More Aryan than Human:
The Return of Repressed White Wisdom in Rob Zombie’s Firefly Family Films

5,694 words

“Our bodies come and go, but this blood stays forever” — Otis B. Driftwood

I am not a great fan of the horror film, at least in its current, Judaicly inspired “torture porn” incarnation. I did occasionally enjoy exposure to the “horror core” or “psycho-billy” music that started showing up here and there in New York in the early 90s. But I first encountered the work of Rob Zombie in the form of his early music videos, rather than the music itself, which I continue to find uninteresting; indeed, I likely saw the videos only in the context of Beavis and Butthead, and I also admit that it was the inclusion of hometown hero Iggy Stooge (the prototypical Wild Boy) that first caught my eye. Hence my interest in him has been largely as a visual artist, the creator of a unique and creepy personal aesthetic, like some “outsider artist” but too “low brow” or “pop” to be loved by the ironic hipsters — and so I was more than happy to hear that he was moving onto the Big Screen, if only in the form of cheap, ironic-hip horror.[1]

But first, what was interesting in those videos, such as “More Human than Human” or “Dragula”? While Zombie’s music is fairly typical hard rock/nu metal/psychobilly, his visual world is more unique.

It’s a world of white 60s TV low brow culture: garage bands, long tangled hair, fuzz guitars, home movies of Mad Men style family scenes for ironic effect, scary clowns, atom bombs and civil defense drills, sexy Russian go-go dancers, “nudie cutie” movies, George Barris Kustom Kars, Big Daddy Roth “Rat Fink” art, Munsters characters, grade z horror, Victorian funerary marbles, etc.

One thing you won’t see: negroes, or anything negroes find to be “cool.” By setting his work in landscapes, real or imagined, of late 50s – early 60s pop trash, he has created “implicitly white” environments; whatever their terrors, they are fundamentally homey, even nostalgic, for Whites, and more “safe” than any of today’s otherwise so advanced “urban” (i.e., negro) multi-culti wastelands

Under the guise of “just kidding” and “so bad it’s good” Rob Zombie may have, perhaps unintentionally, crafted a unique vision of White culture in its prime — 1972 marking, by the reckoning of many, including myself, the apex of White economic and hence cultural dominance.

One aspect of this, as Maury Knudsen has observed, has been the reversal of a long standing cultural trope: the wise or at least innocent rural character, advising or preyed upon by the smug or sinister city slicker. Over the last century, this has slowly been reversed — and we know by Whom — into the ignorant, perhaps dangerous hick — always explicitly White — and the educated, “progressive” urban dweller — always at least implicitly Judaic.[2] Perhaps the most obvious example of this was the decision by CBS to cancel its entire lineup of “rural sitcoms” such as Mayberry RFD and Green Acres, despite high ratings, simply to upgrade the network’s “image.”[3]

From now on, if you were pulled over by a Southern sheriff, as in the pilot episode of The Andy of Mayberry Show, the result would not be comic complications and heartwarming lessons, but rape, torture, and murder, à la films like Macon County Line. Or films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the most famous example of the genre at which Zombie would now try his hand.

Zombie’s version of the genre would be interestingly different. Let me be clear: as in his music videos, I don’t think Zombie has any hidden White Nationalist message — although, like everyone even mildly famous, he is subject to the occasional internet panics about supposed “racism.” Like many such, he falls under suspicion because he’s interested in his subject itself, not in observing the cultural taboos about it. Zombie, unlike the smug hipsters in his films, and in their audience, actually listens to these people.

Now, as Trevor Lynch has observed, under PC conditions only monsters and psychopaths are allowed to speak the truth.[4] And conveniently, while all White people are implicitly psychopaths — noted Judaic scientists like Freud and Adorno having diagnosed their unique group characteristics such as irrational and indelible “racism” and “anti-Semitism” — rural folk are the very worst.

Zombie’s characters are the worst White people on Earth, and they have something to say. What kind of wisdom might they provide, pushed out of Official Culture and hidden deep in the rural boondocks?

House of a Thousand Tropes

“In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen. . . . Divorced from the enlightenment of civilization, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folks were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days, and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.” — “The Picture in the House” by H. P. Lovecraft

We first meet the Firefly family in Zombie’s first film, House of a Thousand Corpses.

