The Imitative Grindhouse Cinema of Rob Zombie
If there is one filmmaker working today whose appeal is hard to explain, it is Rob Zombie. His name has become synonymous with unapologetically violent, loud, shocking films, with his harshest critics finding little to no substance in his work. While he definitely qualifies as an acquired taste of sorts, there is more than meets the eye to him.
It may not seem clear at first, but Rob Zombie loves cinema. While the 1970s, when he was growing up, is his favourite decade for the art form, he has shown a clear understanding of film history that goes back to the silent era. Zombie started off his career not as a director, but as a musician: in 1985, 20 years old, he founded the band White Zombie, a reference to the 1932 Victor Halperin-directed, Bela Lugosi-starring homonymous horror classic. While both the songs of the band and of Zombie’s solo career have groove and industrial metal sounds, the music videos reference plenty of old cinematic classics: everything from Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1920, to A Clockwork Orange and Herschell Gordon Lewis gorefests.
But nothing has influenced Zombie more than exploitation and grindhouse cinema of the ‘70s. The term “grindhouse” became popular again in the late 2000s thanks to the Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez double-feature homage to the genre, including many fake trailers halfway through the film, one of which was directed by Zombie himself (Werewolf Women of the SS).
Grindhouse cinema was incredibly popular in the late ‘60s and throughout the ‘70s – places where patrons could indulge in sleazy, nasty, cheap, and horrifying feature films that pushed the boundaries of bad taste. There are a plethora of subgenres here: blaxploitation, carsploitation, sexploitation, ozploitation, Nazisploitation, Bruceploitation, canuxploitation, and similarly ridiculous sounding names. The goal was simple: to exploit delicate and taboo subjects like sexual abuse, post-traumatic stress, the Holocaust, cannibalism, and religion for entertainment purposes.
One factor that likely brought such an interest for this level of disturbing content was the ongoing conflict in Vietnam: these films were a reaction to the amount of graphic violence shown daily on American television sets, whether intentionally or not. The two filmmakers whose DNA is strongest in Rob Zombie’s work are Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper, who became icons of grindhouse cinema with Last House on the Left in 1972 and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974.
Both films have reached cult status worldwide because of how real they feel: shot on grainy 16mm film, often handheld, with amateur performers, on location, with minimal use of music, watching these grotesque tales of cruelty hit close to home for many audience members. The violence comes swift, brutal, and unexpected, lacking the glamorous coat of paint that was prevalent in Hollywood productions. Actors are constantly sweating and panting, experiencing real hell on these independent productions to the point that their suffering increases the empathy of the viewers.
Young Rob Zombie was changed by seeing these films, and the most emblematic scene that likely shaped how he would make his films is the death of Mari Collingwood (Sandra Peabody): after witnessing her friend get abused, she slowly walks into a lake in a total state of shock, while her abusers wait a few minutes before shooting her in the back, taking her out of her misery. Craven’s idea to use the melancholic slow song “Now You’re All Alone” by David Hess over this scene is the highlight of the film, an unforgettable moment of lyrical beauty and devastating silence and stillness in an otherwise deafening film.
What differentiates the filmography of Rob Zombie from that of his grindhouse inspirations is the character focus: while Texas Chain Saw Massacre shows the horrors of the Sawyer family from the viewpoint of a young group of hippies, Zombie’s debut, House of 1000 Corpses, is very much on the side of Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) and the murderous Firefly family. The film is a massive homage to the first two entries in Tobe Hooper’s horror series, with the grimy tactile intensity of the 1974 original and the colourful, self-aware silliness of the 1986 sequel.
It is a strong tonal clash that gives massive whiplash to the audience, also due to a wide variety of styles, from mirrored images, shot-on-video snippets, and constant noises that feel like watching Natural Born Killers on acid. A standout moment in the film is a slow-motion sequence where a sheriff and his deputy are killed in cold blood: Slim Whitman’s “I Remember You” plays throughout, similarly to how Craven used music in his films, but then Zombie holds on a crane shot of Otis Firefly (Bill Moseley) holding a gun to the deputy’s head for almost 50 seconds before the shot is actually fired. A bold choice, and the most rewarding one in the entire film.
Zombie learnt from his mistakes, and he doubles down on the sadism and conflicting emotions with 2005’s The Devil’s Rejects, a sequel to his debut. Now more than ever, it is clear that the writer-director cares more about twisted, Manson-like criminals than their victims, which is the primary form of controversy surrounding his entire career. Whether he is focusing on the Firefly family in this trilogy (ended in 2019 with 3 from Hell), the horny and misogynist cartoon characters from The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, the demonic witches of Lords of Salem, or his more human interpretation of Michael Myers in the Halloween duology, it is easy to accuse Zombie of sympathising with horrible people and murderers.
One thing is to sympathise with someone, another to feel empathy for them. While Captain Spaulding, Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), and Otis Firefly are the protagonists of The Devil’s Rejects, with much of the entertainment deriving from their deranged banter and sick family dynamics, it is also very clear that they are not good people, as they increase their body count while trying to escape the police force. There is social commentary to be found in this film and the others: criticising capitalism where human lives are worth the same as that of animals, how America is cannibalising itself, and how the modern conflicts in the Middle East are not so different from that in Vietnam. In House of 1000 Corpses, Otis is wearing a t-shirt with the American flag and the text “Burn this flag” right over it! Not a subtle message, but Zombie does not care about subtlety.
As horrible as his characters can be, they do (almost) always get their comeuppance; the ending of The Devil’s Rejects is beautifully poignant and fitting, a shame that it was retconned 14 years later with a sequel. Zombie loves them and understands them, but that does not mean that he endorses what they do. He blurs the line between good and evil more often than not, and, while that can work with the juxtaposition of the Firefly gang with the sadistic sheriff (played by William Forsythe) in The Devil’s Rejects, something like the prison escape from 2007’s Halloween, which sees Michael kill two prison guards who were sexually assaulting a female prisoner, comes off less as exploitative and more as downright misguided and distasteful, turning Carpenter’s The Shape into a vigilante for just a few minutes. But Zombie more than makes up for that with the unfairly maligned 2009 sequel, where all of the pain and suffering that Michael has given to Laurie Strode and her friends is felt from beginning to end, in what may be one of the most earnest representations of trauma put on screen in the 2000s.
While constantly paying homage to his favourite filmmakers and works of art through his cinematic and musical output, Rob Zombie’s brand of imitative grindhouse cinema is definitely effective in recreating the upsetting and disturbing nature of 1970s exploitation. He has an eclectic style that ranges from poetic surrealism to shaky, intense, and thundering outbursts of violence. He loves his psychotic characters and fully understands their plight, finding a glimmer of humanity in their dark souls, while also condemning their actions and never absolving them of their sins.
Though the frustrating studio experience of the two Halloween films brought Zombie back to the realm of independent filmmaking for a decade, he is currently finishing production on his version of The Munsters, a ‘60s sitcom he grew up watching, featuring a benign family of Universal monsters living together. If this does not prove that Rob Zombie has a soft heart underneath his rocker appearance, and that he loves monsters and outcasts, likely seeing some of himself in them, then nothing else will.