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9 years ago

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As it turns out, Hell really doesn’t want them.

We first told you back in October that Rob Zombie was developing a follow-up to The Devil’s Rejects, a film he had been teasing on social media for some time. Earlier this week, our sources scooped us on an update. The rumor, at this time, is that the sequel is filming soon, with the potential title The Devil’s Rejects 2: Three from Hell.

Again, this is all to be taken as rumor at this point in time, but we’ve heard enough to be pretty damn sure that the Firefly family is coming back. But… HOW?

At the end of The Devil’s Rejects, Otis, Baby and Captain Spaulding are gunned down by the police, the murderous trio going out in a blaze of glory while Skynyrd’s “Freebird” plays over the visuals. Zombie made sure to show us that each member of the family was indeed shot, and the suggestion was clear: all three were killed in that epic gunfight.

So if the so-called Devil’s Rejects are definitively dead as of thirteen years ago, how the hell can they come back for a sequel? The key may lie in the title: The Devil’s Rejects.

As implied by the potential title of Three from Hell, Rob Zombie very easily could bring back Otis, Baby and Spaulding by simply playing on the title for the previous film. The moniker “The Devil’s Rejects” implied that even the Devil himself doesn’t want the Firefly clan, so it’s fair to speculate that Zombie will bring them back to life by simply having the Devil, well, spit them back out. “Hell doesn’t want them… Hell doesn’t need them… Hell doesn’t love them,” sings Zombie in his song The Devil’s Rejects, which really says it all.

If they’re not even accepted in Hell, maybe their wrath can continue on Earth. This would of course require Zombie to go supernatural with his sequel to the grounded-in-reality The Devil’s Rejects, but the supernatural just so happens to be something Zombie is really comfortable playing around with. Sure, he killed off his three most memorable characters back in 2005, but how cool would it be to see them walk straight out of the fiery depths of Hell and continue carrying out their murderous deeds here on Earth?

Remember that promo image (above) of the Firefly trio walking down the road, seemingly *after* the shootout on the road? It was never actually featured in the film, and certainly could be looked back on today as the very first image from “Three from Hell.”

Another potential way to bring the Rejects back to life lies in a deleted scene from The Devil’s Rejects, featuring House of 1000 Corpses character Doctor Satan. In the deleted scene, excised because it was a bit too supernatural to fit in with the tone of the rest of the film, we see that Doctor Satan was brought to a nearby hospital after the shootout at the start of The Devil’s Rejects. There he rips out the throat of a nurse, played by Rosario Dawson, and we’re never shown what happens to Doctor Satan from there.

Perhaps Doctor Satan, known to conduct peculiar medical experiments, is the key to bringing Otis, Baby and Spaulding back to life; according to the character’s Wiki bio, “The original tale of Dr. Satan told that he used patients who were near death in experiments.”

Just imagine Three from Hell picking up directly after the events of The Devil’s Rejects. Where would the wounded/dying/dead bodies of Otis, Baby and Spaulding be taken to after the shootout on the road? The hospital, perhaps? And who’s lying in wait at the hospital, which Zombie showed us in that aforementioned deleted scene? Yup. The good doctor.

No matter how Zombie chooses/has chosen to go about bringing the Rejects back to life, one thing is for certain: he’ll have to re-embrace the less-than-realistic aesthetic of House of 1000 Corpses, presumably going full-on supernatural with a batshit tale of murderous maniacs coming back from the dead. An exciting prospect, to say the least.

How would YOU like to see Zombie bring the Firefly trio back? Or are they better off dead?

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Writer in the horror community since 2008. Editor in Chief of Bloody Disgusting. Owns Eli Roth's prop corpse from Piranha 3D. Has two awesome cats. Still plays with toys.

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Editorials

Taking a Closer Look at the ‘Christmas Carol’ Ghosts of Ti West’s ‘Ebenezer’

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2 days ago

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July 24, 2026

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The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.

Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.

That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.

Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’

The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’

Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’

Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”

And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.

Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.

Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.

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