This is a literal “master piece” in which an apprentice demonstrates his mastery of the various skills and techniques of his trade. In this case, the horror genre. It is, to vary the metaphor, a tapestry of horror tropes from House of Frankenstein to the various Texas Chainsaw Massacres and Halloweens to Hannibal Lector. Not being a horror film geek, there may be more I’ve missed.

The advantage of genre style, in both film and book, which has caused many a mainstream or even “avant garde” artist to take on the format of a detective story or gangster film, is that its fairly rigid conventions allow the work to almost write or direct itself, so that the artist can concentrate on his own idiosyncratic touches, while also reassuring the viewer that he knows what‘s going on and what happens next. For example, Fritz Lang’s use of the clichés of the gangster melodrama in his Mabuse films.

While Hitchcock, for example, used and then deliberately subverted the cliché of the “caper” film in Psycho (killing off the “heroine” and major actor within 20 minutes), Zombie “plays fair” with the viewer; even when providing the now-expected “trick” ending he uses the now-iconic hand-from-the-earth shot from Carrie. What he does instead is provide some unconventional filling: a fairly sympathetic look at our culture’s chief monsters: White People.

The world of the Firefly family, like the cannibal clan in the Texas Chainsaw films, is implicitly White. The properly educated urban filmgoer does not expect to see a Black face in a movie set in Texas or the South, precisely because these settings play the role of homeland to madness, violence and evil. Blacks, partly due to the post-war Great Migration North, and partly to obscure their role in cultural decay, have been re-branded as “urban.” A black face can only appear as the victim of some cracker outrage, and only in the “bad old days.”

By contrast, the Northern zombie film maker, George Romero, frequently cast blacks in leading or heroic roles. Thus, by making a low-budget slasher film, rather than a “quality” Hollywood film, and setting it in the South, the filmmaker is free, even if he doesn’t know it, to simply show White people doing White things, even if it’s acting all crazy and killing everything in sight.

There are, in fact, only two black characters, one in each film. In House, a crazy homeless preacher is seen briefly; unlike the White psychos, his “information” is presented as comical, the way negros acting like White folk have traditionally been portrayed. In Rejects, a more substantial role is given to a pimp, who is somewhat implausibly supposed to be an old family friend — of course, just like Lando Calrissian, it’s he who betrays them to the law.

Just as the Southerner, the archetypal White Man, has been shunted aside and ignored, these “crazy” folks all have stories to tell, if only they could find the right audience. They resemble “Madman Muntz” in Barton Fink, who lops off people’s heads while typical urban, Judaic “genius” Fink ignores his stories, waiting to find some “real people” to write about.

Although set in 1977, the kids seem more like proto-millennial hipsters, touring the South to discover, and presumably write about, stupid “roadside attractions” set up by stupid yokels to rip off stupid (non-hipster) tourists. If the kids had survived, they might have an ironic travel blog today. Stopping for gas at “Capt. Spaulding’s Fried Chicken and Gasoline,” they are intrigued, ironically of course, with his collection of curiosities. But Spaulding is not charmed by their questions; he senses condescension, not genuine interest:

Captain Spaulding: Ya’ll think us folk from the country’s real funny-like, dontcha?
Bill Hudley: Jerry . . .
Captain Spaulding: Yeah, well saddle up the mule, ma. Slide me some grits, I’s got to get me some edu-cation, uh hu hu hu.
Bill Hudley: Jerry . . .
Captain Spaulding: You asshole!

Later, Capt. Spaulding will be even less interested in telling anything to the cops, to whom he again rehearses his irritation with “those stupid ass kids“:

Lt. George Wydell: What did you see? Who was she with? Where was she going?
Captain Spaulding: I don’t know. Yeah, that girl was in here last night. She was with three other stupid kids. They was nosing around . . . asking a bunch of stupid questions.
Deputy Steve Naish: Questions about what?
Captain Spaulding: [getting angry and agitated] Nothin’. You ask me, those stupid ass kids probably got turned around ass backwards and got themselves lost.
Lt. George Wydell: Is that all? Now, I want you to think really hard.
[Spaulding scratches his head with his forefinger, mocking “thinking hard”]
Captain Spaulding: Well, I don’t rightly know. You see, they wasn’t in here long enough for me to get up close and personal with ’em like I do with most of the other assholes that come wandering in here!

