Say what you will about Rob Zombie, but you can’t pretend he isn’t consistent. As a musician, a stage performer and a filmmaker, Zombie has made a lucrative and (mostly) artistically intriguing career out of his boundless affection for schlock. Whether it’s ultraviolent horror movies, low-budget luchador adventures or goofy monster sitcoms, his love of B-movie media always jumps out at the audience. And at his best, he convinces us to love his weird obsessions too. At his worst… well, we’ll get to that.
Below, we go through Zombie’s entire filmography, looking back on the nine feature films he’s made thus far and ranking all of Rob Zombie’s movies from worst to best.
Honorable Mention: “Grindhouse”: “Werewolf Women of the SS” (2007)
Rob Zombie’s fake trailer from the 2007 double-feature “Grindhouse” stands out, but not necessarily in a good way. His teaser is a rather obvious riff on exploitation sleaze like “Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS,” but making her an actual wolf, with tasteless Nazi imagery and an also tasteless cameo from Nicolas Cage as the racist caricature Fu Manchu. The subject matter is fitting for “Grindhouse,” but the voice-over narration isn’t as immersive as the trailers from Robert Rodriguez, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth; the trailer calls distracting attention to the fact that “Werewolf Women” is a brand-new production with a famous modern cast, and not a retro artifact from the 1970s that has been uncovered. Zombie must not have gotten that memo.
Honorable Mention: “The Zombie Horror Picture Show” (2014)
Zombie directed this solid but straightforward concert film, in which the rock star’s band puts on one hell of a show in Texas, performing new songs, classic singles and an enjoyable cover of Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band.” There’s no behind-the-scenes footage to speak of, just a quick walk to the stage and then a whole bunch of kick-ass songs, delivered among colorful and monstrous production design. If you’ve never been able to see Zombie perform live, here it is, apparently. It’s very thrilling as a concert but not very exciting as a film.
9. “3 from Hell” (2019)
The third film in Zombie’s ongoing saga of the homicidal Firefly family is the shabbiest of all, awkwardly stumbling from one plot to the another and concluding seemingly in another film altogether. The maniacs have been arrested and then engineer a prison break, go on a bit of a killing spree, and run afoul of the criminal underworld in Mexico. Zombie mainstay and genre stalwart Sig Haig gives his one of his final performances and offers a riveting and frightening monologue, but the film’s cheap production values and half-developed story make most of it a tough sit.
8. “The Haunted World of El Superbeasto” (2009)
Zombie’s first, and thus far only, animated feature is a horny straight-to-video adventure about an egotistical luchador (voiced by Tom Papa) who fights monsters when he’s not trying to have sex. The plot finds him saving kidnapped sex worker Velvet Von Black (Rosario Dawson) from the evil super-nerd Doctor Satan (Paul Giamatti). Meanwhile, the luchador’s superhero sister Susi X (Sheri Moon Zombie) murders an army of Nazi zombies while using her sidekick, a lovelorn shapeshifting robot left over from the 1939 serial “The Phantom Creeps,” as both a vehicle and a sexual aid. It’s a tawdry throwback to El Santo movies, the early films of Ralph Bakshi and “Ren and Stimpy,” and there are highlights, to be sure. But the immature crassness gets old quickly, and the material just isn’t interesting enough to carry the movie after the novelty wears off and the exhaustion kicks in.
7. “The Munsters” (2022)
Zombie clearly loves “The Munsters” and seems perfectly content to make a PG-rated, eccentric, family-friendly film about a Frankenstein monster who falls in love with Dracula’s daughter and moves their family out to the suburbs. The clearly low-budget production does an admirable job with the colorful costume design and kooky creature makeup, and Jeff Daniel Phillips in particular makes his role enjoyable and new, envisioning Herman Munster as a romantic vaudeville comic-turned-rock star. Unfortunately, Zombie pushes all the actual story to the final act of the film, leaving “The Munsters” frustratingly inert, and the jokes aren’t nearly funny enough to compensate.
6. “House of 1000 Corpses” (2003)
Zombie’s first feature film was deemed too violent to be released by Universal and wound up sitting on a shelf for three years. The build-up did the film few favors, as Zombie’s first directorial effort is ambitious, bizarre and not entirely successful. The movie introduces the mass-murdering Firefly family, led by Otis (Bill Moseley), Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), who prey upon tourists at their gruesome roadside attraction. Several set pieces stand out, including a climactic descent into the hellish world of Doctor Satan, but the pacing is haphazard and the overall tone is shrill. Zombie was cutting his teeth. His films got better.
5. “31” (2006)
A group of carnies get kidnapped by a secret society of rich sadists and forced to fight for their lives on Halloween night, when they’re besieged by outlandish nightmare murderers in clown costumes. “31” is Zombie’s riff on “The Most Dangerous Game,” and the action and violence are off the wall and not to everyone’s taste, but it’s effective for the target midnight-movie audience. But where Zombie excels is actually the character work: he introduces a memorable and interestingly crafted ensemble of realistic heroes before they are brutalized by cartoon villains, who are headlined by a delectably evil Richard Brake, giving one of his scariest performances.
4. “Halloween” (2007)
Remaking John Carpenter’s “Halloween” stills sounds sacrilegious, even a decade-and-a-half after Zombie already did it. But Zombie deserves credit for not merely remaking the original, but instead attempting — with mixed results — to put a new spin on it. Whereas Carpenter’s film treated Michael Myers like an inscrutable instrument of evil, Zombie sympathetically portrays the killer’s abusive upbringing, arguing that there’s more “man” in the “boogeyman” than most are willing to admit. It’s not entirely successful, but if you can resist the urge to directly compare the two, Zombie’s version is a relatively satisfying slasher drama on its own merits.
3. “The Devil’s Rejects” (2005)
The sequel to “House of 1000 Corpses” changes genres, following the maniac villains from the first film as though they’re ultraviolent antiheroes on the run from the law, in a strange but effective mixture of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.” Zombie’s top-notch character work begins to emerge with “The Devil’s Rejects,” and his filmmaking style here is infinitely more confident and nuanced than in his debut. But whether or not the film earns its almost laughably overblown finale, a bullet-ridden blaze of glory, scored to the entirety of “Free Bird,” is a matter for some debate.
2. “Halloween II” (2009)
Zombie may have been tempting fate by remaking Carpenter’s original “Halloween,” but his sequel — which takes the best parts of the mixed-bag “Halloween” sequels and re-orchestrates them into something new — is actually quite brilliant. “Halloween II” is a symphony of trauma, exploring the aftermath of a bloodbath from the perspectives of its would-be victims, the families of the dead, the killer himself, and the sellouts who are eager to exploit a tragedy for personal gain. It’s harsh but thoughtful, violent yet beautiful, and one of Zombie’s few unabashedly great films.
1. “The Lords of Salem” (2012)
Sheri Moon Zombie has co-starred in all of Zombie’s narrative features, but her best performance comes in this sad horror saga about a DJ in Salem, Massachusetts, who falls prey to supernatural influence after playing a mysterious record on the radio. As the music infiltrates her soul and sends her vile visions, she falls into drug addiction and despair. Grim, soulful stuff, anchored by a truly impressive lead performance, salient personal themes, and unsettling stylizations. “The Lords of Salem” is Rob Zombie’s masterwork, and Sheri Moon Zombie’s finest hour.
