LEGACY OF EVIL
Manson dead, but sick allure lives on
Charles Manson was one of the most despised figures in American history — and a pop-culture icon.
The murderous cult leader died in a hospital in California on Sunday at 83, but his legacy remains larger than life thanks to the allure that, like it or not, frequently comes with figures who embody pure evil.
“Charles Manson might as well be a word like Kleenex or BandAid. They’re brand names, but they also represent tissue-ness or bandage-ness,” Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, told The Post on Monday.
“I think Charles Manson has already entered that place where he has become a generic term.”
Manson and his “family” of followers captivated a stunned nation after murdering seven people — including actress Sharon Tate — in a two-night orgy of slaughter in 1969.
“The name Manson has become a metaphor for evil, and evil has its allure,” Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson and his devotees, co-wrote in his book “Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders.”
Manson had orchestrated what would be called the Tate-LaBianca killings, sending a group of disciples to invade the Los Angeles home Tate, 26 years old and eight months pregnant, and her husband, director Roman Polanski, were renting on Aug. 8, 1969.
They left no one alive, murder- ing the actress and four others.
The next night, Manson had devotees slaughter supermarket magnate Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, in their home in LA’s Los Feliz neighborhood.
For some, the massacre marked the death of the peace-and-love era of the ’60s.
“A number of people who had been paranoid about this whole hippie youth subculture that had been emerging . . . saw this Manson story as the fulfillment of what they had always suspected, which was that this counterculture, for all the peace and flowers, is going to end badly,” Thompson said.
Manson, with his crazed stare and swastika-branded forehead, has inspired books, films, TV shows and songs since the ’60s, remaining a figure of perverse curiosity and the embodiment of evil in the popular imagination.
Thompson added that Manson’s image has softened over time and there’s a “different kind of counterculture around him.”
“In the 1970s, I’m not sure a regular person would have walked down the street with a Charles Manson T-shirt back then, whereas there is a much wider range of people today that would feel fine doing that,” he explained.
“You become interested in a story like this because it is so horrible, and it’s also really disturbing. One of the ways a culture in general processes that sort of thing is to put it in contexts that are less threatening.”