The kids are unable to resist the temptation of a new local legend to mock, even though it’s pouring rain, and Capt. Spaulding has to literally draw them a map. Along the way they pick up Baby, who corroborates the story, and offers them shelter at her family’s suspiciously (to us) nearby house.

At the Firefly house, we first meet Mother Firefly, and learn from her that there’s been no phone since 1957, since she no longer had anyone outside she was interested in talking to. Sensing a willing audience, she tries to interest them in their Halloween celebration and customs, but the hipsters patiently inform her that they’re “too old” for such nonsense. Like Fink, they don’t realize how . . . interesting . . . the Firefly’s customs would be. Though put out, Mother Firefly is still, like Capt. Spaulding, “just messing with you.” Soon things will take a darker turn.

Meanwhile, upstairs, Otis P. Driftwood, a drifter who joined up with the family some years ago, has kidnapped a whole busload of cheerleaders and is subjecting them to his Speckesque tuition. For the first time, we get to hear what these people would say if they got a chance.

Otis: [ranting to tied up cheerleaders] “Why,” you ask? “Why” is not the question. How? Now, that is a question worth examining. How could I, being born of such, uh . . . conventional stock, arrive a leader of the rebellion? . . . I brought you here for a reason, but unfortunately you and your sentimental minds are doing me no good! . . . I have to break free from this culture of mechanical reproductions and the thick encrustations dying on the surface!

The equally captive audience of hipsters is now being forced to endure some more typical old time White activities, such as family dinner, followed by amateur entertainment. The girls are openly bored, while the boys are . . . intrigued . . . by Baby and Mother.[5] But the increasing creepiness of the family members that continue to show up keeps everyone from openly mocking them. Albino Otis and uncontrollable filthy Grandpa descend and dinner begins.

The family finds it incomprehensible that these kids are looking around in the pouring rain for made up “Dr. Satan” nonsense while oblivious to the much more interesting Firefly family right around them.

Otis: Boy, I bet you’d stick your head in fire if I told ya you could see Hell. [The opening theme has informed us that “This is Hell, come on it.”]

Grandpa Hugo: What are you, Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter for the Daily Asshole?

And now it’s showtime! Baby‘s face is heavily powdered a garish white as she lip-syncs a Betty Boop song — typical old time White entertainment, or, as Zombie says on the commentary track, “some dumb redneck’s idea of glamour.” Things go South, as they say, about now:

Baby: [Baby gets pushed to the ground] Oh, you shouldn’t of done that!
Mary Knowles: Oh, really? Are you gonna do something about it?
Baby: I’ll do something, motherfucker. I’ll fucking cut your tits off and shove ’em down your throat!

Just like Dirty Dancing, it’s not a good idea to push Baby around. Not being a JAP, however, she doesn’t need her absent father to protect her, and pulls out a switchblade.

When next we see Mary, she is tied to a school chair and wearing a dunce cap. Having failed to learn her lesson, Otis tries his hand at remedial instruction.

Otis: Listen, you Malibu middle class Barbie piece of shit, I’m tryin’ to work here. Work? You ever work? Yeah, I’ll bet you have. Scoopin’ ice cream to your shit-heel friends on summer break. . . . I ain’t readin’ no funny books, mama. Our bodies come and go but this blood . . . is forever.

Bill, however, proves to be the perfect subject. He finally “gets it” or rather, gets his; he becomes his own roadside attraction: Fishboy, perhaps in a nod to Lovecraft.

Otis: Bill?
Mary Knowles: Is he okay?
Otis: He’s a good guy. Oh, he’s been a great help to me! A real blessin’. I mean, I couldn’t have asked for a better specimen. You don’t know what kind of dry spell I’ve had here. Total block, total block! But Bill . . . he’s okay.
Mary Knowles: Where is he? Where is he? Can I see him? Can I see Bill, please?
Otis: Let’s go see. Behold . . . Fishboy!
[Otis pulls back a curtain to reveal Bill’s mutilated corpse]
Mary Knowles: Oh my god! Oh my god, Bill! No, no, this can’t be real. This can’t be real, this can’t be real, this can’t be real.
Otis: Oh, it’s real. As real as I want it to be, mama.

