Universal wanted Rob Zombie to build them a haunted house.
It was the turn of the millennium, and the schlock-rocker coasted atop an apex wave of superstardom. One year earlier, Zombie designed a successful maze based on his multiplatinum debut solo album, Hellbilly Deluxe, for Universal Studios’ annual Halloween Horror Nights. The angle for 2000’s outing, however, would be slightly more structured and narratively focused. Zombie already had a name picked out for it: House of 1000 Corpses.
It likely comes as little surprise to learn that Zombie’s first feature film began as a haunted house carnival ride. A rewatch in celebration of the movie’s 20th anniversary all but confirms its origins in the movie’s opening showcase of Captain Spaulding’s roadside detour, “Museum of Monsters and Madmen.” Each garish room in the Firefly clan’s abode looks like a stop on the ride primed for the next jump scare, and the movie dialogue is frequently so hackneyed (and often recited to match) that it feels like it could just as easily come from Baby or Otis as it could through the tinny speaker embedded in a rubber-suited animatronic ghoul.
And yet House spawned two sequels, an impressive cult following, knockoff “Captain Spaulding for President” t-shirts, and not least of all, a second career for Zombie. It begs the question: Why does a return to the cartoonish, not exactly “good” splatter flick somehow hit harder and bloodier after twenty years? For that, it’s worth rewinding to the dawn of the 21st century and the original Halloween Horror Nights attraction’s forced, unfortunately, prescient rename—”American Nightmare.”
Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses boasts one of Hollywood’s most well-documented production hells. Universal was on board when he came to them with the idea of expanding the ride into a full-fledged movie. But in the middle of filming and exactly 363 days before 9/11, Sen. Joe Lieberman participated in yet another congressional hearing alongside Lynne Cheney concerning the perennial specter of “media violence.” Not long afterward, Universal blinked in the face of Corpses’ all-but-unavoidable NC-17 rating and shelved the project to spare themselves a PR headache. By then, however, Zombie’s Halloween Horror Nights attraction was complete and replete with references to the upcoming movie, including a trailer that played as visitors waited to enter the ride. Universal kept the ride the same but changed its name to “American Nightmare.”
Months later, MGM purchased Corpses, prompting an assumedly elated Zombie to publicly quip they “must have no morals.” MGM, unamused, became the second studio to abandon the film. Attempting to venture into genre fare, Lionsgate soon took a chance on the grindhouse release.
It proved successful. Corpses, while no blockbuster, reportedly made its money back for the studio by the end of its opening weekend—barely three days after US-led forces entered Baghdad to facilitate Saddam Hussein’s literal and figurative toppling.
Most film critics at the time were less than impressed. “Mr. Zombie is both too much of a stylist, always cutting away to oddball inserts, black-and-white flashbacks, negative images and much else, and too little: he is not in enough control of his means to let a mood grow and fester,” The New York Times opined in its four-paragraph review. “An hour-and-a-half of undecipherable plot and sickening—but not exactly novel—horror,” complained Film Threat in a slightly longer takedown… although, for what it’s worth, FANGORIA celebrated Zombie’s “balls-out tribute to the genre classics of the ’70’s that pushes the R-rating to the limit and provides a welcome showcase for a gallery of cool character actors.” (It also graced the cover of Issue #219.)
There’s no need to ascribe Mr. Zombie’s prophetic abilities, but Corpse’s frenetic directorial decisions—the chaotic editing, dizzying film filters, genre callbacks, and copious non-sequiturs—now watch somewhat like an infinite scroll down TikTok’s algorithmic feed for uploads tagged “#creepypasta.” The 1970s setting, coated in the sticky veneer of early 2000’s MTV aesthetics, is now the youth of today’s retro fashion du jour. Critics, perhaps rightly, trashed Zombie’s visual and auditory whiplash, but in hindsight, the cinematic mess is a foretelling of overstimulated times to come.
Still, it’s difficult to ascribe socio-political foresight to a film like Corpses with a straight face. Zombie doesn’t exactly deal in subtlety, and even ascribing “homage” or “pastiche” to his first theatrical outing might be too charitable. But the cameras on the set of Corpses certainly captured a filthy, cracked reflection of modern Americana that feels strangely inimitable, even after twenty years —one of clown suits caked in fried chicken grease and ritualized torture overseen by Dr. Satan himself, enforced by super-soldier henchmen.
I asked Zombie about all this during an interview with him in 2014. He demurred, “I’m just a product of my upbringing, as everyone else is, and as a kid I was very much a product of America.” By his own reckoning, that American product was composed of Evel Knievel stunts, reruns of The Munsters, and the photos within his mom’s copy of Helter Skelter. Rob Zombie would have been a twelve-year-old Robert Cummins when his hapless quartet of victims fell prey to the Firefly clan on October 30, 1977. The American Nightmare in Vietnam ended only two years earlier.
I was thirteen when Corpses finally made it into theaters. George W. proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” as the theaters screened Zombie matinees. My generation’s American Nightmare was just gearing up for the long haul. Twenty years later, it often feels like we never woke up from it. If anything, we keep falling deeper into the abyss.
Two decades onward, one can argue House of 1000 Corpses is a fine culmination of Hollywood capitalism, moral panic, pop culture saturation, and throwback sleaze as easily as another could contend it’s simply a Walmart bargain bin DVD impulse buy. Neither is necessarily wrong. It certainly feels arbitrary and obscene to quibble about it in the face of so much goddamn daily U.S. carnage and degradation.
Maybe Otis Driftwood was onto something in his Hollywood premiere: “I ain’t talkin’ about no goddamn white socks with Mickey Mouse on one side and Donald Duck on the other. I ain’t readin’ no funny books, mama,” he tells a soon-to-be victim. “Our bodies come and go, but this blood is forever.”
He had a point. After all, it’s hard to get scared by a house of a thousand corpses amid the daily American Nightmare.
