HORROR FILMS 101: HALLOWEEN: Our Best Directors - 8. Rob Zombie (The Devil's Rejects, The Lords of Salem)

Note: I was recently prisoner to a viewing of reality television program "Dance Moms," and that show is more horrifying than anything I've ever discussed on this blog. The condescending celebration of sociopathy and child exploitation should make people think twice about calling horror films depraved.

That said, let's now talk about a guy who stuck a gloppy fetus demon in a cathedral and called it art.

8. Rob Zombie

(The Devil's Rejects, Halloween, The Lords of Salem)

...all the films I grew up watching and loving, from The Holy Mountain to Eraserhead and something like Cannibal Holocaust, they didn't appeal to everybody. They had a very heavy tone. They weren't made for everybody. That's the way I look at my movies: You can't please everybody with this kind of material.

- interview with Complex

Where to Start?

The Devil's Rejects (2005)

Rob Zombie is a Middle Ages alchemist stuck with a big pot of rocks. The goal? Make some gold. The process? Shove everything you've got into the cauldron, spark that fire, and hope that rocky soup doesn't bubble over and congeal into a mess on the floor. For Zombie, the "rocks" are inspirations like Texas Chain Saw, Peckinpah, Suspiria, Charles Manson (always toss in some Chuck Manson). The results range from the overblown excess of House of 1000 Corpses to the simmering images of The Lords of Salem. If the alchemists wanted gold, Zombie wants the Great Perverse Movie.

Thing is, Zombie found it early on with The Devil's Rejects. The film sequelizes his previous film House of 1000 Corpses while requiring the viewer to know nothing of that previous film. Calling the movie crass is like calling Jabba the Hutt portly. The Devil's Rejects begins and ends with over-the-top shoot-outs and features, as its centerpiece, a motel scene where one of the "heroes" sexually assaults an innocent woman, kills her husband, and then wears the man's face for his sobbing wife. You know, as a goof. What the film offers over House of 1000 Corpses is a more modulated pace and, most importantly, a slyer sense of humor. During their cross-country murder spree, the trio of rejects bicker about stopping for ice cream. And the sheriff chasing them flips his shit when a local film critic insults Elvis Presley.

Zombie's style pushes for fast cuts, grainy images, close-ups of demented or pained faces, beading with sweat and lined with joy or terror. His movies feel like someone left the film canisters in a dusty closet on the Texas border decades ago. This style didn't work so well in his Halloween remakes. Trying to wedge his style into the prerequisites of a slasher, Zombie's adaptations worked only intermittently. At their best, Halloween and H2 diverted from the Myers legend and found their own groove by indulging Zombie's white trash interests and passion for singular visuals. At their worst, the films felt inexplicable and incomprehensible - a climactic chase scene in the first Halloween feels especially confusing and overshot.

H2 has seen some appraisal by defiant internet critics - the writers at Slant Magazine are fans. But its moment-by-moment image-making gets a much more effective treatment in The Lords of Salem. The film skips Zombie's usual interest in Southern-fried psychopaths and evokes Polanski in its story about a woman surrendering to encroaching malevolent supernaturalism. And as a deeply perverse, unapologetic baroque storyscape, the film works (I've discussed its virtues before). It's one of Zombie's two beautiful pieces of gold. Did I say beautiful? I mean nasty. Disgusting and nasty. I think Rob would appreciate the compliment.