70s-ish Horror Stay At Home Double Feature

Different times.

This thing has sat unwritten for a while - it seems stupid to write about cult movies when such large and devastating issues are unfolding outside the House of Sparrows. But the House is safe on lockdown, well-resourced and comfortable, if cluttered. And one of life's deepest challenges is that it doesn't stop - we don't cease to be ourselves or lose our interests just because we're under quarantine.

Upping the internet bandwidth and speed on this end has been an absolute godsend, making for better newsgathering and vastly improved viewing options. Loath as I've been to dive into the whole streaming sphere the distraction has been more than welcome, and it's been good to finally catch up with things that had eluded me previously. (Indeed, in honor of Walpurgis Night, I think tonight is the night I finally take in Sarah Phelps' adaptation of Christie's The Pale Horse.) And it's been a pleasant surprise to find that the internet doesn't necessarily inhibit spontaneity (serendipity, even), that streaming movies occasionally co-mingle with the artful clarity of in-cinema double features. Two movies taken in on different platforms within 24 hours of one another had a lot to say to me, and each other.

Jack Starett's Race With The Devil has an absolute dream quartet of actors (Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, and Lara Parker) as two married couples who take off in an RV for an off-season vacation, and run afoul of a cult of Satanists who spend the last hour of the movie stalking and chasing them across half of Texas. It's wildly implausible and incredibly fun, with our heroes responding with the hysteria and anger you'd expect people to feel under such dire straits. And it's an engaging combination of horror movie and car chase caper, with mounting paranoia and truly inspired stuntwork throughout. It's gritty enough to engage on the grindhouse level, and one might be surprised to recall it slipped out into the world with a PG rating.

Horror filmmaker and musician Rob Zombie would have been around ten when Race With The Devil was released, and it's very easy to imagine the mid-1970s monster kid Zombie must have been seeing it multiple times. I hadn't intended to follow Race with a thematically similar motion picture, but Zombie's indie horror opus 31 would sit very comfortably beneath Race on a double bill, taking in as it does the story of a group of clowns who pile in a van and head off on a road trip only to run afoul of an oddly-aristocratic cabal who force them into a violent game with death as the stakes. (Sealing its kinship with the prior movie, the movie takes place on Halloween, 1976.)

31 clinched my suspicions that there are two Rob Zombies - a consistent-but-unimaginative writer and more-than-competent director - vying for supremacy of his brain, never mind his films. The story is a rote re-hash of The Most Dangerous Game that teases but doesn't pursue an obvious line of class-consciousness. But it's beautifully executed on a largely crowd-funded budget, unfolding in a palpably grimy setting shot through with moody atmosphere and striking use of color. There's always something to look at, and the textures of skin, wood, fog give it a tangibility that makes for effective horror (cinematographer David Daniels takes over for longtime Zombie shooter Brandon Trost and proves just as adept in making Zombie's outre world look and feel real.)

Most of the characters of 31 speak in the same colorful yet witless white trash patois that Zombie has been putting in the mouths of 85% of his characters since House of 1000 Corpses, and most of the villains stalking them through the movie's lethal factory maze match the cheerful vulgarity of the protagonists with a similarly Southern-fried sadism. The cast uniformly commit to and sell their dialogue - as limited as Zombie's scripts often are I can't recall an actor who did anything less than demanded of them. Many horror filmmakers have either a strong visual sense or a sure hand with actors, but Zombie has both, and I suspect that many actors who continue to work for Zombie genuinely enjoy doing so. (The most striking figure is cut by Richard Brake as nominal-lead heavy Doomhead, who brings such terrifying and charismatic intensity to his monologues that I wished they'd been written by almost anybody else.)

This double-feature of not great movies took the edge off a couple of quarantine days, and offered a welcome reminder that cinema remains a living, breathing thing. An actor's medium that presents you new work by old favorites and introduces new favorites in even less-than-auspicious settings (I'd pay real money to see Richard Brake's MacBeth). A venue for ever-new, visceral thrills. A companion and friend even, especially, in times like these. As my new favorite channel says so charmingly, stay home/stay alive, friend.

THE LORDS OF SALEM

Oh, how I wish I'd seen this thing theatrically. I've long been, not a fan, but certainly an interested observer of Rob Zombie's movie work. I was quite pleased by House of 1000 Corpses, which felt like the id of the grindhouse era unleashed on unsuspecting screens. The follow-up, The Devil's Rejects, left me rather cold, feeling that its relentless sadism was largely unleavened by wit (I said then that I found much to admire in the movie, and nothing to like). His Halloween remake and its sequel were rife with good ideas, strong moods, and more than a few truly harrowing shots, and yet they didn't really cohere.

But what the hell do I know? Zombie has his devotees, some of them close friends whose opinions I respect. And Zombie's movies grew steadily more ambitious, and between that and his clear devotion to genre films, I figured it would be only a matter of time before he made a movie I connected with. After finally seeing The Lords of Salem I felt like he was a lot closer to delivering that film.

And yet the movie's stuck with me since last night (among other things, it seems to have parked the Velvet Underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties" in my head for the foreseeable future). Zombie's tale of Heidi (Sheri Moon Zombie, of course), a nighttime DJ plunged into a nightmare by a mysterious recording, is rife with atmosphere and slow-burn horror. It feels like the most patient movie Zombie has made, though in retrospect there are plenty of visceral jolts throughout the piece And even though it feels like a more polished and refined Rob Zombie movie, there's still a superabundance of weirdness in pretty much every scene, delivered so gently and directly that at times one struggles to process what one is seeing.

Zombie is as much a child of genre movies and media as Tarantino, but Zombie's figured out how to use those inspirations beyond just slavishly quoting them. The Lords of Salem is a cocktail of influences from 70s Hammer horror (the witchcraft movies especially), Stanley Kubrick (from whom Zombie's assimilated much about manipulating cinematic space - check out the hallways of Heidi's apartment building and how Zombie maps her psyche with it), and Ken Russell (a clear and direct influence on the often mannered grotesquerie throughout, and especially the explosive and downright festive parade of blasphemy that climaxes the thing). And yet in addition to the visual quotes of those who came before (and his generous casting of those actors they worked with), Zombie's assimilated some of their boldness. Zombie's figured out that there's more to pushing the envelope than more tits, more blood, louder music, more violence; he's also figured out that there's more to Kubrick than just creepy atmosphere and one-point perspective. As the malevolence around and within Heidi grows in power it seems to take over the movie, which abandons narrative and, indeed, reality. Suddenly we're not watching a horror movie. Just as Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey became an otherworldly object not unlike the monoliths that drive its story, so does The Lords of Salem become something dark, mysterious, and finally magical.

The movie is by no means perfect; I can think of a half dozen actors I would rather have played Heidi (Zombie's ready to collaborate with a lead actor who'll challenge him). But it's a huge step forward. You could call it a more mature film than he's made, and not just because the soundtrack includes Mozart's Requiem alongside the Velvet Underground. I'm sad that some of his fans have rejected it (perhaps they feel it would have been more radical to simply resurrect the Firefly clan for yet another bout of psychobilly mayhem), but others more invested in his work than I are also calling The Lords of Salem their favorite Rob Zombie movie. I said earlier that it was a step closer to a Rob Zombie movie that I could connect with, but obviously that I even wrote this makes it clear that this is, in fact, that movie. I'd always been curious to see the next Rob Zombie movie; now I can't wait for it.