MAY 23 - The Lords of Salem

            In the fall of 2016, just as we were about to go to a presidential debate watch party, my sweet summer child of a roommate realized he’d thrown his retainer in a garbage can at the top of East Rock, a popular park in New Haven. “Fuck,” he said, the first and only time I’ve ever heard him swear. We put our liquor in a duffel bag and called an Uber, with a plan to retrieve the garbage retainer before going to the party. Our Uber drive was named John. Despite being larger than the two of us put together, when John realized we were going to essentially the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, worried that we were planning to do him harm. I reassured him that we were not, but agreed that nature is much scarier than any town or city at night, and mentioned how many horror movies are set in the woods. That’s how we got talking about horror. John was very eager to endorse the films of one Rob Zombie. I told him I’d check them out. He also offered to sell us ecstasy; we respectfully declined.

            Despite the fact that Rob Zombie is known for the kind of ~extreme~ bro-y horror I’m not usually interested in, a promise is a promise, so all these years later I’ve finally watched a film from oeuvre of Rob Zombie. You’re welcome, John.

            The Lords of Salem follows Heidi Hathorne, a recovering drug addict and popular rock DJ in Salem, Massachusetts. Heidi enjoys bantering with her radio cohosts, taking her lovely dog for walks, and wearing really excellent coats. When she receives a mysterious record of what I can only describe as dirgy gloom metal and plays it on the show, she is tormented by bizarre dreams and visions. Meanwhile, her landlady, Lace, and her friends, including the wonderful Patricia Quinn of Rocky Horror fame, are getting a little too cozy with Heidi, and the author of a book on the Salem witch trials investigates the execution of a coven who seem related to Heidi’s dirge.

            So, was this what I expected from a Rob Zombie flick? Well, kinda. It has the vaguely sepia color tone so popular in 2000s horror that makes everything look a little dirty, except for the lovely shots of New England autumn. There is an excessive amount of nudity, and a lot of imagery and jumps that serve mainly to be gross or gnarly but left me feeling meh. I have mixed feelings about horror movies that dissolve into phantasmagoric dreamscape visions, as this one does. On the one hand, I love a dreamlike horror movie when it serves the purpose of character or theme. For example, Season of the Witch, which I adored, has a ton of dream sequences, but it’s always clear who’s dreaming, and the dreams tell us a lot about the dreamer. When Lords of Salem’s plot dissolves, it feels lazy, like Zombie couldn’t figure out where the story should go next.

Another dream sequence 

           Which is a shame, because the set-up is strong. I love the idea of cursed music, and the Lords’ dirge of doom is effectively eerie. Plus, it’s inspired by Venus in Furs, and multiple Velvet Underground songs play during the movie, so it’s pandering directly to me. There are some charmingly satirical bits about Satany death metal that feel knowingly self-referential to Zombie’s music career. Heidi herself is a great character; Sheri Moon Zombie plays her with a combination of sweetness and grit. But unlike in a lot of witch movies, including this line-up’s Season of the Witch and The Love Witch, witchy schemes don’t offer Heidi an escape from anything. She’s not running from a dead-end marriage or an oppressive religion. Her life is fine. She’s sad sometimes, but she’s getting by. And Heidi never chooses to join up with the Lords or fuck around with witchcraft. Things just happen to her. She has no agency after she starts playing the record, and so it’s hard to care.   

            And let’s talk about that witchcraft. When horror movies invoke Salem, they walk a weird line; they can ahistorically claim witchcraft was real or they can denounce the witch trials as a tragic injustice, the commonly held view, but one that forecloses the possibility of supernatural fun. Some movies strike a smart balance, like The Autopsy of Jane Doe, which implies that persecution made Jane a witch, or The Witch, which distances its action from Salem. The Lords of Salem goes all out in buying into the reality of Salem’s witches and then offers up a feverish, almost cartoonish depiction that indulges all of the witch trials’ misogyny with hideous naked hags who rhapsodize on the moist sin that lies between women’s legs. Then it makes the weird choice to have a Salem historian become a character, but he seems to lack knowledge about the executions and the real witches, who, in the universe of the film, left behind plenty of documentation. This is research Heidi ought to have been doing in a better-structured film, but I guess she’s too busy wandering aimlessly around her apartment building and shaking tentacles with demons.

            With its loose structure and uncritical treatment of the history of the Salem, The Lords of Salem feels like a transcript of a rambling dream, shapeless as a paint splat. I wanted the movie to follow through on the promise of its strong premise and lead character, but it let me down. Don’t get me wrong; there were parts of it that I liked a lot. I always love some scheming old ladies and some well-placed Velvet Underground cameos, and while Heidi’s radio show is one I would hate in real life, it served the film very well, and was a lot of fun to watch. But overall, something was missing, a central tension or drive, a strong plot engine. Sorry, John the Uber driver. I tried.

The past was copper-toned, you see 

Vibecheck: The kind of color balance that covers everything with a thin layer of filth.

Scare Factor: It tries. It tries so hard.

Pairs Well With: Borrows amply from witch movies past and future – the meddling old ladies of Rosemary’s Baby, the witch-ascendant protagonist of nuSuspiria (which frustrated me in a more interesting way). The mythical misogyny was reminiscent of Antichrist, a film which is far more disturbing. But for my money, the best double feature would be with Disney’s Hocus Pocus. Two egregiously ahistorical treatments of the Salem trials with two wildly different tones and audiences – that’s balance for you!

But how gay is it?: I’m amazed Zombie didn’t treat us to a fifteen minute lesbian hag orgy. Maybe he did and I’d just zoned out. Oh well, there’s always Mother of Tears. Or so I hear.

Girlfriend’s Corner: Jesus, this could not be less my thing. I despise Rob Zombie – his movies were pretty much the only horror films kids in my middle school watched, and my intense dislike for his tone and aesthetic and generally Way Too Much dudebro-iness kept me from liking horror as a genre until late high school – and this seems like everything I hate about him in a single package!

            Plus, if you want to watch a witch-themed movie set in New England in the fall made within a year of 2010 by a bro-y director who’s more concerned with style than substance, Ti West’s The House of the Devil is just sitting there! It’s very good! It relies on tension rather than jump scares, has Greta Gerwig in a minor role, and features a fun dance sequence. Watch that instead.