![]() The writer-director uses affective disjunction and constant images of exaggerated Americana not to moralize, but rather to simply represent a hyper-cinematic, genre-codified vision of specific national identities. Crucially, Zombie offers no redeeming characteristics to his victims but graces the Firefly killers with burlesque charisma and anarchic energy. House’s dramatic tension is simple, pitting visibly upper-class, white non-heroes against white “hillbilly” murderers, who want nothing to do with their visitors’ pseudo-anthropological condescension. The friends are trapped and subjected to torture through a litany of means, which intensifies in both scope and theatricality as the film charges toward its climax. Before long, the urban friends are lured to the Fireflys’ otherworldly home, which resembles an Ed Wood soundstage reimagined for an alternate-universe episode of MTV Cribs, marinated in primary-colored light and detailed with otherworldly production design. They end up stopping at clown-faced Captain Spaulding’s (Sid Haig) Museum of Monsters and Madmen in one of the film’s most vividly disturbing sequences, Spaulding guides the would-be protagonist friends through his Museum ride, which displays gruesome animatronic dioramas devoted to America’s most infamous serial killers. House follows a group of urban friends traveling together in hopes of finding material for a planned book on bizarre American roadside attractions. This formal bombast undergirds a bare-bones narrative. ![]() Its scenes are replete with bold primary color filters, rack zooms, hyper-stylized lighting and constant slippages between various film stocks (16mm, 35mm and even occasionally videotape). House delivers its acrid vision of white Americana in a mode showcasing Zombie’s background in music video direction. The film moves beyond the confines of specific pop cultural references to visualize parallels between broader American traditions-vaudeville, the traveling carnival, and of course the mythology surrounding “celebrity” serial killers. It draws broadly from the plot structures of Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, riffs on vaudeville performer/filmmaker Tod Browning’s sensibility and names its murderous Firefly family members after various Groucho Marx characters. ![]() The musician’s directorial debut House of 1000 Corpses uses overt pastiche to its advantage. With a musical background in ‘80s New York noise giving way to industrialized hillbilly psychedelia, Zombie established himself as part-time creative renegade, part-time purveyor of America’s darkest, famous iconography. However, rather than opting for straightforward comedy-horror hybridity, both films carry out a deconstructive and tonally destabilizing exploration of Americana in its bawdiest, goriest and most outrageous forms. In a 2012 interview with The News & Observer, Alice Cooper says, “Rob Zombie and I are basically best friends, because he totally gets that horror and comedy are in bed together.” Certainly, the uneasy connection between humour and revulsion informs Rob Zombie’s first two films, House of 1000 Corpses (2003) and its sequel The Devil’s Rejects (2005). ![]()
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