While Rob Zombie was establishing himself as one of metal’s most thrilling entertainers, first as frontman of White Zombie and then as a solo artist, he also had a little side-hustle going on. It was during this era that Zombie, now a well-renowned horror director of films such as House Of 1000 Corpses, 2007’s Halloween and its 2009 sequel, The Munsters and more, put himself through self-taught film school.
Making films was something he always wanted to do, Zombie once told Metal Hammer’s Joel McIver, but he had no idea how to make it happen. “I first started directing White Zombie videos and my solo videos,” he said, “and then I did them for Ozzy and Black Label Society and other bands.” Zombie stated that making these music videos became his crash-course in filmmaking. “I’d always studied movies and read about them obsessively since I was a little kid, and then I got a chance to make one, so I took it and ran with it.”
Whilst he’s most associated with horror movies, Zombie said that he’s always wanted to move around between genres too. “The first one I did [House Of 1000 Corpses, 2003] was a horror movie, but I didn’t want to make another horror movie when the sequel came along, so I went out of my way to make it look and feel different. I wanted to make it feel like a postmodern Western, and ever since then there have been other projects that I’ve wanted to get off the ground.” The problem, he revealed, is that having success in one area means you get branded with that. “Someday I’ll make some other types of films. I just love making movies, although getting the money to make them is so fucking hard that saying no to someone who is offering you money to make one seems psychotic.”
Despite experiencing life at the top end of the music industry – he was nominated for a Grammy for 1996’s Alice Cooper collaboration Hands Of Death (Burn Baby Burn) – Zombie reckons that the movie business is much more difficult to navigate than music. “It’s about bigger money,” he opined. “If you want to operate on a big level and have your movie in lots of theatres all around the world, the amount of money it takes to get those things done is insane. Even a low-budget movie costs $15-20million. If you asked someone to give you $15million to make a record, they’d be like, ‘Fuck you!’”
