In anticipation of The Munsters, we reminisce on Rob Zombie’s unique filmography, through its successes– and its fumbles. Filth. Horror. Glam— Wait. No wait, sorry, thinking about the wrong Dragula, that’s in October. My bad. Many people aspire to make being spooky and gothic their whole brand, but very few have succeeded and made that brand hyper-marketable the way Rob Zombie has.
The oeuvre of Rob Zombie is a fascinating library of music, animation, & film that is simply inimitable. So, you can imagine my surprise when The Munsters trailer…sucked. I mean, like, really sucked. Windows Movie Maker fonts, weird audio choices, direct-to DVD image quality, it really looks like a passion project that ran out of budget past the costumes. And based on his remarks, that may just be the case.
I frequently find myself oscillating between enjoying Zombie’s creations one minute and wondering what the hell is going on in that electric head of his the next. He’s a modern renaissance man of horror, and in my eyes, he deserves all the respect he gets. But he also deserves a lot of the flak as well. So, let’s discuss the good and bad in Rob Zombie’s repertoire.
THE GOOD-LOOKING SLEAZE
Just like the man’s own outfits, the key to Zombie’s best works are how stylish they are.
The Firefly Trilogy of films are a model specimen of this. They pioneered what some call his unique “hellbilly” genre, named in honor of his debut solo album, Hellbilly Deluxe. In short, they’re films with B-Movie concepts, A-Movie budgets, and Z-Movie levels of class. They’re trashy, they’re extremely kitschy, and they’re horribly deranged, which is why people like them so much. It’s pure style, with stacked casts full of character actors to boot.
Like his contemporaries, namely Darren Lynn Bousman & Eli Roth of the famed early 2000s “Splat Pack,” his films are incredibly stylized and incredibly violent to match. Their palettes and design, in general are richly colorful. They utilize weird filming techniques like uncomfortable diopter shots, an abundance of non-sequiturs, and music video style editing chock full of photo negatives and extreme camerawork. Most importantly, they play on feelings of nostalgia and old-school Americana that feels like walking past a lineup of old horror movie posters on your way into the theatre.
Beyond that, it’s clear Zombie loves camp, because nowhere is that more relevant than the El Superbeasto comics and their animated film adaptation. They’re the closest that Rob Zombie ever gets to having one of his characters turn directly to camera and wink at the audience because of how absurd they are. In the worlds he designs, worlds perpetually trapped in Spirit Halloween mode, Zombie reigns free to do his bonkers horror movie weirdness and channels all the great horror movies of the 30s, 40s, and 50s that he loved, albeit with a little bit of sleaze for flavor. And sleaze is one of my favorite flavors.
THE BAD IN OVERABUNDANCE
Then comes Halloween (2007). While I agree with John Carpenter that explaining Michael Myers origins outright and giving him a backstory takes away a lot of what makes the original work, I preferred seeing something completely different, something running counter to the ethos of a character, than just seeing a rehash of the same film. Tonally, stylistically, and design-wise, the cinematography of Halloween (2007) is unrecognizable when put up against its forefather, and that’s a wonderful thing.
The choice, nonetheless, resulted in the derision and displeasure of many longtime Halloween fans. Worse off, it led to Halloween 2, my exemplar of everything wrong with his works.
Zombie stated in the past that he never planned to do a sequel to Halloween and mainly took the gig to avoid having his vision corrupted by Dimension Films putting a hired gun in the directing chair. That’s pretty evident since 80% of Halloween 2 is aimless vision and vibes and the other 20% is an ultraviolent seizure. I can appreciate an auteur’s sense of spirit and how it guides you as a creator. Still, there’s a point where, unchecked, Rob Zombie’s personal daemon of art gets in the driver’s seat of the dragula and drives it directly off the highway before flipping several times on the median.
Rob Zombie can’t help himself sometimes when trying to rein in his vision; could you blame a creator so scorned by studios for running free? But the worst part of these films is when Zombie pushes them to their breaking point, indulging in the excess of his vision. Meanspirited characters that end up becoming annoying instead of intimidating, and atrocities against victims that are slathered on for theatric evil that sort of just becomes nauseating. Truly, the sinister urge of the author is usually where things crumble for an artist…
THE UGLY TRUTH OF FILMMAKERS
…And it’s something we kind of have to live with.
I think we need to remember that while no director is quite Rob Zombie, most directors are like Rob Zombie and vice versa. Sam Peckinpah is one of my favorite directors of all time, but his films shift from being really good to really bad; the matter of fact is that not everything you make is going to be The Wild Bunch or Sorcerer.
More relevant to horror, I love Adam Wingard’s directing. I love You’re Next, I love The Guest, hell, I even think the Blair Witch sequel was good on a technical level. But his filmography’s track record tells me that I’m flipping a coin with how much I’ll enjoy one of his films, it’s just how it is. And I will gladly flip that coin for him, just as I will for Rob Zombie.
So he’ll make more bad films and more good films, but what matters above all else is that he makes more at all. You can’t always get what you want; the sentiment is true for the audience as much as it is for the artist. All we can hope is that they exercise their auteur spirit wisely and let ourselves get taken along for the ride.