I was utterly unaware of Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem until about a week ago, when my friend (mille tendresse, Scott) brought it to my attention for its shameless deployment of The Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs. I am pleased to tell you we doubled billed this with Mother of Tears for maximum Autumn Equinox witch vibes, and it did not disappoint. The mise-en-scène and production design of this picture is basically a goth punk princess fantasy. This set smells of incense, mud, ozone, wood fire, and the air tastes like red wine and your date lighting your (clove) cigarette. Heidi Hawthorne (Sheri Moon Zombie) strikes me as a woman who would wear Ilk perfume’s Libertine, with its cognac and bitter orange, or the cold darkness of Memoize’s Shadow. I also thought about a perfume I hadn’t smelled in years: Slumberhouse’s Norne, with its evocation of fog, fir needles, and hemlock. It is Norne that feels right, though Shadow seems an apt alternative.
There are aspects of Suspiria in the film’s colour palette of scarlet and candy floss pink, but I could also feel the presence of that arcane forebear of all witch films: Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922). Since no one can quite decide whether Häxan is….(cough) educational or….a litany of its maker’s personal fetishes, it seems to reside in a liminal space where it is simultaneously considered historically important but could also easily be described as an extremely “vibes forward” work. Häxan is a film you could put on in the background for your spooky sex party*, or screen for your graduate seminar on documentary film.
Lords of Salem on the other hand, is much more of a straight forward genre picture, albeit with some inspiring visual flourishes that include images from the Méliès Brothers’ Trip to the Moon (1902) displayed as murals on the walls of Heidi’s apartment.
I will say Sheri Moon Zombie is perhaps not at her best here, but that may well be because you too might shit the bed if you had to share screen time with Patricia Quinn (yes, MAGENTA FROM ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW). In this scene, Megan (Quinn) reads Heidi’s palm, and what seems like a harmless evening of intergenerational wine and gossip becomes something far darker.
After a certain point, we disappear into a vortex of Alejandro Jodorowsky/Ken Russell/Dario Argento images and I actually prefer it when the whole thing just goes for nothing but neon, hissing, and creepy atmosphere.
Moon Zombie has a spooky, broken doll quality in her scenes of possession; there is something uncanny about how she cocks her head, as if she is about to sleepwalk, or fuck you up, or both. She embodies a silent aura of menace and vulnerability and when her performance is restricted to movement-only, it lets the other cast members do the heavy lifting. The performances on offer from the elder witches are magnificent, glittering, loaded with a severe power that feels like a spell in its own right.
Lacy (Judy Geeson), Megan (Patricia Quinn), and Sonny (Dee Wallace) are the kinds of legends you don’t fuck with, and their gravitas is fitting alongside the maniacal darkness emanating Meg Foster’s Margaret Morgan, the original sower of discord in this version of Salem witchery: smeared in dirt, cackling, she is afraid of nothing. A true crone who has seen it all, Margaret Morgan is driven only by a persistent desire for power. Like the witches of the Three Mothers trilogy, these women are very much in league with the Devil and his various minions, and older women put the bodies of younger women in service to the dark lord’s bidding. It is this aspect that gives the film its unsettling ick, women inflicting violence on other women in the service of a devil coded as male: masked surgeons, diabolical priests and popes, unsettling imps, and huge hairy beasts are all bearers of violence towards a helpless or immobilised Heidi. The mothers and crones persist, while the maidens are sacrificed. Where Mother of Tears destroys witch power, Lords of Salem allows them to continue, their cruelty unchecked. That said, this is a film that abandons narrative cohesion in its last fifteen minutes in favour of increasingly trippy and gory visuals, and it is perhaps best enjoyed through a haze of red wine, with your jaw hanging open as you let the colours and the opening chords of All Tomorrow’s Parties wash over you.
*What would be truly chic for that setting is a supercut of all the most sensuous moments from Häxan, both Suspirias, and Baba Yaga.
Reading this was the most fun I've had in days. Bravo!!
Fantastico! Always a pleasure to read your work 💕