Meanwhile, Jerry’s still dumb as a post:

[Baby starts cutting Jerry’s hair with the scissors]
Jerry Goldsmith: No wait please come on stop it! What do you want? What do you want from me? What do you want from us?
Baby: Please be quiet I don’t wanna slip. Ok one more. You get this right, I’ll let ya go. If you get it wrong you are fucked! Ok, who’s my favorite movie star?
Jerry Goldsmith: I don’t know . . . M . . . Marilyn Monroe!
Baby: Hmmm . . . no Betty Davis! Sorry you lose!
[Baby scalps Jerry]

The remaining kids now put through what seems like some kind of badly remembered initiation ritual, conducted by Otis who is now playing the whiteface role of Baron Samedi, involving bunny costumes and living burials, perhaps some rite death and rebirth that has become grotesquely distorted by years of isolation. Mary breaks free and makes a run for it.

Otis: Huntin’ humans ain’t nothin’ but nothin’. They all run like scared little rabbits. RUN, RABBIT, RUN! [6]

Baby finally gets to use her knife on Mary, a dozen or so times, and chants what seems like some drug-addled remembrance of traditional murder ballad, the sort an earlier generation of kids traveled the back country to collect and bring back to the local coffee house:

Baby: There once was a woman who lived with her daughter in a cabbage garden; along came a rabbit and ate up all the cabbages; the woman said, “Go into the garden and drive out the rabbit.” . . . ‘Shoo, shoo,’ said the maiden. [laughs maniacally]

Really, at this point I have no idea what’s going on. There’s underground passages with undead ghouls, endless tunnels lined with bones, suggesting the centuries old underground cannibal world in Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls,” an underground operating theater complete with waiting room, and finally Dr. Satan, who seems to have mutated into something resembling Cthulhu. The final girl escapes, then doesn’t. Whatever. I’m still wondering about the Fireflys’ back above ground, and Zombie’s next film suggests he too is more interested in the family than the plot.

What we’ve seen suggests, in line with René Guénon, that Tradition, though repressed and distorted, survives in folklore — “This blood lasts forever” – [7] and that, as Trevor Lynch adds, we are only allowed to hear it in the rantings of madmen, psychopaths, and clowns.

But what is the White Wisdom?

The Road Picture to, and from, Hell [8]

“It seems to us that it is more moral to lose oneself and let oneself be ruined than to save oneself. The great moralists have never been especially virtuous, but rather adventurers in evil, in vice, great sinners. You must find that all very repugnant” — Clavdia Chauchat to Hans Castorp during the Walpurgisnacht revels in Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain [New York: Vintage, 1996, p. 334]

If House is a journeyman’s work, The Devil’s Rejects is Zombie’s masterpiece.

In the sequel, Zombie, having demonstrated his mastery of the horror genre, discards this rickety structure — in the commentary track, he notes that he had planned to show “Dr. Satan” being carried out at the beginning but just decided to drop the whole thing — and produces a sort of road picture, if Easy Rider or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas were written by Jim Thompson.

The looser structure of the road picture, and its implicit role as the cinematic equivalent of the Bildungsroman, gives Zombie room to concentrate on the Firefly family and their interesting, though psychotic, ideology. Zombie signals his intentions by bookending his film with two Southern anthems.[9] The early morning police raid on the Firefly estate is choreographed to the languid FM strains of Greg Allman’s “Midnight Rider,” while boldly using the entirety of “Freebird” at the end as the surviving clan members suicidal drive into a police roadblock in a blaze of gunfire.

Although the soundtrack tells us that the rider won’t be caught, the bird is always free, we know that doom is just part of these characters lifestyle; it’s not a question of evading it as of making sure it’s as cool as possible.

The Fireflys’ do less teaching this time around. Baby explains to the female motel hostages how easily she controls them, and perhaps delivers a subliminal critique of the liberal’s gun control fetish:

“Stupid cunt, ain’t no bullets in this thing. It’s all about fucking mind power.”

Which might also serve as an excellent riposte to the idea that the White man’s colonial power was merely a matter of gun, as if giving Africans machine guns and powdered wigs would allow them to produce a parliamentary democracy; while Otis reveals to their male companions, who have seen too many “ordinary Joe reveals his heroism” movies, that he is the Devil, and is here to do the Devil‘s work.

Instead, it is the film maker is implicitly instructing the viewers through his narrative, and he has two remaining lessons: the cops, and other forces of “the good” are in fact just as bad, or worse, than the “bad guys;” and second, the art of choosing a noble, or at least, bad-ass, death.

