The film opens with a scene from the black and white genre classic “Creep show”, immediately the director is making a reference to the old 70s style of B-Movie Horror, while at the same time introducing a classic piece of Horror Iconography into the picture. The opening shot is a typical long shot, setting the scene of a lonely gas station out in the middle of nowhere. This is a visual cliché that is commonly used in horror. The lights are flickering and a lens filter has been added to add a green glow to the setting. The scene is set up that way purposely so the director can introduce an element of fear from the start, through the use of these tried and tested codes that the viewer picks up on, on a connotive level.
The camera tracks all the way across the forecourt, the film stock is grainy and the motion is jumpy, as if we are actually looking through the eyes of whoever is about to enter the garage, again a technique often used to add a touch of realism to a scene. Here the director attempts to make the audience think the events are actually happening (Blair witch project, Texas chainsaw 2). Once inside the garage the setting is like a horror fans paradise, each frame is filled with pieces of horror iconography in the form of B-movie props, clown masks and freak show exhibits that are placed all over the set. The director has worked very closely with the set designer to create a dazzling, spooky visual effect and I think it works extremely well in establishing a certain time and mood. This is also the point where we are introduced to “Captain Spalding”, played by Sid Haig.
Spalding is the stereotypical hillbilly redneck character so often used in this type of narrative, but Zombie has added a clever twist to the character. He is made up like a circus clown, the costume and make up work brilliantly to make him appear sinister and disturbing. Spalding is way over the top but I definitely wouldn’t want to meet him in a backwater gas station in the middle of nowhere and this is the impression the director wants you to get from this bizzare character. I think Zombie has used a clown as the central Protagonist to surprise the audience rather than use some typical half-witted gas station clerk as you would come to expect with a plot like this also clowns and clown masks are significant of Halloween which is when the story takes place and of course everyone has had nightmares about clowns!
The next part of the analysis is the opening titles. This is a montage of graphic images shown in quick cuts with the films theme tune (performed by Zombie) playing in the background. I think this is the part of the film that Zombie decided to make up for all the parts of the original that he had been pressured into cutting. His use of flash cuts, slow motion, split screen and chilling negatives if viewed in one single run just comes across as quite a cool and modern addition to the soundtrack, not dissimilar to one of his videos, but when viewed in slow motion this becomes a disturbing, nightmarish overdose of psychopaths in masks, severed dolls heads, chickens in cages, clowns, operating tables dead bodies, erotica and so on, the list reads like a Horror movie-Sub genre A-Z, and this is fundamentally what it is. At first I was quite shocked, but the director has set out to make his genre debut memorable and his “horror fan” approach to the whole project meant if the images had been any less disturbing or the horror imagery any less constant, the die-hard fans wouldn’t have accepted the film and really they were the audience this film was made for. In this short sequence Zombie has paid tribute to all of the Horror film Sub-genres, and by doing this he has given the audience a glimpse of what to expect, which is a pure horror film in every sense of the word drawing material from Classic Horror right through to Demonic Possession and Teen Terror.
Finally we arrive at the story of the four twenty something’s travelling cross-country, the starting point of the main storyline. The audience is introduced to the two unfortunate couples while they are driving along a quiet road at night; the two male characters are holding a conversation while the girls sleep in the back, all this is shot from outside the car looking in, putting the audience in close enough position to witness the scene that is taking place without feeling intrusive. This setting is a stark contrast to the fast, shocking images we have just witnessed in the credits. The mood has been shifted to suit the “everything is normal” feel that is used to set the equilibrium to start a narrative structure of this kind. I think Zombie purposely tried to echo “Texas chainsaw massacre”, especially at this point but rather than make what would be seen as a carbon copy he has made it seem almost like a sequel, a tribute to one of the greatest horror films of the 1970’s. Here he is setting a standard and trying to pay homage to the gritty films he grew up watching, but, at the same time he is also saying that “House of a 1000 corpses” is not going to be another “Scream” or “I know what you did last summer”, which were the standard to which he had witnessed the genre reduced to and although the plot is hardly groundbreaking, I think Zombie has made a conscious effort to learn from the mistakes made by previous films in an attempt to perfect the Genre.
