Send in the deadly clown
Rob Zombie’s 31 features the memorable psycho-villain Doom-Head
Sometimes being ahead of the curve isn’t a good thing. Metal-rocker-turned-horror-filmmaker Rob Zombie, for one, is tired of hearing about killer clowns. Doom-Head, the most memorable psycho-villain (among many), in his latest film 31, is an assassin in clown makeup, whose clients include Father Murder (Malcolm McDowell), the impresario of a stylized competition to the death.
Zombie couldn’t foresee the epidemic of “creepy clowns” in 20 U.S. states and parts of Canada in 2016. Nor could he know that a spiked club — a murder instrument of choice in the movie — would become iconic, thanks to the villainous Negan in TV’s The Walking Dead.
“There’s always something,” Zombie says wryly. “The movie was long finished before the clowns, or The Walking Dead, started happening. The first time I heard the clown thing, I thought, ‘Oh, this is probably a joke.’
“Then I started to hear that it might be an elaborate marketing plan on my part. I wish I were that brilliant.”
And then, of course, there’s the ultimate evil-clown, The Joker.
Doom-Head — played with chilling intensity by Richard Brake — could be some as-yet unrealized version of that character. I mention that that particular psycho-clown image dates back to the 1940s.
“And even then, the Batman comics ripped it off from The Man Who Laughs, the silent movie,” Zombie notes. “But we had the luck to come out the same year as Suicide Squad, so everybody had The Joker on their minds.”
Zombie has stayed pretty busy since changing directions from music to movies with the slasher flicks House of 1,000 Corpses, the followup The Devil’s Rejects and a reboot of Halloween that still holds the record for the highest Labour Day opening-weekend box office.
And he’s done it through various ups and downs in the horror genre. The flick 31 — which debuts on shudder.com this month — was brought to life partly through crowdfunding. “It’s not like it was a struggle to make. Crowdfunding did not pay for the whole movie. It was kind of an experiment. I didn’t know much about crowdfunding before, and now I know way too much about it.
“The business is always changing. I went through this in the music business, so I’m used to change. A movie like The Devil’s Rejects made a fortune on DVD. Now the DVD market has dried up and it’s all about streaming services. So you step up to the plate.”
Zombie says he’s already got offers (which he’s refused), to fund a sequel to 31 — about a van-load of ’70s carnies who are taken hostage in a mansion full of rich people dressed like 18th-Century French dandies (and their killer accomplices). Participants in the bloody game include characters played by the likes of Laurence Hilton-Jacobs (Welcome Back, Kotter), Meg Foster (They Live), and Zombie’s wife and leading-lady-of-choice Sheri Moon Zombie.
And yes, it is meant as a kind of a metaphor for the one per cent.
“I had those characters and concept fluctuating in my head for a long time. I thought, ‘This is believable. This probably goes on in the world — people that are rich enough to get away with murder for fun. They put on their little costumes, take them off at the end, put their tie back on and go back to work. It may take place in more corners of the world than we want to know.”
And for wife Sheri, the role of victim-on-the-run is a switch.
“Usually, she’s more on the other side of things. This time she was receiving the havoc as opposed to causing it. The hunter becomes the hunted.” Is she happy with the change? “Probably, we never talked about it. She’d be much happier if she were to play something where she didn’t have to get all bloody or do anything violent.”
That chance may come if Zombie gets a green light for his non-horror feature debut — a project about the last years of Groucho Marx (when he was allegedly abused by his caregiver, a Canadian woman named Erin Fleming).
“I first read that book about seven years ago, and contacted the writer maybe two or three years ago and we’ve been developing that ever since.
“It’s a sad story. It’s basically about the last three years of Groucho’s life, old and sick and having strokes and he had this woman who was taking care of him, and yet seemed completely abusive.
“It’s Sunset Boulevard in a way.”