Starting around 1929, America experienced this fascination with the idea of voodoo. And in July of 1932, a little pre-code film directed by Victor Halperin and starring Bela Lugosi, fresh from the grave as Dracula in the 1931 classic, was released to fairly boffo box office business and mostly mixed to negative critical assessment. This film is notable for a couple of reasons. Bela Lugosi plays a character with perhaps my favorite name in the history of cinema, “Murder Legendre.” With its scant 69-minute run time, it has the distinction of being the first full-length zombie picture ever made. About 60 years later, its title would be appropriated by one Robert Bartleh Cummings when he named his heavy metal band White Zombie. And of course, his nom de guerre in that band would be Rob Zombie.

So in 1992, White Zombie released La Sexorcisto and started showing up in places where I was looking: MTV, “Beavis and Butthead,” music stores. So I was aware of White Zombie around this time. I was aware of their existence. I was aware of their sound. I was aware of their aesthetics. And I was not having any of it. I associate White Zombie of this time with Marilyn Manson, another horror music act, which was also saturating the cultural landscape starting the following year. I just found a lot of it really silly and really cheap-looking.

And I didn't think it was outre, but I thought it was trying hard to be outre and smacking of so much effort, I just couldn't get behind it. Please recall at this point, I'm firmly ensconced in my appreciation for horror films. I've been consuming them with alarming regularity for more than a couple of vears. But I was just not having any of this sort of silly, heavy metal monster music at all. And consequently, I didn't think about it too much more until I saw the trailer for House of 1000 Corpses, and then seeing the film. In fact, I may have seen it with Clay McLeod Chapman and Kyle Jarrow and Paul Thureen. because we were all seeing all kinds of scary movies together at this point. And I was really surprised by what I saw, because my expectations going in to see House of 1000 Corpses were not exactly all that high. Saw hadn't come out yet. That would be the year after this. It was two years before something like Hostel would come out. And even though House of 1000 Corpses came out after Eli Roth's Cabin Fever, as gory as that film was, that was seen more as a horror comedy, and it didn't quite run at the wall, I think, with the same commitment as does Rob Zombie with House of 1000 Corpses.

I think that as a filmmaker, he's mined both the history of horror and horror as history to pastiche together this crazy quilt made of human skin. Cinematically, he directly or indirectly refers to The Old Dark House, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein. Sometimes it feels to me like he's got a little bit of Lucio Fulci's The Beyond in this film. Sometimes it feels a little bit like Flesh Feast, that late-stage Veronica Lake film. There are a million razor-wielding hands drawing blood sequences from a million Italian gialli that inform what we're seeing on screen. He's playing with the horror host as a concept. He's got John Wayne Gacy, he's got Ed Gein, he's got the Bender family of serial killers in Kansas in the 1870s. He's got the Manson family of serial killers in California in the 1960s. He's got Albert Fish, he's got Ben Cooper and he's got more tropes and other assorted genre conventions than I think the three of us together have fingers to count them on.

I mean absolutely no disservice to Mr. Zombie when I use the word pastiche, because I think he's achieved exactly what somebody like Charles Ludlum achieved using pastiche techniques to make plays. The influences are rewoven in such a way as to yield something new, something that definitely owes to what came before it, certainly, because to be unfamiliar with the cinematic legacy of which this film is a part diminishes the degree to which you can fully appreciate it. And while I might say that originality is the art of concealing your sources, in this case, fan service is the art of carrying them right out in front where you can see them.

From all of this colliding in what is clearly Mr. Zombie's very fertile imagination, he's created this Firefly family and their ilk. He takes plenty of inspiration from a very unlikely source here, the Marx brothers, whose films Rob Zombie loved as a child. The name Firefly comes from Duck Soup from 1933 in which Groucho himself plays Rufus T. Firefly. Mother Firefly, Karen Black, the unspeakable horror, the maiden name of her character is actually Gloria Teasdale, which is another Duck Soup character. In A Night at the Opera, Groucho plays Otis. B. Driftwood, the name of go-to swamp hillbilly and Yale alumnus Bill Moseley's character. Groucho was Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers in 1930. He was S. Quentin Quail, Dr. Satan's birth name, in 1940's Go West. And transmogrified, all of these characters run around in this roadside dark ride that is House of 1000 Corpses.

It's dark, except when it isn't, and you're blasted with some bright flash of some garish color. I think it's chaotic in both construction and effect. It seems heavily “dramaturged” to feel disorganized. It's hallucinatory, but in Zombie’s hands, giddily real, sometimes in the same frame.