Given what we’ve already seen, the first will be a hard task, but Zombie can rely on the audience’s love of the underdog — and although the Fireflys are murderous psychopaths, once driven out of their home base, they operate with the same “disadvantages” that granted Will Graham the chance to capture the brilliant Dr. Lecter.[10]

We’ve already seen a hint, so subtle it might take several viewings to pick up on it, towards the end of House when one of the minor Fireflys appropriates the shirt and shiny name badge of one of the dead cops. The cops we’ve already seen are pretty dumb: Here’s a couple walking into an ambush:

Lt. George Wydell: I myself always favored for the Hulk.
Deputy Steve Naish: The Hulk was dumb as shit! [11]

And in the sequel, enormous efforts are expended to figure out the significance of all the people running around town with names like Spaulding, Firefly, and Driftwood. They finally have to call in a film geek to explain it to them, and then, rather than expressing gratitude, they threaten him for not reverencing Elvis.[12]

Even under torture, Capt. Spalding can’t summon up any enthusiasm for the intelligence of Wydell’s dead brother, the source of his quest for revenge:

Yeah I remember him. Stupid fuck just like you. All I had to do was point him in a direction and there he went. Officer Wy-fuckin’-dell to the rescue.

This also introduces the further stupidity of the “heroism” of the ordinary Joe, who thinks he is morally superior but is really only someone who has read too many comic books:

Otis: Ha, that’s what they all say, “Fuck you.” Well it ain’t gonna save you. It don’t scare me none. And it certainly doesn’t make you a fuckin’ hero!

Wydell by contrast is portrayed as a man so crazed with Old Testament style vengeance that he becomes less sympathetic than the psychopaths he is pursuing.[13]

Wydell: It’s time to do what the good Lord would refer to as a “cleansing of the wicked”, and what my brother George . . . God rest his soul, used to call a 100% Alabama ass-kicking.

Gentlemen, let’s do what God made us to do!

As God is my witness, I have only just begun.

From the illusion lead me to truth. From darkness lead me to light. From death lead me to eternal life. [He nails Otis’ hands into the arms of a chair] Hallelujah! Are you feeling it brother?!

Lord I am your arm of justice. Lord I am your arm of justice. Lord I am your arm of justice. Your righteous sword of vengeance. Let my blows be true.

In short, unlike the cliché TV cop, the vengeful surviving Wydell brother is crusty but … un-likeable.[14]

Zombie is presenting a worldview in which good and evil are ultimately perceived as merely conventional, mere names, arbitrary designations which only the ignorant take seriously. Is such antinomianism Aryan? Are we not a moral people?

Perhaps Aldous Huxley, well acquainted with the wisdom traditions of the East and West, summed it up best:

If we accept the universe we must accept it for its divinely appalling and divinely beautiful inhumanity, or, in other words, because by our standards it is utterly unacceptable. — Music at Night (Penguin, 1950), p. 66.

Huxley is right to refer this nondual viewpoint to Job, who has been tortured as much as any of the Fireflys’ victims — remember, Otis is “the Devil and [is] here to do the Devil’s work” — yet fails to get any answer out of JHVH acceptable to Judaic moralism. Instead, he gets . . . monsters.

God is justified, not by His goodness, not by the reasonableness of what He ordains, but because, as His strange, enigmatic, and often sinister creations attest, He is powerful and dangerous and gloriously inventive beyond all human conception; because He is at once so appalling and so admirable, that we cannot sufficiently love or fear Him, because, in the last resort, He is absolutely incomprehensible. . . . Behemoth and Leviathan are more convincing than the most flawless syllogisms. Job is overwhelmed, flattened out; the divine logic moves on the feet of elephants. [ibid., p. 61]

Behemoth, Leviathan, Firefly . . . the nondual perspective, whether in morality — virtue vs. “antinomianism” — or metaphysics — groveling worship of the personal deity vs. “pagan pantheism” — is always perceived by the dualist as monstrous, or as itself a monster.[15]

From Arjuna’s terrifying vision of Krishna’s true form — “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds,” as Oppenheimer intones at Los Alamos — to Lovecraft’s hapless narrators confronted by “trans-dimensional horrors” — wisdom is only vouchsafed to those with the courage to step beyond conventional morality.[16]

