BY BOB STRAUSS
August 31, 2007
We'll have to take Rob Zombie seriously one of these days.
May as well start now.
The horror-movie-loving lead man of the metal-band White Zombie has become a phenomenally successful solo performer in recent years. But, like so many showbiz talents, what the tendril-haired, multitattooed musician really wanted to do was direct.
Which he did, starting with White Zombie videos, then the shockingly brutal fright features "House of 1,000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects." A remake of John Carpenter's seminal 1978 slasher film, "Halloween," would not on the surface seem like the next step toward directorial legitimacy. But Zombie (born Robert Cummings in the cozy hamlet of Haverhill, Mass.) does make something out of the creatively suspect project.
He delves deeply into the tormented childhood that turned the series' resident boogeyman, Michael Myers, into a knife-wielding lunatic, before picking up where the original film began. The story is told with more narrative coherence and attention to character than the normal run of scary movies these days. And while it's certainly gory enough, Zombie distances himself from the pack of horror-torture producers currently dominating the genre.
"I wanted to show enough so that it seems real, but not that it seems gratuitous," says the scary-looking but perfectly personable Zombie, 42. "Gunshots, beheadings; these things should seem horrible because violence is horrible. "I never wanted there to be a moment in the movie where something would happen and the audience would cheer. If a character is screaming and crying in pain, I don't think anyone should be cheering. You should get sick watching it."
That sounds refreshing coming from such a noise/splatter artist, but Zombie had mixed feelings about remaking one of his favorite films.
"I was excited about making a movie with the character of Michael Myers, but I was kind of burned out by all of the bad `Halloween' movies," he notes.
"I had to do something to reinvigorate this character that's been around for 30 years that everybody is used to. So I figured, let's go back and give him a full-blown origin story, and he will seem different." Different is a big deal in Zombie's world. Unlike some artists who are drawn to dark subjects, Zombie says he isn't working out any upbringing traumas or childhood abuses. He's just always liked monsters and killers and extreme freaks, and has no idea why.
"I had a half-happy childhood," he explains. "This had nothing to do with my parents; I was a real happy kid until I left home. I was looking at these home movies of myself, and up until the day I started first grade, I always seemed so happy. Then, suddenly, I never smiled again. "I think I was just a weird kid. Not trying to be weird, but when I was home in my own bizzaro mindset, I was very happy. When I had to go off into the world of other people, it made me a very different kind of person."
Zombie says he was always drawing, writing, playing instruments and making short movies as a child. After a brief stint on scholarship to New York's Parsons School of Design, the dropout took a number of odd jobs (his favorite: graphic-designing porno magazines). Around that time, White Zombie came together, then took off commercially.
"I never differentiated, really," he says of his creative fields of endeavor. "I always wanted to do everything. I always wanted to do film and music, but music's easier because it's cheaper to start a band than make movies. "Film is pretty much the most important thing to me now," he adds. "I love music, and I love touring and playing live; there's no other thing you do that has that same experience. But film is the thing that I'm always thinking about and concentrating on, always wanting to fine-tune."
Sounds normal enough, and despite his image, Rob and his wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, say their home life is normal enough - with a few twists. "We have a nice house, with a lot of old '30s and '40s movie posters hanging up all around, and some other collectibles," she says. "We watch movies, eat pizza, hang out with friends in our spare time, just like everybody else." They also work together on Rob's movies.
Sheri has appeared in all three features and the fake "Werewolf Women of the SS" he made for the "Grindhouse" compilation earlier this year. She also does voice work in the upcoming animated feature "The Haunted World of El Superbeasto," which is based on a comic book Rob created.
But, um, is there anything alarming to be implied from the bloodthirsty, sexualized roles Zombie keeps creating for his bride? (In "Halloween," she's Michael Myers' ever-lovin' mom, who supports her dysfunctional family by working at a strip club.) "Those are good parts," he insists. "Women don't get to do a lot in movies sometimes, so I always want to jazz it up for Sheri. Someone could go, `Well, why does she have to be a stripper?' I'm like, well, she could be a waitress. Would that be more interesting? I don't think being a bus driver would be more interesting, personally."
Zombie ultimately hopes to break out of the horror ghetto and make his trademark intense films in other genres.
"I don't sit around and watch horror movies all day, because I feel that you need to bring in other influences," he reckons. "If all you watch are horror movies, you can't expect to bring anything different to the table when you make one. Same with music. I'd rather adapt something from some other genre to my sensibility.
"And in order to get better as a filmmaker, you have to watch great films. Dreck isn't going to inspire anything. Some argue that the credit belongs to Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" and Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" from 1960. But honestly, John Carpenter's 1978 "Halloween" set the template for all slasher movies that followed (including a couple of "Psycho" sequels): Unstoppable mad killer chops up teenagers for, usually, having sex and not asking him to participate. That's pretty much it.
There have been a million of 'em since that first bloody jack-o'-lancing movie. And Rob Zombie, a connoisseur of such things, only agreed to remake "Halloween" because he deems it the best of a generally rotten bunch. "It's such a great movie," Zombie says of the original. "It's such a simple movie. And it was such a unique movie at the time. But it spawned so many horrible movies in its wake. `Halloween' was so classy, the way it was done, but so much dreck came after it."
Perhaps even worse, a lot of that dreck set out to ruin perfectly good holidays.
The "Friday the 13th" franchise has been the worst offender. Not because anyone ever really cherished that unlucky calendar date, but because it proved that the most witlessly derivative "Halloween" knock-off could prosper even more than the innovative trend-starter, with something like 1,300 sequels in the can at press time.
Admittedly, most "Halloween" sequels have been wretched, too, but that guy in the hockey mask is just dog stupid.
Other holidays were mutilated in "My Bloody Valentine," plain vanilla "Valentine," "Silent Night, Deadly Night," "New Year's Evil" and "April Fool's Day." "Happy Birthday to Me" made us all complicit, regardless of creed or national identity. "Prom Night" cut up the biggest nonofficial holiday in the teenage datebook; "Graduation Day" did the same for the one parents look forward to most. And while I don't recall if "Trick or Treat" was actually set on Halloween, it gets demerits for having an even lazier title than "Friday the 13th."
There have been so many holiday horrors, in fact, that torture porn impresario Eli Roth thought he was being clever when he made a fake chop-'em-up trailer for "Grindhouse" called "Thanksgiving." But nope. Check out www.imdb.com; there's an entry for an actual "Thanksgiving" horror short from last year.
