The Devil’s Marxists

A Halloween gift from Rainer.

Sid Haig as Captain Spaulding in House of 1,000 Corpses

Rob Zombie (stage name of Massachusetts native Robert Cummings) has, since the moonrise of the twenty-first century, made a name for himself as a filmmaker with outings such as his hyper-violent Halloween franchise resuscitations for the Weinstein Company. Zombie’s sadistic diptych House of 1,000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005) constitutes perhaps the quintessential statement of the torture porn philosophy on film. Trivializing and even eroticizing the acts of torture and murder, the films offer what, on the surface, would seem to be a typical Hollywood rendering of that threat to American modernity, the Texas redneck. This should come as no surprise in view of the fact that the films were produced by Madonna’s and U2’s manager Guy Oseary – an Israeli and “hardcore Jew”¹. Scurrying under the floorboards of Zombie’s nightmare movie vision are indications of…