Rob Zombie, director of new film 31, says two big influences on his work are 1930s horror, and films from the seventies, when he was a teen.
In Notes On the Auteur Theory in 1962, film critic Andrew Sarris defined cinema's capacity for revealing a given film artist's "élan of the soul." One wonders if Sarris was accounting for the entry of a film artist whose work is marked by a hyper-violent fanboy glee, and whose last name, however pseudonymous, is "Zombie."
Rob Zombie holds a complicated, roundabout claim to the status of auteur: that category of film director whose work is regarded, at the high end, as sublime and, at the lower end, visually or artistically interesting enough to qualify as worthwhile.
Zombie emerged in the early 2000s, parlaying his celebrity as an industrial-metal-punk cartoon character (first as frontman of New York City's White Zombie, and later in his eponymous rock band) into a filmmaking career. He was clumped together with a wave of "Splat Pack" directors (Eli Roth, Alexandre Aja, etc.) making pitilessly violent movies steeped in winking, po-mo referentiality. Zombie has often positioned himself as something of a film scholar, curating a program of forgotten B-movies for Turner Classic Movies and, more recently, a slate of influential genre films for the newly minted horror-movie streaming platform Shudder.
His directorial debut, 2003's House of 1000 Corpses, was unapologetically a product of its influences: the plot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre cut by the zanier tone of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, with some Marx Brothers and mad-scientist stuff rammed into the grinder for good measure.
"The two big influences on me," Zombie says from his L.A. home, "are thirties horror, and the seventies. It's a product of me being a little kid, when what was on TV was from the thirties: Frankenstein, Dracula, Lugosi, Karloff, that stuff. Then as a teenager, the stuff I liked was Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead. It was always those two worlds."
The rise of fanboy filmmakers such as Zombie has undoubtedly done more harm than good to that increasingly disenfranchised thing we call "the art of motion pictures." While rare talents can productively meld an encyclopedic knowledge of film history with actual, artistic intelligence (Quentin Tarantino most of the time, Ben Wheatley and J.J. Abrams sometimes), too many others are lost in the boring mires of the incipient pop-cultural enthusiasm and insufferable spot-the-reference dorkiness (see: Roth, Aja and others among whom Zombie's name is typically invoked). Rob Zombie sits in the middle, his horror homages landing somewhere between a gentle nudge and a somersaulting elbow drop.
Zombie's latest, 31 (largely crowdfunded and released straight to VOD), offers the latest recursive mutation of his artistic sensibility. A grisly, retro, survival-horror schlep tracking a group of foul-mouthed carnies as they're stalked by a group of killer clowns, it's essentially an homage to Rob Zombie's own movies, melding the plotting of House of 1000 Corpses with the hyperstylism of Halloween II or The Lords of Salem. It is also, like the bulk of Zombie's filmography, set on Halloween night. "It's fun to pick a visual time of year," the director explains. "With House Of 1000 Corpses it was like, 'Okay! First movie! Let's make it Halloween!' When the Halloween movies came up, I had no choice."
From the spooky, seasonal setting to the psycho clowns in Nazi regalia, it would be difficult to mistake 31 as anything other than a product of Rob Zombie's hyperactive, cinephilic, acutely "twisted" imagination. But is this enough to confer genuine auteur status? For an answer, let's return to Sarris, who writes that a film's "interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director's personality and his material."
Such a notion of film authorship explains why 2009's Halloween II is regarded – at least among serious Rob Zombie devotees, which, yes, do exist – as his premiere auteur object. Not only was Zombie wriggling inside of the confines of studio filmmaking, he was also contending with the legacy of another lunch-pail auteur, John Carpenter, whose own Halloween mythology Zombie largely snubs. Similarly, Zombie's Lords of Salem remains compelling because of how it thrashes against the expectations of narrative filmmaking itself, largely forgoing storytelling convention for a string of Satanic shock-horror fantasies that vacillate between the hypnotic and the giddily vulgar.
With 31, there's no such tension. The film is all personality. There's no thrashing or wriggling or straining against constraint or convention. It is Rob Zombie unchained, which is Rob Zombie at his worst. His films express that rare interior élan in their quieter reprieves, such as the shots of his partner/muse Sheri Moon Zombie frolicking with a dog in Lords of Salem or the nostalgic cut-ins of Universal horror movies in House of 1000 Corpses, or the shots of psycho killer Michael Myers's mom (Mrs. Zombie again) walking astride a white stallion in Halloween II. (Zombie's loving lensing of his own wife, both as an exalted aesthetic object and tough-as-nails Amazonian ass-kicker is also endearing, in its way.)
The more obvious, and often desperate, weirdness of Zombie's movies – the demented Nazi harlequins and cartoon luchadors and mutilated, masturbating clergymen – pale in comparison to the genuine weirdness of these gentler moments. They are the glimmers of the soul of the artist, glinting like a ruddy axe blade flashing in the dark. And they account for the odd, and sometimes disingenuous-seeming, vulgar-auteurist cult that have rallied around his films.
The best movie by an Eli Roth-type will likely always be less interesting than Rob Zombie's lamest effort.