Spooky Month Recommendation - House of 1000 Corpses - When Horror Reflects Us

As we close in on the end of the spookiest month, I think we should talk about horror as a genre. Nothing too deep in a recommendation for a trashy campy movie, I’ll save that for a future deep dive, but knowing the genre is part of loving it. Horror has been around since anyone can remember. Starting out as folk tales about demons and the dead, very quickly we begin to see things that we can recognise reflections of in modern horror. Witches who make deals with devils in an affront to the Christian Patriarchy, wielding magic that is chaos to clash with the established order. Noble vampires who leech off of the common man and see them as nothing but food. It is simple, now, to see the allegory and the deeper meaning behind the horror staples that have stuck around.

Somewhere along the way, when horror became profitable on the big screen and artists continued to push boundaries, excess became the focus. People who didn’t understand horror took issue, as they had at every point along the genre’s timeline, and big-screen horror fought back. It can be hard to properly define ‘camp’, but Susan Sontag’s understanding of the word is good enough to help us out here:

 “The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” (Sontag, 'Notes on Camp' 1964)

There is truth and real sincerity in how ridiculous the ‘campy’ can be. The love for the genre became artists defending it by scratching at the perceived ‘limits’. And camp horror is all about being excessive, whether in plot or execution or visuals. I’m really excited, after I’m recommending films for you to watch, to talk about some of the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels and how they become more and more campy. Later in the series, this is at odds with the quality of the films, I think, but other classics of camp exist. Rocky Horror Picture Show, Cannibal Holocaust, and my recent favourite Driller Killer. All very excessive and silly and FUN, even when they have something to say.

But, for those who miss the knowing wink that all of this art presents, horror is something else. It becomes blood, screaming and violence for fun. So different artists take different approaches. Some of them defend the genre, some become more intellectual about the idea of genre as a whole. Profitability is as much to blame for the blending of subgenres of horror as it is for their inception in the first place. But others, like the director of today’s recommendation, Rob Zombie, looked at the people who were worried and angry about what they thought horror represented and decided to reflect that back at them. Like a spoopy haunted mirror.

House of 1000 Corpses

Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses is the horror movie that people who say they hate horror think horror is. It is loud, violent, gross and uncomfortable. And that is entirely the point. Zombie builds on his influences, which he cites as mainly exploitation and Grindhouse horror, which we could talk about all day. Think Pink Flamingos, Wizard of Gore, Texas Chainsaw or my beloved Driller Killer. He wears these inspirations on his sleeve, particularly Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in his exploration of cityfolk landing themselves in the redneck rural hellscape of House of 1000 Corpses. Our little team of characters, who we expect to be picked off one by one, arrive at a peculiar little gas station. The ‘teenagers’ (including Rainn Wilson who was 37 during filming) are investigating weird little roadside attractions as they drive across the country. While they’re getting gas, they meet Captain Spaulding - a bearded man with his face painted like a clown but smeared and a clown suit that has seen better days. He invites fans of ‘blood, violence and freaks of nature’ to see his Museum of Monsters and Madmen. When it comes to out-there attractions, they’ve hit the jackpot.

Captain Spaulding is a clown. Never overtly ‘clowny’ in his performance, but by all appearances, he is a clown. His roadside attraction, his ‘Murder Ride’, has animatronics of real famous murderers transformed into their most grisly moments; Ed Gein chops endlessly and ineffectually at a leg. It is death and pain as entertainment, with a clown acting as our carnival barker to lead us through the experience. Zombie has us look at the history of real monsters through the lens that we really see them, with the warping of time. They are true crime documentaries and dramatisations. Murder performed.

There is a moment when Rainn Wilson’s character asks Spaulding about the attraction itself, where Spaulding seems offended. He says that he understands these teenagers coming out here to make fun of the backwoods people and their stupidity and depravity. Rainn Wilson retreats in terror before Spaulding reveals his offence was a joke. He was toying with him. And Zombie is toying with us, here. We, like the little gang of eager horror hunters, want more. We went looking for this in the exact same way they did. But the pair of men seem most enthusiastic. Their partners want to leave.

