Lords of Salem

Directed by Rob Zombie

Viewed on Shudder

 

Lords of Salem may be the strangest movie in Rob Zombie’s filmography. Not just because of the bizarre visuals that appear in it, but because of how out of place this movie is when you consider the types of movies he usually makes. His arguably best known works are his reboot of the Halloween franchise and its sequel, and while I haven’t seen those yet, I can say that they probably aren’t deliberately paced atmospheric horror. Looking through his previous movies he tends toward a much more upfront style, usually involving graphic violence, as House of 1000 Corpses did, which I have previously looked at, but Lords of Salem is a complete reversal of this, featuring nearly no violence and not featuring a terrible murderer. Is this a change for the better? Let’s find out!

Lords of Salem is a classic tale of the evils of witches, as told through the strange events happening to Heidi, a DJ living and working in Salem, Massachusetts, after she receives an odd wooden box containing a mysterious vinyl record. After briefly listening to the record, and being baffled by the unsettling music that it produces, Heidi and her co-DJs decide to play it on the radio and some women in the town become entranced by the mysterious tunes. Following this, Heidi begins to experience odd goings on around her and is unsure of what to do after more and more bizarre occurrences happen.

I don’t want to go much further than that, there isn’t a lot more of the plot I could reveal without getting into spoiler territory and I want to avoid that for as long as I can. Plot for this movie is less important anyway because Lords of Salem focuses much more on being an atmospheric and visually driven film. Which makes sense for me because Zombie’s talents have always been much more pronounced in building atmosphere than they have been in writing complex plot lines.

In that regard Lords of Salem mostly succeeds, I genuinely enjoyed the spooky atmosphere and I liked a lot of the cinematography, particularly the sequences that take place in Heidi’s apartment building. The way the hallways are shot there reminds me a lot of The Shining, and these long hallway shots are used effectively to establish similar feelings of unease. A lot of other sequences also use similar methods of shooting and it results in a movie that looks quite nice, especially considering its reported budget of one and a half million dollars. This shooting style, combined with the visuals, helps make Lords of Salem a visually engaging film, but that engagement isn’t always enough.

For as many visuals here that are striking and work well there are almost as many misfires. Zombie’s experience in designing the visuals for his musical career certainly helped him craft a great deal of striking imagery, but there’s a big problem here and it is that Rob Zombie is not good at editing his own work. Even though there are many sequences that use haunting imagery that will stay with me, some of my personal favorites being the opening sequence that features the colonial era witches and a scene in which Heidi is standing in a completely barren room mesmerized by a purple neon sign of a crucifix, there are many more scenes that just seem to miss the mark. One example of the latter is a scene in which Heidi is out with her dog and she sees someone walking down a path, who, from a distance looks like a guy walking a dog. When they get closer it is clear that it is a goat on a leash being walked by a man with some kind of odd makeup on his face.

A lot of these visuals that didn’t work for me kind of blurred the line between being creepy and being humorous and I’m not sure if that was intentional. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was because Rob Zombie seems like the kind of artist where he enjoys blurring those lines, there were moments in House of 1000 Corpses that had some dark humor. If this is on purpose then I have no idea why he would include shots like that, it kind of took me out of the movie and undermined the atmosphere that was previously successfully being built. What’s good is that there aren’t a ton of moments that took me out and I enjoyed the bizarre visuals peppered throughout the film. These visuals are definitely the strongest aspect of Lords of Salem.

Unfortunately there are also issues here, the main one being the film’s pacing. I have no problem with slower paced movies, especially visually unique ones, but Lords of Salem tends to drag a bit as it goes on. It isn’t a problem initially, as the story begins nicely and chugs along at a deliberate pace for the first act or so, but once Heidi starts seeing these oddities in earnest, the pace slows down considerably. I wouldn’t have had a problem with this if the film was edited down to compensate for this but the runtime of this movie is one hour and forty minutes and there just wasn’t enough to keep things going for that long. Now I do enjoy movies that are much longer than this but the issues with the uneven visuals exacerbated the tone problems for me, giving me long stretches of the movie where not too much happens and then shows me something weird that doesn’t do much for me. Having not entirely memorable characters didn’t exactly help in this regard.

It’s not that all the characters here are bad, most of them are perfectly serviceable, but that’s where the problem lies, when the main characters are just kind of there it is difficult to become invested in what is going on. The performances aren’t bad, in fact I enjoyed many of the more over the top performances that villainous characters indulged in but that only highlighted the problem more for me, that the protagonists of this story were far less interesting than the antagonists and that can be fine in plot driven movies but when the film spends so much time focusing on these people who aren’t terribly unique. They aren’t bad characters per se, just a bit bland.

While there is quite a bit of wasted potential here I did, on the whole, enjoy Lords of Salem. There was more than enough visually interesting imagery to keep me engaged even if it was hit or miss, and I liked the throwback nature of the story. The pacing left a bit to be desired as did some of the characterization but I’d still say there’s more good than bad to be had here. I would recommend Lords of Salem to people who like slower paced atmospheric movies that focus on visuals over plot. Not so much for everyone else though.