The Lords of Salem is the latest release from heavy metal front man/horror film director Rob Zombie. My first exposure to Zombies work was his remake of the John Carpenter classic Halloween, and I was really impressed with Zombies take on the character of Michael Myers and the dark, unsettling mood he established throughout the film. In contrast to most modern slasher flicks Zombie really put his own creative mark on it and even more so with its sequel and firmly established himself as one of the top horror directors in Hollywood today. What makes Zombie stand out to me is that whilst he is obviously not adverse to depicting gratuitous violence he doesn’t rely solely on gruesome torture porn that has unfortunately become the prevalent trend in horror movies recently, instead he creates a really unsettling tone of dread. Particularly through his use of music and score, he creates films that are slow burn; they steadily ramp up the sense of dread towards the third act. Again this is all too rare these days in modern horror films which often just try to barrage the audience in an all out assault of constant jump scares and frenetic shaky cam footage.
The Lords of Salem is a story about witches that are attempting to come back into the world via an age old curse on the bloodline of the family that executed them. Back in the day the witches created a piece of music that would infect the minds of the women of Salem which somehow finds its way into the hands of present day local radio DJ, Heidi Hawthorne played by Zombies wife Sheri Moon Zombie. Who decides to give the unusual record plenty of air time despite the fact that it’s a pretty ominous and repetitive piece of quite clearly haunted music, I guess that’s what the hipsters are into these days so whatever, but the music is also making Heidi lose her fucking mind. She has intense and disturbing lucid hallucinations of bizarre satanic rituals and you guessed it naked witches. The subtext of the film is pretty clear, people have darkness within them. Besides being steadily possessed by dirty naked witches, Heidi also returns to drug abuses, she becomes isolated and pushes away her friends and she willingly accepts the child of Satan into her body.
Influences like Stanley Kubrick’s the Shining are pretty apparent throughout as Zombie crafts a pretty impressive mind fuck of a movie, incorporating some wild, trance like sequences particularly in the build up to the final act.
The Lords of Salem is a bizarre and disturbing movie that truly stands out amongst today’s modern horror flicks and delivers a truly original experience.