[HorrorScience] The Lords of Salem (2012)

Reading time: 11 minutes

Qualification

The Lords of Salem

Year

2012

Duration

101 minutes

Director

Rob Zombie

Distribution

Sheri Moon Zombie, Bruce Davison, Sid Haig, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Ken Foree, Andrew Prine, Dee Wallace, Meg Foster, María Conchita Alonso

Script

Rob Zombie

Within the Terror/Horror genre, as I have commented in previous analyses, there are several subgenres. In the same way that these subgenres have guidelines to be followed by any director, there are directors who manage to imprint their personal brand on their products, and create a kind of their own and inimitable subgenre. There we have Tim Burton and his particular visual style, for example, so recognizable and personal that he has created a string of products trying to imitate it. This is nothing new, and it happens in all fields of art and audiovisual media, full of clone artists cut from the same mold and some more who stand out above all of those in good or bad ways. Clearly, being part of the clone army is the easiest path, because striving to stand out requires much more work and is more risky: if you achieve your goal and are well seen, you will be recognized and your name will serve as an example for many others to follow; On the other hand, if you do not achieve your goal or you do it but because you are frowned upon by critics or society, your path will become uphill and will be almost impossible to overcome, so you will probably end up becoming one of those generic artists or you will be directly relegated to oblivion.

[HorrorScience] The Lords of Salem (2012)

Rob Zombie is the director of this film, and many already know him before he began his path as a director, since He is a renowned musician and a declared fan of the horror and demonic genre since his youth., as demonstrated by his visual style in many videos of his songs or in his recitals, and even his last name, which he legally changed in 1996 from Cummings to Zombie. Seeing his career, and his particular style and way of being, and that he is also the director of all his music videos, it was only a matter of time before Rob entered the world of cinema, and although he has already been fully involved for a few years and has some of his own productions and a couple of remakes to his credit, it is for The Lords of Salem, his latest production so far, for which I want to begin in a brief cycle within HorrorScience where I will analyze the films of this director that fit into this section.

If you are a fan of horror films and you are passionate about films like the saga of Saw (especially from the second onwards), Paranormal Activity, or even Final Destination Most likely Zombie's films are not to your liking, and even less so this last one, how different it is from the others and from the standard within the genre. Rob is one of the directors who gives his films scenes of violent and brutal content., but unlike others, he does not use these scenes as the only effective resource or forced excuse in his films to generate visual impact and feed the viewer's fascination with morbidity and unpleasantness, but rather violence becomes something natural in the whole that makes up the film, and is shown in a terrifying as well as euphoric way without falling into bad taste.

The film begins in 1696, in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, where we will see the Reverend Jonathan Hawthorne writing in his diary that he swears to exterminate anyone who has pledged allegiance to Satan and his spectral army, and then show us images of old witches who undress in the middle of a forest performing satanic rituals. Next we will see Salem today, where Heidi lives and works, played by Sheri Moon Zombie, wife of the director who, in order not to lose the habit, uses her again for his film, in this case with the leading role.

Heidi is a recovered drug addict, who works as disc jockey and participates with his voice in a program on a local radio station specialized in music of the genre. hard rock along with his two companions, Whitey and Herman. At the end of one of their programs the group is leaving the radio, and the receptionist hands Heidi a wooden box with an engraving on the lid, which someone left specifically for her, and that contains a paste record inside from a band called "The Lords". Heidi decides to take the disk home. Whitey accompanies Heidi to her house and stays to eat with her, and at one point decides to play "The Lords" album out of curiosity. The music that starts playing is somewhat disturbing and sounds bad, and Heidi starts to feel bad and has a vision where she sees the witches we saw at the beginning of the movie, helping a woman give birth, and then the lead witch curses and claims that they have failed in their mission, while spits out the baby and orders him to be killed. The vision ends when Whitey stops the music. Before going to sleep, Heidi goes to her room and we can see through a door on the side an apparition in the form of one of the old witches of yesteryear.

The next day, during the radio show, they interview Francis Matthias, historian and author of a book about the truth of the Salem witch trials. In that same program Heidi decides to play the music from "The Lords" album that her partner Herman, assuming that it is a local band, decides to rename it "The Lords of Salem." The name of the band disturbs Matthias, who thinks he has heard it before somewhere else, and the music not only causes Heidi to feel bad again, but all the women who are listening to the radio at that moment go into a kind of trance, which gives us to understand that these sounds only affect women.

