Hidden Gems #2 – House of a Thousand Corpses

Late October, when the weather portends the oncoming chill of winter, the night rises earlier and the day grows shorter, when the veil between this world and the next grows thin and the spirits of the dead are welcome to revisit and the most terrifying aspects of our reality are celebrated by figures in dread masks and our most vulnerable – the sweet, innocent children – are sent out into the darkness amongst a myriad of monsters to visit the lairs of complete strangers, hoping for a treat and not a dreadful trick. In other words: a family holiday, a gloriously ghoulish evening in which the world of the unearthly is paid eager homage. And what better way to spend Halloween than with redneck murder family The Fireflys in writer/director Rob Zombie’s underrated 2003 debut, House of 1000 Corpses.

I’ll attempt to keep the first part of this essay spoiler free for those who haven’t seen this film and will discuss all aspects of the movie in the latter part of the piece after a spoiler warning.

On the rainy night of October 30, 1977, the proprietor of a rural store that sells gasoline and fried chicken (more impressively known as the Museum of Monsters and Madmen), Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), is the subject of an attempted robbery, which he handily repels, killing the two assailants. Shortly thereafter, four young people enter the store, not noticing that Spaulding is just finishing mopping up blood from the floor. Bill (Rainn Wilson) informs the Captain that they’re writing a book about weird roadside attractions, and the group is invited by the clown-faced Spaulding to take his own version of a Disney attraction, the Murder Ride. It’s a celebration of various infamous serial killers such as Ed Gein and Albert Fish, and it ends with the story of local murderer Dr. Satan, who eluded capture by the authorities and has been missing (presumed dead) ever since.

The young people get a map from Spaulding to lead them to the last place Dr. Satan was seen, and on their way they pick up a lone hitchhiker standing in the downpour, a personable and flirty young woman named Baby (Sheri Moon), who says she can lead them to the location. Unfortunately they get a flat tire, so Baby takes them all to the Firefly residence, her family home. It’s a creepy place, decorated with broken baby dolls and classic monster movie posters, but they need somewhere dry to wait for the repair of their car. Mother Firefly (Karen Black) is their host, grotesquely resplendent in her red feather boas, and as they wait, Baby begins to put on a show, lip-syncing in costume to “I Wanna Be Loved by You.” One of the girls, Mary (Jennifer Jostyn), starts a fight with Baby when she gets too physical with Mary’s boyfriend, Bill, and the group of young people decides it’s time to leave. But apparently Firefly hospitality is ironclad, and the young people are not allowed to leave, and their nightmare is just beginning.

There are many reasons to enjoy House of 1000 Corpses for fright fans, from a trio of iconic performances to Gregg Gibbs’ amazing, detailed production design (you can feel both the grunge and the love of the genre), but the foremost one is Rob Zombie’s wildly creative direction. It was his first film, transitioning from his music career (solo and with White Zombie), and it hums with the joy of a horror movie buff getting to use all of the cinema toys. There’s a visceral sense of a filmmaker having a hell of a time, and that gleeful energy is infectious. In its scant 89-minute runtime, Zombie uses black and white, infrared footage, crane shots, a take on the famous Vertigo stretch moment, split screen a la DePalma, slow motion, stuttered editing to create a punchier version of slow motion, repeated shots to emphasize a particular moment, POV changeups, a frequently roving camera and regularly inserted uses of montage that amp up the visual energy of the film. He also wrote the script and shares credit for the evocative music with Scott Humphrey.

The cinematography of the movie is superb, with great work from DPs Alex Poppas and Tom Richmond. The film pops with lurid reds and blues and greens, reminiscent of Suspiria. The editing team of Kathryn Himoff, Robert K. Lambert and Sean Lambert clearly worked overtime to realize Zombie’s vision, and they succeeded. The director’s love of classic horror movies is proudly displayed throughout, with a Creature from the Black Lagoon poster mounted on the wall of the Firefly home, including clips from such great films as The Wolf Man, The Old Dark House, House of Frankenstein and even the tv show The Munsters (which Zombie later remade).

