Review: The Lords of Salem (2012)
Previously hell-bent on emulating the sleazy spirit of the grindhouse features he so clearly adores, it’s somewhat of a surprise that Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem is so much more evidently meaningful and complex, or at least, is so much more clearly cultivated to achieve a certain effect through its bizarre imagery and plot.
This refined aesthetic might simply call more attention to itself than did the style of his early, obviously imitative films, which everyone seems so quick to dismiss as nothing but depravity, regardless of whether or not they enjoyed them, but frankly, my experience with Zombie is limited to hearsay and vague recollections of the one movie of his I watched in middle school, and I still can’t discern whether that was The Devil’s Rejects or House of 1,000 corpses. So bearing that in mind, it might be brash of me to declare The Lords of Salem his most mature work yet, but I can say with some degree of certainty that nothing he made previously has the same sort of mounting dread and atmospheric intrigue that he’s achieved here, with some scathing religious commentary to boot.
As if the name “Salem” weren’t already synonymous with witches and the mock trials that saw them executed, The Lords of Salem opens with a flashback of sorts depicting a frenzied ritual, which is especially foreboding given the mundane domesticity that follows.
Heidi (Sherri Moon Zombie) is a radio DJ who receives a mysteriously packaged record at the station one day, having arrived under unknown circumstances and addressed specifically to her and not her two male co-hosts (Jeff Daniel Phillips and Ken Foree) from an unknown band calling themselves The Lords. Upon playing the track over the radio, Heidi and scores of other women (shown in a subtly creepy montage) are entranced by its droney repetition, and it becomes increasingly clear that there’s a relevance of gender here. Subsequent listens render Heidi more and more nauseous, and her visions of witchcraft and death — sometimes in dreams, sometimes in waking — become more intense and take a severe toll on her psyche.
Contrary to the baffling notions of many critics, the plot is extremely straightforward in actuality, with the surreal sections in between serving as bizarre and hellish manifestations of the evil that is slowly but surely consuming Heidi’s mind. Whether or not these sections “actually happen” is entirely irrelevant, partially because the film is so full of purposeful ambiguity from the start, and partially because they’re so totally effective on a visceral level. Filled with grotesquely imagined monstrosities and imagery that channels misogynistic violence and religious ugliness, these visions force uncomfortable thoughts into one’s mind, whether or not these images have anything of any genuinely depth to say.
For my money the film has quite a bit of depth, but even if it didn’t, Rob Zombie takes strides to imbue these frames with visual allusions to horror veterans like Dario Argento, and with intrusive, nightmarish attacks on Heidi’s subconscious that render her a vulnerable and tormented character, and forge a surreal atmosphere rarely seen in films today. These testaments to Zombie’s enthusiasm for horror (and his knack to inexplicably forge it out of somewhat trite and corny tropes and effects) hit me on a level which, thanks to my over indulgence in the genre, I sometimes forget exists.
Sometimes The Lords of Salem suffers from some pacing issues, unfortunately, but some of these are merely the inadvertent consequences of trying to add plot clarity and diversity to the film. The character of Francis Matthias (Bruce Davison) serves as the means by which all is made clear to us, a historian and author who begins investigating the possibility of legitimate witchery after hearing the Lords track while at the radio station for an interview. His good-natured demeanor and almost entirely not-surreal screen time seem to hinder the film’s otherwise relentless aura of unpleasantness, but it’s hard to say whether or not these breaks in the tension (which are still interesting in how they illuminate the movie’s backstory) are truly superfluous or not. It would also be easy to complain about many of the performances and the quality of lighting in many of the scenes, but in a film this thoroughly strange, these are minor problems that can be expected from such low-budget horror.
Without diving too deeply into the ideas that Zombie seems to be getting at, I can say that the film is almost definitely about religious oppression, and how the horrific history of Salem echoes to this day. The film is riddled with sex negative witches, a hypocritical priest who simultaneously molests and slut-shames the same woman, and a character arc that finds the initially independent and free-willed Heidi becoming the possessed slave of a religion that subsists on fear and brainwashing to attain its goals. Zombie at first conveys these ideas through the sexism and fanaticism of the witches’ dialogue, and then discards subtlety in favor of a finale so dizzyingly psychedelic and overripe with visual symbolism that it might well be comical in another context. The constant parallels between Christianity and the witch cult collide in a frenzy of flashing lights, crucifixes, and nudity that feels like Jodorowsky on even more acid.
Again, there are those who will deny the significance of the imagery, but horror movies can, more than most genres, be appreciated purely for the sensory intensity they elicit. Watching The Lords of Salem, my mind was often engaged, and my spine was constantly tingling. If this level of lunacy and psychologically, surrealistically violent morbidity was all the film had to offer, it would still be enough.
