Overclocked On Caffeine v.1.1

House of 1000 Corpses

89 minutes

The late 1990s was a weird time for movie fans in the UK. For a long time, movies like Driller Killer, The Exorcist and, most famously of all, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, had been denied a release by the British Board of Film Certification. While that doesn't technically count as a ban, no cinema would normally take a film without and no shop would stock it, all but killing it until it falls in line with their standards. As a result, most of these films received a mystique to them. These were sights so horrifying, so disturbing, that to see them was to invite madness. A modern day Necronomicon. Those who saw them would inevitably watch them on 35th generation VHS copies, the picture quality so degraded, you were never entirely sure of what you'd seen, thus preserving the legend for another telling.

Then they finally released it for all to see on pristine DVD. And all decided it was actually a bit shit.

The legend, like all legends, failed to meet the reality. It was a decent enough movie, sure, but the stories, man, the stories! They had us expecting brutality on a level we'd never experienced before! Violence to sicken even the most hardened of hearts! The shitty quality of VHS had actually managed to enhance the atmosphere of the film, making you see more than was actually there.

House of 1000 Corpses faced a similar fate. The film was denied a release by the studio this time, on the grounds that there was no way they could release it without hefty cuts. Rob Zombie, writer, director and pretty much everything else in between, was an avid fan of the horror genre, as anyone who's ever listened to his music or watched his videos could testify to. The man knew his shit, and if he said that this was a violent, brutal movie, well, it was pretty safe to say that this was indeed so.

The film starts off relatively 'safe': four college students, travelling around researching a book on weird roadside attractions hear of a local legend: the story of Doctor Satan. They commit a breach of one of the cardinal rules of horror movie safety when they stop to pick up a hitchhiker at the side of the road, an oddly unhinged girl by the name of Baby. The car suffers a blowout, and the group is forced to take refuge for the night, blah blah blah. We all know how this goes, we've all seen it before, right?

Well, not really, no. Sure, you've seen the basic premise a million times or more by now, it's one of the classic horror movie setups. But somehow, Rob's managed to make it even bleaker than usual. The Firefly clan, primary villains of the piece, are closer to the Manson Family than Leatherface's brood, the spliced-in footage of them ranting and raving to the camera only further emphasising the idea. The tortures inflicted on the clueless corpses-to-be are impressively inventive - the 'Behold: Fishboy' scene straddling the line between funny and freaky perfectly. The movie's the posterchild for the trope It Got Worse.

The cinematography and soundtrack are especially worthy of praise. The opening titles and many intercut scenes were shot in his basement with grainy handheld cameras, setting the tone nicely, and the obligatory chase scene towards the end has some simply stunning shots. The background music, as you'd expect, is of a high calibre, Zombie himself having composed the majority of it for the film. Some of it saw release on the album The Sinister Urge, released during the three year period when it looked like the film would never see release, and divorced from the visuals, didn't carry that much impact. Once you get to see the two combined, it fares that much better. The man also loves his soundtrack dissonance, with songs like I Wanna Be Loved By You underscoring some of the outright weirder moments. When the two combine, it adds an odd beauty to the sights - the scene where Otis holds a gun to a sherrif's head for about a minute while the camera pans out is hypnotising in its simplicity.

While Zombie couldn't go quite as far as he wanted, he does it better than most. Not long after the release of House of 1000 Corpses, a new genre of movie, the Torture Porn genre, sprang up, focussing more on the violence and blood than the execution. All of the gore, with none of the style, brutality without brilliance. It's something Rob managed to avoid with this film, making it worth any number of Saw sequels. Off the back of this and the sequel, The Devil's Rejects, he was given the opportunity to work on the renewed Halloween series of movies. Frankly, I couldn't think of anyone finer.