I think there's a really authentic Manson family patina to the Fireflys in their writing and in their performances that's undeniable and deeply disturbing. But wait! They're musical, too! A pack of regular vaudevillians. So they're one strand of Manson DNA and one strand of Marx family DNA. But again: if you don't have an appreciation for the ingredients, the meal may be a little unsatisfying for some audience members. I think that as you gain a greater appreciation for the genre, as you watch more scary movies more critically, and then return to something like House of 1000 Corpses, you might notice more complex notes emerging. Sure, you can detect the references to things like Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre from a mile. But does it mean more if you realize that Bill Moseley was Chop Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, or that he was Johnny in the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead?

And the voluptuous horror of Karen Black herself, ladies and gentlemen—Karen Black's very presence in this film offers a litany of horror history touch points from Burnt Offerings to her being all three faces of the Trilogy of Terror to, eventually, Warnings from the Bathtub, in which she plays a haunted bathtub. Her presence connects links in a chain that spans from the past to the future of genre filmmaking. Karen Black alone puts this on a continuum of a certain kind of horror picture. And I think that's the kind that we might've watched when TV still had antennas on a Saturday afternoon on WPIX or at a drive-in, something grimy that feels like it was made in the mid- to late-70s with no prestige and less budget, but nonstop dedication and imagination on overdrive. One that conjures the damp and the dayglow paint and the axle grease of the county fair haunted house and emphasizes plot just about as much. Something that might choose to jar us out of that near-nap complacency by suddenly positive-negative inverting the image that we're seeing on our screen and whose edits, like its logic, are not what I might describe as meticulous.

Zombie has located his action on Halloween 1977. He uses all manner of contemporaneous media to set his tone. We open on Karloff as Morgan in (once again) The Old Dark House, hinting that we're probably gonna experience another kind of fish—or fish boy—out of water story about some city chickens who can't help but involve themselves in situations they should probably avoid at all costs. That is immediately interrupted by the local horror host showing The Old Dark House. which is immediately interrupted by the local Rugsville TV station's ad for Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen, and its adjacent famous murder ride and fried chicken emporium.

We will, of course, return to The Old Dark House again later, but from thence, we are off and galloping through Uncle Rob's trick house for a tight 90, grainy, gleefully nihilistic, grease-painted, blood-spattered, unhinged, satanic, tap-dancing cartoonish minutes. The first scene at Captain Spaulding's really sets up what the entire experience is going to be in terms of approach and style and tone. It's bloody and it's violent and it's dark, but it's irreverent and intense and a little campy, and sometimes it is surprisingly funny.

We get strong to excellent performances from almost the entire cast, from whom, with the exception of Karen Black, when I saw this for the first time in the theater, I had no expectations from, really. We didn't know Rainn Wilson yet, not really. And Sheri Moon's performance for a first-time actor is basically exactly what's needed here from her being a nubile, unstable hitchhiker to evoking a silver screen siren to basically showing herself as a killing machine with a moral vacuum at its center. I will also say that by the time we get to Lords of Salem, I think that Sheri is a legitimate actress, and by the time we get to The Munsters, she has enough technique to really have fun onscreen. Bill Moseley feels legitimately dangerous.

I think the clothes are great. I think that everything feels particular, character-motivated, unique. The production design is super rich and textured. It's such a celebration of Halloween with its million pieces of vintage Bicel artwork as holiday decor on every surface, inside and outside the Fireflys’ house. The giant Creature from the Black Lagoon mural is fabulous. Dr. Satan's lair looks like an ossuary in Prague, and yet somehow it all feels cohesive and connected. I think that Zombie's work as a musician and his meticulous attention to detail, which he lavishes on every choice, is evident, especially in the nearly omnipresent soundscape of this film. The composition of that soundscape does a lot of lifting narrative imparting work. He's got the voice of Aleister Crowley in there. All of that allows the image to function maximally and occasionally contrapuntally, though usually, it's just doubling the terror we're experiencing. He wrote most of the songs in the film.

While it is a serious movie, I'm not sure how seriously we're meant to take it all the time, which makes me question just how violent or gore-drenched this movie actually is, versus how much it may be a kind of pitch-black comedy made by a director who's clearly winking at those of us in the know throughout the lion's share of it. Is it explicit or uncomfortably implicit? Personally, I think it's far more evocative than it is overt, but the experience of taking it in is intense, it's visceral. I wonder if the promise or the threat of a grindcore splatter house movie made by Rob Zombie makes it seem by reputation worse than it actually appears on screen. Are we laughing or are we screaming? Does the story matter at all? Or are we simply meant to thrill at the overwhelming way in which it's told? In the end, have we really been delivered our promise of a thousand corpses?

Whatever you think of Rob Zombie, his style, his music, his other movies, whatever you think of the art that he as an auteur produces, he knows the genre inside and out. He clearly loves it to the point of obsession and he celebrates the aspects of it that he loves the most in every frame of his first movie.

To listen to our episode on House of 1000 Corpses, click here.

Bradford Louryk