Lords of Salem is divisive
filmmaking. On the one hand, the movie is a visual feast. Zombie has a great
eye for composition. That trait has been evident since his first film. Much
like Zombie’s incoherent debut House of
1000 Corpses, Lords of Salem has little
in the way of plot. Unlike the former, which was a tribute to (derivative of) Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Zombie’s most
recent effort offers a smart (if sparse) take on panics over subliminal satanic
messages in metal music. That Lords of
Salem has little in the way of plot development aids the film, rendering
its freaky imagery all the more unsettling. In contrast to Halloween II – a slasher movie intercut with inappropriate unicorn
imagery – Lords of Salem’s hallucinatory
images work well with the witchcraft theme. The dream-like imagery and floating
narrative movement chimes with the plot’s central fugue-inducing record. Do not
be fooled by the thudding captions that signal time passing: Lords of Salem is more akin to The Serpent and the Rainbow than The Shining. Indeed, the overall effect of
striking set-pieces and drifting narrative is reminiscent of Lucio Fulci’s scrapbook-like
The Beyond, which is why I really
enjoyed it (and probably why many will hate it). Lords of Salem arguably suffers from being a little too glossy, outlandish,
or even self-conscious, and is certainly not a masterpiece. However, for my
money it is easily Zombie’s best film to
date.
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