“You look at the world of carnivals and it’s pretty sleazy and weird, so a lot of that seeped into my movies,” says Rob Zombie, son of a carnival worker. The carny gig led naturally to a short stint on the set of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” followed by a music career as front man for White Zombie, making him the industry’s first horror maestro with sales of 15 million albums worldwide. The twisted mind behind “The Devil’s Rejects,” “House of 1000 Corpses,” “Halloween” and now “Halloween II,” Zombie originally turned down the chance to direct the sequel but feeling protective of his ghoulish characters, he decided to step behind the cameras a second time.
Here, Rob Zombie (born Robert Bartleh Cummings) talks about real-life horror on YouTube, the cesspool that is television and how “bad taste drives the American Dream.”
How would you define horror’s place in pop culture?
It’s a weird time, and it’s only going to get weirder. There’s so much real violent content just online, on YouTube -- whether it’s people breaking their legs in half skateboarding, or people fighting in back alleys, it’s so graphic. You watch somebody get hit by a bus. What do you do? It’s amazing how jaded people are.
Everything’s just a funny gag, and people are like, “I’m not supposed to care. Why would I care?” So one of the things I try to do is freak people out by developing characters nobody expects you to bother. So that when someone dies, you actually feel kind of bad.But your movies are so graphic.
You can show a movie to one person and they’re like, “Oh my God, it’s so graphic.” You show it to the next person, they go, “It’s not as violent as I thought it was going to be.” I think maybe sometimes people fill in the blanks with what they didn’t see, which is good. To me, that’s when things are working the best.
The ear-cutting scene in “Reservoir Dogs” …
Yeah, it’s not even there. It’s hilarious.
You run a fine line between cheating fans who want that level of gore and maintaining some civility about it. If you make it too, it runs the risk of seeming like a cartoon. In “Halloween II,” say, when the nurse is getting stabbed, you don’t see a lot of it – the stabbing is mostly off camera, and we just have close-ups of her face. Then what feels intense is the actor’s reaction, not fake blood coming off a fake knife somewhere.
The end of “Halloween II” seems to set up yet another sequel.
I’m not thinking of another installment -- I just thought it was a great ending. However you end a movie, somebody interprets it as a set-up for the next one. I could have killed off every single character and people would go, “Ah, what an obvious set-up for a sequel.” But no, to me it’s done.
