GUIDE | MODERN SLAYERS

The Lords of Salem

(Rob Zombie, USA, 2012)

BY LAURA WYNNE | October 26, 2024
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“On the rare occasion, a special child appears…” I first watched The Lords of Salem in an empty multiplex in Easton, PA, in 2013. After 10 minutes, I had to go ask them to turn off the lights. Two days later, I came back and watched it in an empty theater again. Rob Zombie had established himself as a vulgarian, arguably the best filmmaker of the torture-porn era, but unlike most of his work as a director, his sixth feature develops a strong sense of disquiet. The most violent thing that happens here is someone getting hit with a frying pan.

Heidi Hawthorne (Sheri Moon Zombie), a radio DJ, receives a record in the mail that has a hypnotic effect on the female descendants of the Salem villagers of 1692. The film depicts her breakdown as a coven of witches (her neighbors) scheme to use her as a vessel for the birth of the Antichrist, driving her to madness. What sets the film apart from its many ’70s occult clichés is its tone. Zombie’s primary influences here are The Shining and The Devils, even if it has neither film’s scale or heft. This is an apartment movie about the unraveling of one’s mind, firmly placed in the realms of Polanski’s psychological thumbscrews (particularly his Macbeth).

The film originally envisioned a parallel story about a coven being hunted and burned during the Salem witch trials and their ecstatic reemergence in the modern day. But when Richard Lynch, the lead in the 1692 section, was too ill to perform (and died soon after), much of the story had to be rewritten to focus on the present day. An earlyish (and typically cheap) Jason Blum production, The Lords of Salem even features several scenes shot in a prop house.

It’s a movie about mental illness pushing someone back into addiction and the abyss, as well as an incoherent movie about feminism—beautifully contradictory in what it is saying and what it concludes, as a good horror movie should be. It hints at the feminist nature of witchcraft but also features women who have aged out of their slated Hollywood ingénue or mom roles. Zombie points to the domineering patriarchal presence of Catholicism and the idiotic posturing of black metal. He shows each as false male pageantry in the light of a Satan that only women have any access to. Of course, the way these women seize power is by removing another woman’s agency. In the surreal birth scene, where Heidi’s taste in ’30s horror and silent cinema infects her hallucinations as she delivers the Antichrist, Georges Méliès’s Man in the Moon hangs over a row of faceless bishops jerking off plastic dildos. Ken Russell was in turns psychedelically vibrant and embarrassingly obvious; it’s so accurate a tribute that Zombie inherits his hero’s flaws. It feels like these touches, of Satan liberating you from this patriarchal nightmare world, arrive directly from Heidi’s subconscious.

The Lords of Salem shares lingua franca with Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar (satanic cults, naked old people, trauma as plot), but it has profound, weighted images—becoming only richer with each encounter—that those films could never grasp. Heidi reaching for a massive red neon crucifix, Heidi in corpsepaint as she walks into hell and it’s an opera house, the original coven of witches emerging from a blinding light onto the stage behind the modern trio—in these moments of such strong imagery, one almost wishes Zombie had Gaspar Noé’s taste level. Zombie likely has no interest nor pretensions to make something as arresting and experimental as Lux Aeterna, but he absolutely has the chops.

Zombie loves actors from the ’70s and likes to write significant parts for them. In The Lords of Salem, the cast is largely people in their 60s. Meg Foster never before had the opportunity to play anything like this, something that’s guttural, intentionally ugly, and aggressive. She is naked and filthy in nearly every scene. It is her greatest performance.

Above all else, The Lords of Salem is a deep, loving tribute to Sheri Moon, who is allowed to play against type. Here, she is internal, troubled, and eventually transcendent. It’s become an online cliche to call Zombie a “wife guy,” but he’s obviously so fully in love with her face—and what more could you ask for than a husband who will cast you as the satanic Madonna? 🩸

Day #10: The Lords of Salem
LAURA WYNNE

is a writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn.

X: @cronenbabe

How to see The Lords of Salem

The film is also available on various DVD and Blu-ray editions.
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