By Keri O’Shea
When the trailer for Lords of Salem premièred a few months back, I couldn’t help but be quietly optimistic. Oh, sure, Rob Zombie has made mistakes – and a lot of them. As much as House of 1,000 Corpses has its share of charms, the tapestry it weaves out of its many horror referents is just too obvious, too crude, too easy to unpick; I liked Devil’s Rejects a lot more, but it still has the capacity to make a girl wince with some of its odd oversights. (We’ll say nothing of Halloween here, okay?) Regardless, Lords of Salem was on its way and it promised tantalising hints of modern-day witchcraft; none of that love and light Christianity-with-garlands nonsense, but black magic. I was prepared to give the film a whirl simply for giving Ol’ Scratch his dues, getting him back into the limelight and on our screens by some other means than the boring possession of some confused kid with a limber spine and a potty mouth…
And actually, contrary to my usual style, this is not some wordy preamble which allows me to then launch into a lengthy sneer at the expense of the film I’m reviewing. I actually really liked Lords of Salem, a movie which indisputably has problems, but makes up for this with that rarest of commodities in modern horror – ideas.
The plot synopsis is thus: recovering heroin addict Heidi (of course played, albeit well, by Sheri Moon Zombie) is a DJ at a local Salem rock radio show. (Sadly this job doesn’t seem to pay very well – the poor woman can’t afford a functional pair of underpants, as we see in the very first scenes.) One day at work, a parcel arrives. It’s addressed to her personally, and it contains a vinyl record, a gift ‘from The Lords’. No other information is given. Assuming it’s another wannabe rock band, Heidi gives the record a spin after work. The recording – atonal, but somehow disturbing, evocative – has an odd effect on her, although her friend/co-worker Whitey gets no ill-effects. Assuming then it’s something to do with her rather than the record, she decides to enter it into the regular ‘Smash or Trash’ competition they’re due to run on the show the next day.
They duly do this – but the effect which the record has on the women of Salem is subtle, yet profound. As they listen, it’s as if they’ve been hypnotised. And as for Heidi, she is now unable to extricate herself from a sinister chain of events which soon begins to tighten around her…
First things first: as I mentioned above, it’s about time we went back to giving the Devil a bit of respect for such long-term involvement with the medium of cinema. Despite a long pedigree of silver screen appearances, things for Satan have gone into sharp decline, and he has to be worth a lot more than a vomiting schoolgirl here, an Al Pacino there. I’m also a big fan of what I like to think I first coined as Satansploitation, and to be fair to Rob Zombie, here he manages to make his own brand of occult goings-on both evocative and innovative. Sure, you can see the influences of other films in here (perhaps most surprising of all, I saw a few elements which reminded me strongly of the late Michael Winner’s massively-underrated movie The Sentinel) but the brand of devil-worship brought to the screen here has its own strengths in spades.
Make no mistake, the opening scenes of Lords of Salem had me gripped. Most coven scenes have traditionally been an excuse to show nubile young flesh; perhaps aware that he is unveiling his wife’s buttocks on a semi-regular basis throughout the film and thus catering for nubile flesh in this respect, Mr. Zombie really doesn’t feel the need to stick to that protocol when shooting his own coven scenes. The film is all the more bold for it. We as a culture are terrified of unorthodox female flesh, and unorthodox ageing female flesh is even more shocking. We trust in cinema to protect us from it, but Rob Zombie’s witches – cruel, aged, deformed – want to harm, not heal, and they don’t care if we are looking at them. This is also why the seduction scene in The Shining is so repellent; we simply do not see women who look like this, let alone ascribe any agency to them, malevolent or otherwise. (Neither is this the only time that The Shining sprang to mind as I watched Lords of Salem, come to mention another obvious influence.) Meg Foster as the maniacal head witch Margaret Morgan delivers a chilling performance here and speaks her lines with malignant conviction, whilst Zombie toys with age-old religious ideas about women being conduits of evil, drawing upon this notion throughout.
The use of the occult as a theme is then, for the most part, continued interestingly and thought-provokingly throughout the film. It’s evident that Rob Zombie knows his stuff in this respect, and he manages to weave together an altogether more sophisticated mesh of heavy metal music and horror (from the title’s font to the occupation of his leading lady, this is a film infused with heavy metal) than he has previously. Key to this balance between themes is the phenomenon of the record itself.