All fuelled up, the gang heads off again. Jerry, played by Chris Hardwick, convinces them to go out of their way to see the tree where one of the murderers that Spaulding told them about was hanged and disappeared. The girls complain and protest, but before they can come to a decision and head off, they pick up a hitchhiker in the rain. This lady, Baby, is the first of the Firefly family that they encounter. We flash between Baby telling them about her nearby house and Doctor Satan’s tree behind it, and grainy old footage that looks like a snuff film where Baby says that sometimes you have to kill people. A tyre blows out, and Rainn Wilson (Bill) is led up to Baby’s house to seek out a tow truck. Meanwhile, upstairs, Baby’s brother Otis is torturing and killing some missing cheerleaders. From here, the film explodes into real violence. The Firefly family: Mama Firefly, Grampa, Baby, Otis, Tiny and RJ are the archetypal cannibal rednecks, and they revel in the idea of Halloween, wearing masks and costumes and listening to punk rock as loud as they can. Baby is creepily childlike and hypersexual, flirting with Bill in one breath and showing him her doll collection in the next. After dinner, while the group of teens wait for their car to be prepared, the family puts on a show for them with Grampa shouting obscenities as a parody of stand-up comedy and then Baby performing ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’ provocatively. Bill’s girlfriend tells her to back off, and the tone shifts, the car is fixed, and they leave. The car has been fully repaired, and yet as they drive away, they are attacked and captured by the family who never had any intention of letting them get away.

Our main cast went looking for violence. They laughed at the crimes when it was all a ride. But where we look for violence, it will breed. Bill is the first to be killed, dismembered and twisted into a roadside attraction himself. Fishboy! It is at once exactly what the audience wanted to see, and too much. Seeing the finished piece is campy, and on its own it could be laugh-out-loud funny, seeing Rainn Wilson turned into a cheap hoax like the Fiji Mermaid. But we also get more grainy snuff film footage that makes it real. The loud music blaring. The grins and excitement on the faces of Otis and Baby as they cut off an arm. Bill’s terror.

Captain Spaulding’s ride, the commodified horror of murder and blood, has stepped out of fiction. Everything about the family feels ‘camp’, which is to say, performative and over-the-top. The horror that the genre has been accused of celebrating is literalised. The kids go looking for real murderers, for a real story, for a terrifying myth that they can follow all the way. They find exactly what they were looking for. Violence doesn’t just exist in these places, in rural settings or in horror itself, it breeds there because that’s where we have decided to look for it. Both horror fans and horror haters demand the spectacle and create the conditions we need to tease it out. The Firefly family aren’t hidden monsters. They are performers waiting for an audience.

All of the kids that survive the first round of torture are given to Doctor Satan himself; he is a nightmare that has persisted past his own death, and the killer family hand the kids over to him to let the nightmare they sought out consume them.

The police arrive in the midst of the torture, led there by the late arrival of one of the kids. They go looking for the nightmare and it claims them. Each one of them is brutally gunned down, with the last one being made to kneel before being made to wait. A long shot, in complete silence. And then Otis pulls the trigger. Those who try to police horror will always be claimed by it.

Halloween Classic?

So Rob Zombie made something grotesque. It’s well-made, well-executed, well-acted. Certainly campy, definitely a cult film. But is it a good Halloween recommendation? I thought about putting this film on my recommendations for a while. It’s why I felt like I needed to give you the preamble about horror. Horror can never be conventional. It is supposed to be uncomfortable and to push boundaries. By showing fans of horror what happens when we go looking for it, Zombie also makes the film that anyone who hates the very idea of horror imagines when they picture the genre. “Ya'll think us folk from the country's real funny-like, dontcha?” Intentional or not, Zombie showed that the Grindhouse trash he loved, that he grew up on, is a part of American cultural identity, whether in celebrated violence, pain for entertainment, or outrage for profit. The impulse is always the same: gawk at the monsters, make them perform, tell ourselves that we are not part of the act. House of 1000 Corpses knows that you are.

Thanks for reading this one guys! It’s a very different vibe from what I would usually write and has taken a lot longer than expected! You can expect more of this kind of thing in my deep dives, and maybe I’ll even bring this one to video - I think it’s structured pretty well! Let me know what you think and if this is something you like or would read more of. And remember to share this, leave a comment, get this in front of as many people as possible. We’re uploading a new special episode of the Sonicomicast for Halloween so check that out if you want to hear a Creepypasta analysis. You can donate to me to keep letting me do this on my KoFi. Thanks again, and have a very spooky day <3