SPOILER WARNING

It’s my opinion that Sid Haig gave his best performance as Captain Spaulding, a cheerfully crude clown and a fried chicken entrepreneur. It’s a tour de force of rude charisma, and Haig was never funnier or more memorable. He’s a vision of the darker side of our country, especially when he conducts the Murder Ride decked out in his American flag suit and top hat, describing serial killers as if they were great celebrities to be admired. “You like blood, violence and freaks of nature?” he asks, knowing the answer.

Moon (later Moon Zombie) is terrific as Baby, the Firefly who initially seems like a harmless flirty tease but whose constant bursts of delighted laughter conceal murderous rage. She personifies the thematic connections of sex and death that Zombie makes throughout the film and even manages to pull off the musical lip-syncing number respectably. “We like to get fucked up and do fucked-up shit, you know what I mean?” and we do.

Bill Moseley is both amusing and horrifying as the sardonic Otis, a psychotic killer who thinks of himself as a scientist/philosopher. He’s the kind of murderer who likes to lecture his victims (such as a group of kidnapped cheerleaders) before he “experiments” on them, and Moseley expresses his general exasperation at everyone else in the world very well. But he’s also the scariest member of the family, roaring “Rabbit run!” at fleeing prey or offering helpful information to people such as: “It’s all true. The boogeyman is real, and you found him.”

The cast also features Black, Wilson, Chris Hardwick, Walton Goggins, Tom Towles and Michael J. Pollard (?!), all of whom add to the fun of the project. Goggins gets one of the best scenes in the entire film, in which his hapless deputy character attempts to make an arrest at the Firefly home, only for things to go very wrong for him. It’s the most purely cinematic set piece and stands out as a moment in which things are no longer meant to be funny and it becomes human. As the deputy is ambushed by Otis and is clearly in a panic, Zombie uses slow motion to show his desperation, until the officer is on his knees before Otis with a gun up against his head. Up until this second, the panic of the deputy has had the Slim Whitman song “I Remember You” as a rustic, homely counterpoint, but then all falls completely silent as Zombie has a slow crane shot pull up and away. The tension grows as we wait and wait and wait for Otis to pull the trigger, which he inevitably does. It’s a haunting scene in what is otherwise a much blunter and darkly comedic movie.

It occurs to me that House has three different styles. The first is black comedy, as the young tourists meet Spaulding, take the Murder Ride and meet Baby as they bicker amongst each other. The second section is a standard horror reveal, in which the young victims discover that the Firefly family clearly exchange holiday cards with the Texas chainsaw clan (“The Saw is family.”) and the victims are captured. The third part is a surreal supernatural nightmare of midnight rituals by lantern light, lowering living people trapped in a coffin into a pit in the ground (a literal descent into the underworld or Hell), an attack by white-eyed zombies, tunnels strewn with cobwebs and bones (here’s the reason for the film’s title), and the final awful reveal of Dr. Satan (a mechanical exoskeleton keeping his emaciated body moving) working in his laboratory, operating on the brain of one of the screaming tourists. It’s the true horror beneath all of the campy stuff – the Firefly family takes Halloween very seriously.

Trivia: As to the naming of the Firefly family, many of them were taken from Groucho Marx characters, including Spaulding and Otis and also the lesser roles of Rufus and Hugo. The exterior of the house with all those corpses is the same building on the Universal lot that was used for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and they often had to stop shooting when the Universal tour buses would drive past. The character of Bill is made into Fish Boy, an actual sideshow roadside attraction. The spooky, slowed-down chant used in the underground section of the film seems to be a precursor to the demonic recording in Zombie’s later work, The Lords of Salem.

House of 1000 Corpses wasn’t a critical success, but that was a mistake rectified by the kinder reception given to its sequel, The Devil’s Rejects. The sequel is a great film on its own merits, much darker and more realistic. I prefer House, however, because it’s just a blast of visual energy, a demented valentine to horror movies that radiates pure fanboy love.