffs, telling Tye he’d only be interested if they were “sativa” seeds (i.e., marijuana or cannabis), but Laura dumps her druggie boyfriend and Tye punches him when he tries to grab her back. The film then leaps forward in time 20 years and Tye is working as a landscape gardener and still reading Bible verses to his kids and demanding they live their lives by them, including the ones about total obedience to your parents. The original David Turpin was the son of a minister and among his extra-curricular activities in high school was the Bible Club, but there’s not much evidence that his mania about keeping his kids locked up had a religious motivation, as the fictional Tye McGrath’s does. In fact, it was odd to be watching this movie just after having spent the weekend with my husband Charles at his religious retreat; after being surrounded by people who both take God seriously and believe that God is love and is all-encompassing of all races, religions, cultures, orientations and gender identities, it was a wrench to be watching a movie that hooked all my old prejudices against religion and religious people. At other times in my life I would have regarded a story like this as, “See what religion does to people?” Now that I’ve considerably mellowed in my attitude towards religion, spirituality and the possibility that there may be some sort of animating spirit in the universe that some people refer to as “God,” I’m more able to think of Tye and Laura McGrath as simply garden-variety crazy people whose craziness just happens to manifest itself in religious terms.
Though Stephen Tolkin made considerable compromises to the tale – the real Turpins had 13 kids, the fictional McGraths have only six, and none of them reach adulthood plus a decade the way the oldest Tolkin daughter did; also the online article by Marco Margaritoff cited above claims that Louise Turpin as a girl had been pimped out by her mom to a wealthy pedophile and as an adult had taken up witchcraft and gambling, none of which is depicted in the film (though we get an intimation of it in the loser boyfriend she’s with when she meets Tye) – he manages to forge a quite interesting and chilling tale. Part of Tolkin’s skill as a filmmaker is he doesn’t overdo the villainzing of the elder McGraths; their actions, horrific as they are by normal standards, make a certain (albeit demented) sense given their overall world-view. Tolkin also effectively portrays the willful ignorance of the neighbors, who like the Turpins’ real ones live for years in the presence of this evil in their midst without any idea that it’s going on. For me the most interesting and sympathetic character is the heavy-set Black woman who gets assigned to the McGraths’ case and who figures out what’s going on – and has to tell the police to hold back on interrogating the children because the trauma of being pushed to rat out their parents as part of a police grilling would itself push them over the edge and damage their psyches beyond repair. (The cops are worried that if they don’t get evidence against the McGraths within 60 hours, they’ll have to release the McGraths and they’ll have the legal right to demand their children back.)
Also, one of Tolkin’s most inspired touches was to have the McGraths give her children names from nature: River (Natalie Jane),. Meadow (Madeleine Kane), Summer (Joey Carson), Prairie (Owen Irvin McCullough), Rain (Callum McAllister), and the youngest child, Forest (Grayson Taylor-Day), After the 20-year time jump, the next time we see Laura is when she’s pregnant with Forest, who is born at home without medical intervention because by then Tye has become convinced that all doctors, like all police officers and all personnel in established churches, are agents of Satan. The crisis is precipitated when Forest gets appendicitis (which had a particular resonance for me because my husband Charles had appendicitis and, though we got him to a hospital before his appendix actually burst, it was still touch-and-go for a while) and his sister Meadow is determined to get him to a hospital to save his life despite their father’s opposition. The escape attempt gets the attention of the local police, and though Tye manages to persuade the cops that he wasn’t holding his children against their will and it was just a “game” Meadow liked to play, eventually the police send the Child Protective Services wormer (who is, alas, not identified on the imdb.com page for this film, though she turns in one of the better performances I’ve seen in a Lifetime movie of this particular stereotype of the all-wise Black female authority figure).
Eventually the McGraths, like the real Turpins, agree to plead out to spare their children the ordeal of having to testify in open court (Margaritoff noted in his article the bizarre irony that the Turpins, after what they had already done to their own kids, would have been worried about further traumatizing them by forcing them to testify), though a couple of the McGrath kids read victim impact statements in court that serve the same purpose of allowing them to give their sides of the story. House of Chains is an example of Lifetime at their best: a powerful drama, quietly but intensely told, and though Tolkin made extensive changes to the real story in his script, the film still had the added complexity and nuance common to Lifetime movies at least nominally based on true stories.