The apparitions that we are seeing and that Heidi does not seem to notice are affecting her pet, a dog, which finally makes Heidi look for the cause of her strange behavior and ends up going to room number 5 of the building where she lives, which according to the person in charge should have been unoccupied for a long time, but nevertheless a red light emanates from inside and is caused by a neon cross hanging on the wall. Upon entering this room Heidi experiences a vision about a demon and a naked witch, and then wakes up in his bed, believing that everything that happened in that room was a nightmare. A little worried about her vision, she visits a church and finds a priest who first comforts her, but then attacks her by forcing her to perform oral sex on him. Heidi wakes up again, but this time in one of the church pews, and apparently it was all a dream.

Heidi's visions of demons and incubus priests become worse and more frequent, causing her behavior to become increasingly erratic, deteriorating her character and mental health, and inevitably leading her down the path of drug use again. At the same time, Matthias becomes increasingly obsessed with the group "The Lords" and begins to investigate them until he makes an interesting discovery.

From here I don't want to reveal anything more, but I can say that the film begins to walk on quicksand, where the progress is slow and the steps are increasingly heavier and one can be sure that it will eventually end up sinking. And I am not using this example to illustrate something that is wrong, quite the opposite.

The Lords of Salem It's closer to the macabre than horror.. The visions and nightmares that the protagonist has during the film, and the story that advances at its own pace, slowly cooking while we suffer what we are seeing thanks to the excellent dramatic performance of Sheri Moon Zombie that makes us connect emotionally with her character, causes the same sensation that one has when watching films like Jacob's Ladder (which I will talk about another time) where reality begins to become confused and everything seems to acquire the logic of dreams and nightmares.

As happens in Rosemary's Baby by Roman Polanski or in Suspiria de Darío Argento, que además son dos de las muchas influencias que tiene The Lords of Salem, vemos a una protagonista que no sabe bien qué es lo que le está pasando, aunque tiene la certeza de que algo va terriblemente mal. Sin embargo, a diferencia de los dos filmes mencionados, en esta película Rob Zombie intenta que el espectador vaya acompañando a la protagonista a través de las horribles experiencias que va sufriendo en vez de ser un espectador pasivo que sólo observa el desarrollo de la historia.

Estamos ante una película genuinamente sucia y perturbadora, el trabajo más personal de Rob Zombie como director, y cuyas escenas logran molestar al espectador cada vez más, acumulándose hasta que uno se llega a sentir incómodo y hasta diría incluso violado psíquicamente. Es una de esas películas que se quedan en tu cabeza mucho después de haber terminado, que además te deja con preguntas sin responder, y aún así con la certeza de que esas preguntas no hace falta que sean respondidas, porque parece que las respuestas están en lo profundo de tu mente aunque no sabes cuáles son ni mucho menos cómo expresarlas.

Some curiosities:

Esta fue la última película del veterano actor Richard Lynch, quien falleció en 2012. Debió interpretar al reverendo Hawthorne, pero a causa de su deteriorada salud y una ceguera parcial las escenas con él no pudieron ser rodadas apropiadamente y debieron rehacerse usando al actor Andrew Prine que también interpreta a Francis Matthias.
A diferencia de la mayoría del cine actual, donde se abusa de los efectos especiales digitales, esta película no hace uso de esa tecnología en ninguna de sus escenas.
Uno de los jueces que participó en los juicios a las brujas de Salem en la realidad se llamó John Hawthorne.
Dentro del guión original hay escenas de una película dentro de la película, llamada Frankenstein and the Witch Hunter, que Matthias y su esposa van a ver gracias a entradas gratis que reciben del programa radial de Heidi. Rob Zombie filmó todas las escenas de esta sub-película usando a los actores Udo Kier, Camille Keaton y Clint Howard, pero en la edición final todas estas escenas fueron cortadas.
Rob Zombie escribió una novelización de la película junto con el escritor Brian Evenson. Según Zombie, la novela está basada en su guión original, que difiere mucho de la versión final del guión que fue usado para la película.