The Devil’s Rejects

The Devil’s Rejects picks up almost immediately after House of 1000 Corpses’ end, as a rash of good-old-boysy lawmen descend on Firefly Ranch, the site of the first film’s looney-tune torture time. Led by Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe), who fancies himself an avenging angel and can’t wait to replace his badge with his self-proclaimed “devil slayer” vigilante heritage. The law in The Devil’s Rejects is as itching to violate bodies as the anarchic Firefly family, and while Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie, always shot like the love of Zombie’s life; always the light limning these films’ grungy corpuses), her adoptive brother Otis (Bill Moseley), and father Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) inflict plenty of grisly acts on their trail, leading from that opening shoot-out through the film’s oily, on-the-run structure, the scenes maybe most likely to make the spectator hide behind fingers come courtesy of Wydell. He turns a cattle prod on human flesh, sticks knives in rib cages then twists them, and nails palms into rotting wood. On a recent rewatch, I thought about 3 from Hell (2019), Zombie’s later, near-elegiac close to the Firefly trilogy. It’s a less fun but no less essential statement on American violence, existing as it does closer to the historical crash of whatever the counterculture could have meant to a country founded on and policed by violent urges. In that film, locked up and denied parole, the now fully unhinged Baby taunts a correction officer with lurid come-ons. “I live inside your head, I live inside your head,” she coos, before a breakout sees her don—what else?—a police uniform.

Who has the freedom to kill? Otis says he worships the Devil, that he’s been sent to do the Devil’s work. Wydell claims he serves Jesus Christ, a supposedly diametrically opposed force. Both men commit unspeakable horrors—which are, of course, spoken aloud and bloodily in a film like this. To watch horror movies in and from the mid-aughts is to experience the New Millennium in America lensed not through the promise of the future’s renewed prosperity but in spikes of increasingly discombobulating violence, refractions of Columbine and Guantánamo, Virginia Tech and Iraq all at once. Unlike the roughly contemporaneous horror remakes produced at Platinum Dunes, which typically posit millennial shock as their primary message, violence in Zombie’s films always has historical, psychological precedent. It is not meaning itself but a container for unearthing the passage of time, whether in personal-traumatic terms, as in his improvisations upon Halloween, or in national-historical terms, as in The Lords of Salem (2012) and The Devil’s Rejects. Violence is heritage here, the method by which the exceptional individual virtue is transformed into an authority to extinguish at will.

In The Devil’s Rejects especially, Zombie locates this urge in the songs of the mid-’70s, that moment when an almost-counterculture doubled down on historical amnesia. When Baby Firefly dances waggishly in front of a troupe of soon-to-be chum country musicians, the camera lingers less on Baby’s frame and more on the Confederate flag sewn into her denim jeans. It’s Grand Funk Railroad’s “Black Licorice” until your ears bleed, which is to say, it’s Zombie’s sub-sub-conscious meditation on how management-level mavens like Grand Funk’s Terry Knight relentlessly leveraged the American public’s willingness to mistake a good time for a genuine counterculture, until that supposedly liberation-minded music created a listening audience of (white) consumers almost cultishly willing to simply overlook historical implications of race in order to get theirs. Get theirs, they do—The Devil’s Rejects ends with a bravura sequence of its James Gang gang shot down, driving their hot rod straight into a line of police gunfire. It’s easy to say, “No matter who wins, we lose.” The harder to enunciate truth is the one encased in the text and image: “Lord help me, I can’t change.”