The Jewish scriptures are, of course, a mixed bag of genuine Tradition and post-Exilic dualism — even apart from modern textual criticism, the Torah actually describes itself being cobbled together by the returning exiles — and fundamentally, if you will, this wisdom is profoundly non-Judaic.[16] The post-Exilic Jew, as Evola suggests,[18] having seen his temple razed and his kingdom destroyed, and having absorbed Zoroastrian dualism during his Babylonian Captivity, was broken in spirit, and thus too weak to accept the world, and so embarked on a “prophetic mission” to “mend the world” [tikkun olam] and regain his dominion by serving as a — compulsory — “light unto the nations.” And to the extent that America, and the South, have been colonized by the Judaic mindset through a particularly virulent Protestantism, even the State and Authority are alien forces imposing a compulsory black and white form of morality and vengeance.[19]

As Otis said to the cheerleaders: “. . . you and your sentimental minds are doing me no good.”

In the face of such wisdom, how is death prepared for? Surely not a triumph over evil, which is both conventionally defined and unlikely to happen. If we turn to the great Aryan works, from the Gita to the Iliad to the Song of Roland, the answer is clear: to do one’s duty, even if, like Paris or Antigone, one is “wrong,” and die gloriously.

Unlike the drug dealing hippie bikers of Easy Rider, these outlaws will not just be blown off the highway in some quick, meaningless encounter with nameless rednecks. Zombie will appropriate the entire length of “Freebird” for a slow motion Ragnarök between our protagonists, a heavily armed bullet-riddled Cadillac convertible — white, of course, and reminding us of the White Whale driven by Thompson and his Samoan attorney in Fear and Loathing — and a massive police road block, the high velocity violence of which may top the ending of Bonnie and Clyde — whose Michael J. Pollard appeared in the first scene of House, thus implicitly book-ending the two films.

The ending is far from despairing, any more than the ending of the NS-era film Opfergang.[20] Having literally overcome and killed the Judaic spirit of vengeance and ressentiment personified by Sheriff Wydell, Capt. Spaulding and the surviving younger generation of Fireflies have, like the heroine of the German film, become Übermenschen, for whom life and death are a matter of indifference.

In the Kali Yuga, in the Twilight of the West, in the wake of the loss of the regular opportunities for initiation provided by Traditionally structured societies, this may be the message we most need.[21]

Notes

1. Zombie wrote and directed his first film, House of 1000 Corpses, according to Wikipedia, “the tale of a group of unlucky young adults who stumble upon the Firefly Family, a family of sadistic and vicious murderers,” between 1999 and 2003, and did the same for his second, The Devil’s Rejects, in which, as Wikipeida again says, we find “the Firefly Family on the run from the law and a particularly vengeful sheriff whose brother had been murdered by them in the first film.”

Zombie later also wrote and directed a “re-imagining” of John Carpenter’s Halloween, which I don’t find interesting at all, since it doesn’t seem to have any particularly “white” content, implicit or otherwise, other than the casting, as the child Meyers, of the eerily Aryan Danish-Canadian child actor Daeg Faerch.

2. See “The Shifting Other” at http://mauryk2.com/2010/09/19/the-shifting-other-american-hysteria/

3. In House, Mayberry’s loveably dopey gas station attendant, Goober, reappears as “G. Ober,” the clerk at Tarrantino-esque Red Hot Pussy Liquors.

4. See his review of The Dark Knight. With Heath Leger’s Joker in mind, it’s perhaps interesting to note that not only is Capt. Spaulding in John Wayne Gacy clown makeup in most of the first film, Otis is in “whiteface” to suggest not very well an albino. In the second film, Spaulding is mostly out of makeup, while Zombie decided to ditch Otis’s makeup altogether, since it appeared “cartoonish” outside the house.

5. There’s a shot of Jerry with his hand on Mother Firefly thigh that exactly reproduces a shot of Dennis Hopper and the prostitute played by Karen Black (who plays Mother in the first film) in Easy Rider, right down to Jerry’s 70s porn mustache although I suspect this is coincidence.

6. This calls to mind John Updike, chronicler of WASP “angst” and, according to Gore Vidal, one of the “OK goys” acceptable to the Judaic literary establishment. The kids’ situation suggests that “Rabbit” Angstrom’s midlife crisis would seem a pretty minor thing right now.

