Saturday morning cartoons and the horrors of Abu Ghraib are not two subjects that immediately occupy the same thought. But for the documentarian Errol Morris, they make a certain kind of sense together.

Mr. Morris’s “Standard Operating Procedure,” which opens next Friday, meticulously re-examines the images and recollections that shocked the world as they exposed the 2003 prisoner abuse at the Iraqi prison. There, as headlines and news broadcasts first shouted in 2004, a group of mostly young and guileless American soldiers, members of the 372nd Military Police Company, photographed their abuse of Iraqi war prisoners. “I used to watch, with my son, this cartoon called ‘The Tick,’ which I loved,” Mr. Morris said while sitting in a Manhattan hotel room, amplifying his anecdote with wildly modulated cartoon voices. “The Tick is a confused superhero, and he has to infiltrate this group of really evil, evil characters. Arch-villains. He has to pose as an arch-villain himself. And one guy comes up to him and says, ‘Well, if you’re really evil then eat this kitten!’ The Tick says, ‘No, no! That would be wrong. I can’t do that.’ And the guy says, ‘You’re not a villain!'”

“And so, here’s Abu Ghraib,” the filmmaker continued, “where you have these people actually saying these things, saying, ‘That would be wrong.’ And yet they’re in the middle of this insane muddle.”

Mr. Morris, 60, has made some of the most memorable, and occasionally oddball, documentaries of the last 30 years. He has taken on subjects as curious as the eccentric rural denizens of “Vernon, Florida” (1982) and as divisive as the former secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, in the Oscar-winning “The Fog of War” (2003). The story of Abu Ghraib, and the stories of the servicemen and servicewomen who became its villains, were attractive for their complexities. “It was an insane place with an insane assortment of characters,” Mr. Morris said. “There aren’t easy answers.”

The filmmaker had endless questions, though, and he interviewed many of the principals in the scandal, notably Lynndie England, the private whose name became synonymous with the events, and Sabrina Harman, a specialist who insisted her photographs were meant as documents of potentially illegal behavior, not as tools of the abuse.

“What are we really seeing? What are we really being shown in these photographs? Who are these people who took them?” Mr. Morris asked, rhetorically. “It doesn’t matter who you talk to; everyone sees [the soldiers] as monsters. The left sees them as monsters directed by Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush. The right sees them as monsters acting under their own initiative. But what’s common between these views? Monsters. They’re monsters. Monsters! And what’s interesting is to drag them back into a human world, taking them out of this imagined world of who they might be and actually hear from them what it is they thought they were doing.”

As he has for the last 15 years, Mr. Morris employed his homemade “Interrotron,” a modified dual-camera setup that uses a teleprompter to present a video image of the interviewer’s face underneath the lens, which makes for more revealing eye contact with the camera. Many of the subjects have thickened since their time in Iraq, and, for some, since their terms in prison.

What he discovered, once the cameras rolled, was an utter lack of easy truths. “They’re all different,” he said. “They’re not these automatons. And to say there is no moral dimension there isn’t right. “When Sabrina writes home to [her companion] Kelly and says the military is nothing but lies and I’m taking these pictures to show what really happened here, you can interpret these letters in a thousand different ways. You can even say she’s writing these letters because she’s going to cover her tracks. But even if that’s true, she’s still thinking this is wrong. It’s not as though there is no moral or ethical dimension. It’s all there. And that’s what makes it weirder and more powerful.”

Once again, as he has since his 1988 film “The Thin Blue Line,” Mr. Morris uses dramatic re-creations — or “visuals,” as his wife and producer, Julia Sheehan, prefers to call them — to illustrate certain instances in the story. In “Standard Operating Procedure,” they are flashbacks to scenes of degradation and torment in the prison, studiously art-directed and set to Danny Elfman’s minimalist-chic score. For some critics, this element of Mr. Morris’s approach is powerful and effective. But others have complained that he’s basically emulating the torture-porn formula of the “Hostel” and “Saw” horror franchises. “Ah,” Mr. Morris said, marshalling his thoughts. “The re-enactment question.”

Ms. Sheehan, who had just walked into the room, took note. “It’s his favorite question,” she said.

He’s used to it. “These questions came up at the time of ‘The Thin Blue Line,'” Mr. Morris said, as he began a winding rejoinder. In fact, though, his comments were rather succinct compared with one of his recent Web logs at the New York Times’s Web site, in which he used 11,000 words to address the issue.

“To me, they’re an essential element. You’re telling people a story about photographs, and you’re trying to take people into that moment the photograph was taken. When the flash occurred. You hear these retrospective accounts, whether it’s Sabrina or Lynndie talking about how they took these pictures, and you see the picture uncropped, with the white borders. I very rarely move in on a single picture. I sometimes think of it as the anti-Ken Burns approach: no zooming.”

This prompted a few laughs. Will Apple adopt an Errol Morris function for iPhoto software, as it did in honor of Mr. Burns’s signature slow-motion zoom?

“Yeah,” Mr. Morris said. “There’ll be an Errol Morris button: Do nothing.”

But, in actuality, his films unfold into dreamlike (or nightmarish) passages that are stylized to a highly sophisticated degree. “Standard Operating Procedure” may seem grounded in its pontification and torrents of photographic evidence, but it just as often spirals off into the uncertain shadows of memory and imagination.

“I hear a line in an interview [with a subject in the film] and a line will suggest a picture to me,” he said. “It’s not meant to illustrate the line as much as it’s asking you to think about the line. So if Roman Krol [a military intelligence interrogator among those prosecuted for Abu Ghraib] says he wants to set an example for the people who are watching in the cells, it’s almost like that hallway became a proscenium. This whole idea of display, of picture-taking of a performance for people watching, is what I find truly interesting and disturbing about the whole story. So what do I do? I show pictures of people in the cells watching. I’m not re-enacting anything, except an idea: The idea of what is going on.”

When they were trying to secure an R rating for the film, Mr. Morris and Ms. Sheehan went to the Motion Picture Association of America to discuss the issue. “And I truck out my theory that the center of the war is humiliation,” he said. “Maybe every war has that element, but at the heart of this war is, I feel, humiliation. The pictures are about humiliation; shock and awe is about humiliation. And the head of the MPAA said, ‘That’s really interesting, because a lot of movies that have come out since the war began are not about killing people, they’re about humiliating people. Killing is kind of an afterthought. The real horror comes through humiliation.’ And ‘Saw’ and ‘Hostel,’ actually, have grabbed a hold of some zeitgeist, something that is in our culture at the moment. If the critics are saying I am doing nothing different, I would respectfully disagree. If they are saying there are elements in common, I think that’s not my fault.”