I made a lot of friends because of this movie and it sent me down a rabbit hole of some pretty cool stuff.
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I know I’m 1000 years late to the party here… I had friends on Tumblr like ten years ago who loved Rob Zombie but I initially dismissed his body of work and refused to watch any of his films.
I already intuitively knew this to be true but this officially marks the point at which I confirm that I definitively have bad taste because I loved this movie.
House of 1000 Corpses is a love letter to Texas Chainsaw Massacre and grindhouse cinema, and exists within the thematic subset of horror movies about people on a road trip who find themselves stranded in the worst place imaginable due to vehicular dysfunction—The Hills Have Eyes, House of Wax or Wrong Turn—which I LOVE. Like truly among my favorite concepts.
Where I grew up, to get anywhere you would have to drive hours through empty desert with random little creepy houses and old gas stations (both operational and abandoned) littered along the way, and nothing in between. So these kinds of scenarios were like all I could ever imagine as a hysterical demented child.
But I love this even more because it’s like okay what if you took those movies and made them more like Off Season by Jack Ketchum which was one of my favorite horror books as a teen (highly recommend if you’re a freak like me) and is so graphic and disturbing and hopeless. (See italicized footnote at the bottom for further thoughts…)
But also add in goofy campy characters like a Harley Quinn/Elly May Clampett-type girl who likes to do makeup like Theda Bara and perform Marilyn Monroe songs on stage, her evil brother who looks like Riff Raff, and their mom who is like redneck Jennifer Coolidge played by KAREN BLACK (who slayed btw literally and figuratively). Combine it with a haunted house thrill ride and also make it weirdly hilarious, completely insane, and devoid of taste with absolutely no restraint. But with a hyper-stylized fantastical element that allows you to view the happenings on screen with some amount of remove and enjoy yourself rather than just feeling sickened and low-vibrational. Go off Robert Zombie!!!!
(Footnote: All of these stories are based on the legend of the Sawney Bean family which okay blah blah anti-Scottish propaganda by the British—some scholars actually believe in its veracity as a true accounting of events—but like what if??? Wouldn’t that be sooo creepy to be on your horse at night, far away from other people, and come upon a band of inbred roaming cannibals and you have no phones no lights no motorcars not a single luxury and they take you into a damn CAVE. I can believe it happening because Fred and Rose West were unfortunately real. Well anyway if you like the terror that conjured up for you and are interested in its truest modern analogue read Open Season by Jack Ketchum or watch this movie I guess. Thanks for reading if you did)
Oct 27, 2024
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which I had shared with friends last October and I thought I saved it somewhere in my Notes app but it’s lost in the ether :( I’m a huge horror fan and former obsessive. I’ll recommend just a few:
Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) — watched this on TCM the morning before my like tenth birthday party and it rocked my world forever… sad and disturbing
The Others (2001) — gorgeous gothic atmospheric soooo creepy and Nicole Kidman is a vision
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) — details the last days of a troubled beautiful teenage girl named Laura Palmer… heartbreaking examination of traumatic cycles and evil forces. I would recommend that you watch the show first though 🤓
Barbarian (2022) — this goes against like everything you said you wanted but I have to put it on here because it’s so scary and expertly paced and filled me with dread but it’s also hilarious! It has to be my favorite recently released horror movie
Apr 24, 2024
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I love the microgenre of screen horror and this is one of the best executions of that aesthetic. I watched this in 2020 a month into lockdown and while I don’t remember most of the stuff I watched in that period, I haven’t stopped thinking about this movie since the
Oct 28, 2024
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