Lionsgate released Rob Zombie’s Firefly Trilogy in a set earlier this month. If you choose these films for your Halloween movie marathon, Zombie’s grimy, unsettling, bleak, ugly, uncomfortable aesthetic is enhanced by 4K.
It begins with House of 1000 Corpses, the movie Universal disowned. Lionsgate swooped in to the rescue. The film introduces the Firefly family, clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), Otis (Bill Moseley), Baby Firefly (Sherri Moon Zombie) and mother Firefly (Karen Black) but this has the trappings of a traditional slasher movie.
Some kids on a road trip (Rainn Wilson, Erin Daniels, Chris Hardwick and Jennifer Jostyn) stop by Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters & Madmen. They also pick up Baby as a hitchhiker, an homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so if they ever had the sense to leave, she gets them to drive her to the family’s home. Once it’s too late, the kids discover past crimes of the Firefly family too.
The usual accoutrements of horror provide a lot of exquisite 4K darkness. The night behind Spaulding’s blinking sign and the dark night ride are pure and deep. When we get to Otis’s house with the kidnapped cheerleaders, the darkness of his dwelling offers no respite. Jostyn’s run through the dark forest and graveyard is all the more hopeless in 4K darkness. It ends in a dark well and caverns.
Given Zombie’s filmography, it’s interesting that 1000 Corpses escalates the style from canted angles to quicker cutting to eventual split screens. He doesn’t unleash it all at once.
Surround sound adds to the despair with rain, the echoey threats of “Mary, we’re gonna get you,” and the creaky lowering of the casket into the well.
The Devil’s Rejects is a sun-drenched road movie. So all the blood and bruises are clear and full frontal, but it’s the psychological torture of the motel hostages (Geoffrey Lewis, Priscilla Barnes, Kate Norby and Lew Temple) that’s scariest. Otis, Baby and Spaulding are on the run, but Mama (Leslie Easterbrook now) is arrested.
Shot on Super 16mm, the graininess adds to the ‘70s aesthetic. It does reach nighttime with a deep black sky and shadows in Charlie (Ken Foree)’s barn.
3 From Hell was made 14 years later. Haig is clearly ailing but I’m glad he got to do one last scene as Spaulding. This is the digital one and it looks anachronistically modern, even with a scratch filter on earlier scenes. It still doesn’t look like 1988, though it is interesting to see these characters in a more modern context. Digital photography has its own sort of starkness, and Baby is still rambling all the same no matter what kind of camera is on her.
There is some good darkness in the third entry. Baby is in a prison with a dark underground tunnel, and also goes to solitary confinement. The green neon of the motel gives an eerie effect.
If you want to delve further, Devil’s and Hell have documentaries over two hours each. Zombie and cast do commentaries and there are plentiful bonus features from all previous releases.