THE LORDS OF SALEM (2013)

The Lords of Salem is the first sign that Rob Zombie might be a true auteur, in the horror genre and otherwise. I’ve been waiting for him to come into his own ever since he debuted with House of 1000 Corpses, which was a total mess but at least revealed a filmmaker who took his work seriously, and wanted to deliver something more than the average boo-boo ha-ha stab-slice genre fare.

The Lords is not great, but it’s the most complete and satisfying piece he’s put out so far. It’s the story of the demonic possession of a young woman, told not in realistic form but as sense experience. Zombie uses The Shining as a template and projects the movie from the mind of his main character outward. We experience the possession as she does, rather than as an outside observer would.

The demon naturally arrives in the form of a rock song. Salem rock radio deejay Heidi LaRoc (Sheri Moon Zombie, the director’s wife) receives a strange vinyl record in the mail. She plays it, and sets into motion the rise of the Devil in Salem, and the rebirth of the “Lords of Salem,” the name for a group of witches who were burned in colonial times.

What we have here is essentially a feminist horror film, which is a rarity. While the witches are cunning, the colonial-era men who hunt them (including genre vets Andrew Prine, Sid Haig, and Michael Berryman) are boorish and bloodthirsty. Meanwhile, in the modern-day plot, the Satanic force that overtakes Heidi is decidedly male, represented in phallic imagery that is ramped up to a near-ludicrous level as the film goes on. The men who try to help Heidi--a longtime friend and colleague played by Jeffrey Daniel Phillips and an occult expert played cheekily by Bruce Davison--are benign and useless.

The plot is certainly a recipe for silliness, but Zombie doesn’t treat it that way. The movie brazenly accepts a premise as far-fetched as Satanism; Zombie's tone is dreadfully serious and successfully eerie throughout. Take the opening scene, for example, in which a coven of naked witches perform a ritual before a pyre. Listen to the dialogue on its own and it sounds like something out of Manos: The Hands of Fate. But Zombie, with help from composers John 5 and Griffin Boyce and cinematographer Brandon Trost, makes it into a quite spooky and foreboding setup for what is to come.

Zombie very convincingly and carefully transforms Heidi’s life into a wide-awake nightmare. He wisely never allows us to see a perspective of her possession that is not hers. We’re never sure of what others can see because she can never be sure either. We witness the engineering of her madness from the inside out, as in one particularly effective scene in which we learn what happens when she tries to go to church. Ms. Moon Zombie delivers a measured, sympathetic, believable performance that’s a complete 180 from her histrionic, grating murderess from House of 1000 Corpses.

The parallel plot, in which the Davison character does some research into the devil record and tries to help Heidi, is less original and less interesting, but is correct in the context of the film. Though it pulls us out of Heidi’s point of view, it’s necessary to keep the constant sensory bombardment from becoming numbing. As Heidi’s landlady and her two mysterious friends, Judy Geeson, Patricia Quinn, and Dee Wallace add some deviously absurd comic relief, modeled on Ruth Gordon’s character in Rosemary’s Baby.

If the finale is disappointing, it’s only because Zombie has set up a culmination of beastly proportions: a rock concert combined with a demonic possession and an entrance into hell. Budget constraints likely prevented Zombie from making it into the massive full-on eve of destruction it appears to promise, but he still delivers a climax that is an appropriate summation of everything that’s come before it. Above all, it ends on a note of sufficient madness.

*** out of ****

NOTE: The very funny film-within-a-film, featured on various TVs throughout the movie, is called Frankenstein and the Witch Hunter. It features several actors without whom a Zombie film would be incomplete. I’d very much like to see it on a triple bill alongside Don't and Mant.