Herzog’s film captures the complexity of a system that claims the right to put people to death.

Fred Allen, the former captain of the Death House in Huntington, Texas, sat across from acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog during an interview, telling him that he had overseen over 125 executions in his time.

“We were doing about two per week,” Allen said heavily, “and that was getting tiresome.”

It’s hard enough to imagine a crime fit for capital punishment, or the state having a legal right to end a human life for such a crime, but to consider everyone else involved — not just the family, but the people that seem to fade into the background of the situation — is something unexpected.

In Into the Abyss, Herzog fearlessly explores these intricate and deeply personal experiences with the people closest to capital punishment.

He focuses the documentary on the 2001 triple-homicide of Sandra Stotler, Adam Stotler and Jeremy Richardson in Conroe, Texas. Taking his camera behind the yellow tape and into the video footage of the police investigation, he compels his viewers to experience both disgust and emotional trauma from watching the sombre details of the case. Only moments later, Herzog asks his viewers to sit across the partition with the men who committed the crimes.

It’s a hard transition, but a powerful one.

Herzog interviews Michael James Perry, who was sentenced to death, and Jason Burkett, who was sentenced to life in prison for the triple homicides, 10 years before Herzog interviewed them.

Herzog tells Perry during the first few minutes of their conversation that he “didn’t have to like [Perry], but he respected [him] and [he] was a human being,” which seems to set the tone for the documentary, as many of his interviews seem also to indicate his aversion to capital punishment, most notably when he says that it seems somewhat “Old Testament.”

Herzog interviews everyone involved in the case, from the reverend moments before he is scheduled to be present at Perry’s execution to the families of the victim and the convicted to the former captain of the death house. But the strangest interview had to be with Burkett’s wife.

Her only contact with the convicted killer was through mail correspondence, until Burkett told her he was in love with her, eventually leading to marriage and finally to in-vitro fertilization. Keep in mind that they were married with a partition dividing them and the most intimate thing they had ever done was touch hands.

Only Herzog could coax such peculiar facts out of his subjects and tell so strange and dark a story in such a personal way.

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Photo: Supplied