7. As Evola puts it: “In most cases, savage tribes should not be considered as precivilized states of mankind, but rather as extremely degenerated forms of remnants of very ancient races and civilizations. Even though the above mentioned particulars are found among savage tribes and are expressed in materialistic, dark, and shamanic forms, this should not prevent us from recognizing the meaning and the importance they assume once they are brought back to their true origins. . .. These forms coincide with what I have called the ‘spiritual virility’ of the world of Tradition” (Revolt Against the Modern World, p. 46).

8. The “special edition” DVD includes a “making of” bonus disc called “30 Days in Hell.”

9. It’s probably the most Southern horror movie since the man-eating electrified worm epic Squirm, where Mystery Science Theater’s Tom Servo sneered “That’s way over-Southerning.” The use of “Freebird” in particular raised the ire of fans and especially the more PC Southerners who model themselves on Atticus Finch. See, for example, Tony Lazlos’s “Redneck Pride: Why Rob Zombie Sucks”; of course, “redneck pride” is a bad thing.

10.

Hannibal Lecter: Then how did you catch me?
Will Graham: You had . . . disadvantages.
Hannibal Lecter: What disadvantages?
Will Graham: You’re insane.

However, as Lecter will go on to point out, Graham also has the unwanted advantage of being “just like [Lecter]” just as the White audience is, on some level, just like the Fireflys.

11. We recall that Otis “ain’t readin’ no funny books, mama” and Grandpa sneering about Jimmy Olsen of the Daily Asshole.

12. The Marx Brothers, of course, epitomize the Judaic technique of hiding behind assumed names, the more ridiculous the better to mock the stupid goyim.

13. Tarantino gets a similar effect in Inglourious Basterds, where the Nazis are more likeable than even Brad Pitt, to say nothing of the grotesque Bear Jew, played by Eli Roth, the pioneer of the aforementioned “torture porn.” The actual torture scene in Rejects could have come from Basterds, including the climactic building fire. The scene in House where Baby dances around while scalping Jerry, complete with the funky song on the radio taking over the soundtrack, seems a homage to the ear scene from Reservoir Dogs, while Zombie would return the favor by contributing a faux trailer called Werewolf Women of the S.S. to Tarantino’s Grindhouse in 2007. While frequently been condemned by moralists, his muse, Uma Thurman, whose father is a noted authority on Tibetan Buddhism, is able to give a more favorable view: “Quentin’s not a moralist, and he’s freed himself from that traditional blanket distinction where there’s a good guy and a bad guy and each must behave according to his role. I think it’s exciting to see something that’s morally unpredictable, and in this twisted way you can feel the humanity somewhere inside a caricature-ish kind of storytelling” (W Magazine, May, 2004).

14. Tom Servo again, reacting to a pompous Air Force general in The Starfighters.

15. “This explains why the first generation of Egyptologists was led by devotional religion to recognize in the features of pharaonic regality those of the Antichrist or of the princeps huius mundi” (Revolt, p. 43, n. 8).

16. Arjuna, the Templars — whose “secret” was a monstrous head — the “greater holy war” of the Sufis, warriors all. This is Evola’s reason for disputing Guénon’s privileging of contemplation over action: wisdom is an achievement, an activity, not a passive state.

17.  It is also not to be confused with the nihilistic relativism of the “deconstructionist” college professor or his hipster students, though Zombie’s audience may be full of them. In Ken Wilber’s terms, it is trans-moral, not pre-moral.

18. See Chapter 31 of Revolt, “Syncope of the Western Tradition,” for his discussion of the “desperate” and “divided” Jewish soul and its negative influence on the Aryan spirit.

19. While vengeance seems to have some purchase in Nordic culture, it is ultimately tempered by the ultimate fate of the gods themselves: Ragnarök. So ends Rejects as well.

20. See Derek Hawthorne’s “Opfergang: Masterpiece of National Socialist Cinema.”

21. For Evola, the only opportunity for self-overcoming, for “spiritual virility,” open to modern man is the resolute concentration on the transcendent, so that, in extreme moments, such as the risk of death, a “rupture of levels” may occur corresponding to what would occur in the death mimicking trials of traditional initiation rituals; we recall the degenerate versions of initiatory trials at the end of House. See the last chapter of Ride the Tiger or the essay “The Concept of Initiation.” Evola himself put this into practice during the Second World War (or Second European Civil War) by walking the streets of Vienna during Allied air raids, during one of which he sustained the injuries that crippled him for the remainder of his life.