FROM TV TO FILM AND BACK AGAIN: ZOMBIE's CREATURE FEATURE SHOW

Despite all his showmanship, Roth would never become the biggest celebrity in the Splat Pack. Even with his appearances in a couple of Tarantino films, there was little chance that Roth could top the celebrity of Robert Cummings, better known as Rob Zombie. In the late 1980s, Zombie formed White Zombie, a noise metal group. After several years, a few album releases, and a shift from noise metal to groove metal, White Zombie signed with Geffen Records and released their major label debut album, La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One, in 1992. The group catapulted into fame after the music video for their single ‘Thunder Kiss ‘65’ was featured on MTV's popular animated programme, Beavis and Butt-head. While a member of White Zombie, he began dabbling in film-making, directing music videos for the band. After recording and releasing another successful album, Zombie disbanded White Zombie in 1998 and began recording and touring as a solo artist. Zombie soon entered into feature-length film-making by writing and directing House of 1000 Corpses. A career in film followed, making Zombie a rarity: a successful musician who became an equally successful film-maker, becoming ‘a cross-platform juggernaut who delivers variations of trashy yet clever schlock-horror to all manners of media, from film to record … to the stage’ (Erlewine, 2007).

Zombie's journey from heavy metal front man to ‘cross-platform juggernaut’ was not an easy one, as his movie career had an inauspicious start. If Zombie's music was a more danceable version of metal, his dark, brutal films did not make many people feel like dancing. After Zombie had successfully designed Universal Studio's ‘Halloween Horror Nights’ attraction for their studio tour, Universal financed Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses. Zombie and company shot much of the film on the Universal lot during 1999 and 2000. Things turned sour, however, when Universal executives disliked Zombie's violent film which, despite its often cartoony and psychedelic palette, is brutal, gory and downbeat. Suspecting the film would unavoidably receive an NC-17, Universal dropped Corpses from their release schedule in 2001. After floating in limbo for about a year, the film landed at Lionsgate. The distributor managed to get an R rating for Zombie's film and gave it a cinema release in April 2003.