Recipe for horror

Noel Vera

Singer-songwriter-impresario turned filmmaker Rob Zombie's debut
film "House of 1,000 Corpses" is famous for having been shelved by
its production company, Universal Studios, thanks to allegedly
intense violence and abundant gore; the film languished for some
three years, its reputation growing to near-cult status, until
Lion's Gate agreed to become its American distributor and show it
the light of day. You have to wonder why they bothered.

"House" doesn't have a very complex story: four rather generic smart-
alecky college students stop for fuel at a backwater gas station,
and are treated to a lurid carnival ride by Captain Spaulding (Sid
Haig of various prison flicks, often co-starring Pam Grier). He
tells them stories of Doctor Satan, a cannibalistic serial killer
who was to be executed but escaped, and draws them a map showing the
tree where he was hanged. On their way there they suffer a flat tire
and are invited to the Firefly household, where Otis (Bill Moseley),
Rufus (Robert Mukes), sexy Baby (Sheri Moon), enormous Tiny (Matthew
McGrory), and handsomely sensual Mother Firefly (Karen Black, the
most easily recognizable name in the cast) hold one of the more
outré domestic dinners this side of the Manson family. It isn't long
before the students are tied up and subject to all kinds of
picturesque tortures and mutilations.

Obnoxious college students; backwoods family complete with
ramshackle house and thick Southern accent; mazelike hidden passages
concealing inbred freaks of nature; helpless hostage cheerleaders,
bosoms straining against the tight rope; nearby town with clueless
police officers--Zombie has pretty much included every element in
every notable drive-in horror flick of the past thirty years, from
Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to Wes Craven's "The
Hills Have Eyes;" overlaid it with shrieking loud rock music (some
of which he composed himself); and used production design presumably
inspired by the horror and sci-fi influenced rock concerts he staged
(Rob was previously the singer-songwriter of White Zombie). To
please the hip crowd he's thrown in songs from The Ramones and
Lionel Richie; named several of his characters--"Captain Spaulding"
and "Rufus Firefly," among others--after the more famous characters
played by Groucho Marx (why Groucho I haven't the faintest idea);
and even makes a Hitchcockian appearance himself, as a mad doctor's
assistant.

It's a generous brew of schlock and blood and heavy metal, with
maybe a dash of the sublime (the Marx Brothers' reference); given
skill and some tender loving care, this might have become a low-
budget comedy-horror classic. But Zombie, in trying to infuse
something of himself into this considerable collection of borrowed
references and stock horror clichés, has fallen back on the familiar
music-video techniques of his earlier career: shock cuts, inserts of
grainy handheld footage and home video, an occasional split-screen.

The result is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach (though
the hard of hearing might enjoy the soundtrack), but neither is it
for hardcore horror fans. Disgusting and horrifying things that
include but are not limited to flayings, cannibalism, necrophilia
and worse are performed onscreen, supposedly--we hear them
threatened often enough, hear the victims scream loud enough--but
you just can't quite be sure; for all you know they could be doing
nothing worse than sharing a cup of tea, with some friendly tussling
over the watercress sandwiches.

Which is unfair--unfair to us (the hapless audience whose appetites
have been whetted by three years' worth of waiting); unfair to the
enthusiastic cast; and unfair most of all to Mr. Zombie, who shows a
flair for horror on precisely two occasions--first, when a police
officer is held at gunpoint for an uncomfortably long time; second,
when one of the college students is lead to believe her father had
finally come to rescue her (the cruelty of the deception actually
made me sit up for a moment).

Other than the two instances, Zombie demonstrates little control
over his material, or even any kind of indication that he knows what
he's doing. The secret to effective horror filmmaking should be
simple enough, yet we see fledgling practitioners (and sadly, the
odd veteran) screwing up time and again, so often that you despair
for the future of the genre. Given that the best horror is the
quietest, there is room for the kind of over-the-top spatterfest
that "House" obviously aspires to be (Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead 2" and
Stuart Gordon's "Re-animator" are perhaps the best examples of this
subgenre). The trick is to cut the gore with some other element--in
the case of Raimi's and Gordon's works, with humor. The horror in
both "Evil Dead 2" and "Re-animator" give the comedy real teeth (the
best jokes are sad, even horrifying underneath), the same time the
comic storytelling helps discipline the material, give it snap and
shape (it might be said that the timing necessary to create a comic
sequence isn't so different from the timing necessary to create a
scary or suspenseful sequence).

Zombie has the right ideas in mind--Haig, for one, spends most of
the picture in clown makeup--but lacks the skill to pull it off; he
has his cast mug to the cameras (B-movie veterans Haig and Karen
Black are guilty of the worst excesses) and stuffs the film full of
in-jokes, but little of this comes across as even remotely funny. He
subjects his movie to high heat from the beginning, and the
resulting mixture boils over long before the film reaches halfway
point; by then the audience is too numbed from the loud music and
incoherent camerawork to care what happens next (if they could
understand what's happening at all), much less what happens in the
end. You imagine Zombie heaping the various elements of his film
together and hoping the heat of fusion will transform them into a
new kind of horror--an ambitious and rather risky way of working,
though it's one method used by artists to create art; unfortunately
it's also the method used by farmers to create fertilizer out of
warm compost.

(First printed in Businessworld, Oct. 17, 2003)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)