by MATTHEW HAYS

Rob Zombie throws a bit of a curveball with his directorial debut, House of 1000 Corpses, one of those movies that has already become notorious due to the scandals surrounding it. The film begins with a light and campy tone, feeling almost like one of those inspired Count Floyd intros to Monster Chiller Horror Theatre on SCTV. The scene is set in the late '70s: cult actor Sid Haig (Spiderbaby, Foxy Brown) sells gas and chicken at a highway pit stop, trading raunchy one liners with a sidekick.

It feels downright comedic, until two curious young couples show up, looking to fill up. And when they inquire about a mysterious local legend, Haig draws them a map indicating how to get to the place where "Dr. Satan" died. The duped foursome soon find themselves hog tied and ready to be sliced up, prisoners of the Firefly Family (with mom played by Karen Black). House is a film that turns from a comedy into a nasty, gruesome chop-'em-up, one seriously disturbing horror movie.

Playing with our expectations, Zombie explains over the phone from Los Angeles, was precisely what the founder of metal band White Zombie was trying to do. "I really wanted it to have that quality," he says. "I felt like I was shooting a sitcom in the beginning. It starts out kind of goofy. Then I wanted it to be more and more depressing, until it's completely bleak. I like that no-hope quality."

Universal aversion

But that no-hope quality is precisely what put off House of 1000 Corpses' first studio, Universal, two years ago. Executives claimed at the time that the content didn't disturb them, but rather that they saw the film as unmarketable. Enter MGM, who picked up Corpses for distribution, until Zombie made some facetious remarks concerning MGM having no morals, which made their way onto the MTV Web site, which in turn led to MGM turfing the film. Finally, Lions Gate picked it up, which is how it's ended up in cinemas this week.

But the bleakness was part of the point Zombie was trying to make. "Someone always survives in horror movies, at least one person does. But they didn't in '70s horror movies. They would die, and it would be horrible, and you'd walk out of there and feel like you'd just witnessed a murder. But in the past 20 years, somehow the kids would figure out a way to take down Freddy and they'd survive for another Nightmare on Elm Street movie."

No survival here, just pure, '70s-style nastiness, in the same vein as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left. As Zombie describes them, "those genre films that came out when drive-ins were at their height."

Reel life (and death)

And though Corpses is shot very, very stylistically, full of rapid-fire cutaways and over-the-top art direction. (Zombie seems to have taken a page from the rule book of a show for which he served as a production assistant, Pee-Wee's Playhouse.) The filmmaker contends, however, that House of 1000 Corpses' intense bleakness is an effort at capturing a certain realism.

Realism?? "No one ever survives these things. I thought it was more real to have four normal leads and have them all get it. Had I had the money, it would have been fun to have really big stars get it. People really don't expect that.

"The Manson Family murders always fascinated me as a kid. And they used to have camera equipment and film themselves. I always thought, what if they'd brought those cameras with them to the Tate house? No one survives those things. They come in, home invasion, boom. The studios were always arguing, ‘What if you were to have one girl and she punches the guy in the face and then gets away?' That's such bullshit. They felt one person had to escape to carry on.

"I basically tell the whole movie from the killers' point of view, and I'm basically siding with them. They're the ones with all the personality. I didn't want to make it seem like a big deal. Like Henry Lee Lucas, he said he killed 300 people. Not every murder could have been that big of a deal to him. Some of them must have been like, whatever. That's what I wanted this to be like: it's not a moral dilemma for them, they're just crazy."

Horror is Heavy and vice versa

Making a horror movie as a heavy metal vet was not a huge leap, reports Zombie. They both, he says, get the same thing: no respect. "Aside from the general link, which is that it seems the kids who like these movies like this kind of music, for me the main link is how both are so dismissed. It doesn't matter how good the film is or how good the record is, or how many people saw the movie or how many records were sold. It still gets treated like somebody's dirty little secret. For one year they lost their minds and gave Silence of the Lambs awards. But for the most part it doesn't matter how good the horror film is, they'll treat it like crap.

"And you see it every year at the Grammys. You'll have a metal record that's sold 10-million copies and they'll give it an off-camera award, right next to best instrumental polka album or international children's spoken word album. Horror and metal are both so big and commercial and yet treated like these weird underground things."

Zombie acknowledges his own film has had to be cut, at times rather drastically, to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating, one that direly limits the reach of a horror movie's key youth demographic. "It's hard to say how much, precisely, has been cut out. About 15 or 20 minutes, I'd say. It'll be on the DVD. The torture scene, where a hand is cut off, that originally went on a lot longer. The MPAA was really hard on this film.

"No one would release the film unless it had an R rating. An NC-17 is just too difficult to deal with. Most newspapers won't even run ads for an NC-17 movie. It's sort of ridiculous, because NC-17 was created to get over the stigma surrounding X-rated movies. Now it's just created a new stigma. It's as though in this country we can't create movies for adults. So you can't watch something in the cinemas that you're going to be able to watch at home eventually anyway? It's a bizarre system that's just hypocritical. What was the point of creating an adult rating if you can't use it?."

House of 1000 Corpses opens Friday, April 11

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