As a metal fan of some twenty years’ standing, I’m aware that the relationship between Satan and my musical genre of choice has been long and complex, but in using the mysterious record in the way he does Zombie is bringing a hell of a lot more to bear on the plot. Of course, he’s toying with the idea of metal as ‘the Devil’s music’, and with the frenetic idiocy, reaching its apex in the 1980s, which asserted that heavy metal records contained hidden or ‘backwards-masked’ Satanic messages believed to control or alter people’s behaviour. But I’d say there’s more to it even than that. The music on the record itself isn’t a song in any conventional sense – it brings to mind moral panics of centuries gone by, such as that surrounding the so-called ‘devil’s interval’, a chord banned by the Catholic Church, but the film also features the use use of sabbat music; this is an additional, rarely-explored aspect of the relationship between music and evil which I almost never see used on screen, so the way in which Zombie combines all of these ideas in his film via one, simple device is really something special. Again, the theme of the music itself lends the film some of its most engaging content, and these scenes furthermore did something which none of Zombie’s earlier work has ever done for me: they unnerved me. There’s some evidence of a new style of direction tucked away in The Lords of Salem; when he’s not going for scenes of excess, as he’s wont to do, it seems Rob Zombie knows how to do creepy, which is something I’d never have guessed. Some of the strongest scenes in the film are actually the quietest, and take place in quiet, chic urban spaces. He’s even toned down his colour palate in this film, and it works beautifully.
So much for the good points…
In all of his films to date, Rob Zombie has had a tendency to follow a promising set-up with a bewildering decision or two. (Again, we’re saying nothing of Halloween, which bucks this trend by being a bewildering decision in and of itself.) In Lords of Salem, there is far less of this, but nonetheless, I found myself forcibly taken out of the film on a few occasions by some excruciating lines of dialogue. I can only assume Zombie’s script editor is a) shy or b) Zombie himself, but let me explain my problem. I’ll be euphemistic; the use of the ‘c’ word is a fine art and, in the wrong hands, this still-powerful li’l noun can make someone seem like a kid who doesn’t know how to swear but wants to anyway. Back at the end of the 90s I went to see the re-release of The Exorcist: you know that bit where Regan asks, ‘Do you know what she did, your c***ing daughter?’ Well, if that shocked in the 70s, by the time the 90s had rolled around, people were rolling on the floor in helpless laughter. The same awkward c-word handling derails The Lords of Salem on occasion. it sounds weak because it doesn’t fit, and when you consider the enhanced subtlety of the film as a whole, it’s not helped by such jarring, silly lines, however droll their delivery. Is Rob Zombie teasing us? Maybe, but a bad script can more than finish off a film; it can make it ridiculous, and that goes for several lines with or without the ‘c’ word, and the scenes they’re in.
Another issue I have with The Lords of Salem relates to the ending of the movie. Far be it for me to spoiler what happens, but without saying what happens I can still discuss how it is presented – and again, it’s one of those odd directorial choices, a sudden reversion to type for Zombie which breaks through the atmosphere he has otherwise carefully developed. Why he decides to duck out of the film and into…well, into a Rob Zombie music video is unclear, but it does not fit in with the rest of the film and adds confusion, rather than colour. I’d have taken some more exposition – only a little would have done – and dropped the ephemeral guff with the goat.
All of these issues are significant, sure, but when it comes to the film overall I’d still say this: The Lords of Salem has its baffling moments, and it has its plain silly moments. Much of the best of the Satansploitation genre shares in these flaws. This does not change the fact that, for me, The Lords of Salem is in many places brutally effective, gripping and – in the true sense of the word – sinister. With a touch less of the dialogue and a tad more tale, I’d go so far as to say this would be a cult classic. As it stands, it’s certainly solid, has a great cast, and has enough imagination and atmosphere to make me genuinely curious to see what Rob Zombie will do with his next film. And, now, as opposed to how I felt in the dark times of the post-Halloween remakes, I again feel that he can achieve.
The Lords of Salem will be released to select UK cinemas on 22nd April 2013, then to Region 2 DVD on 29th April, from Momentum Pictures.