Interviews
Rob Zombie on How Terry Reid’s Music Helped Resurrect ‘The Devil’s Rejects’ [Interview]
Rob Zombie is back and he’s bringing his homicidal Firefly Family with him in 3 From Hell, debuting this week in theaters via Fathom. That’s a pretty neat trick, considering that all those characters died in a hail of gunfire at the end of their last film, The Devil’s Rejects, way back in 2005.
In a new interview with Bloody-Disgusting, we asked Rob Zombie about what it took to resurrect the characters, behind the screen and also on the page. And it turns out we have none other than English rock star Terry Reid to thank for the return of the Fireflies!
“I’ve always loved the characters. They were always close to me,” Zombie says. “I always thought about resurrecting them but I never did, obviously, for that amount of time. I would always move on to another project. But about three years ago the idea just struck me and I couldn’t get away from it. I just had to do it, or thought it was the right time to do it.”
“So I went to Lionsgate, spoke to them. They were excited about bringing it back and from there it was a couple more years until it was finally all put together and ready to go, but that’s when it started. About three years ago I think,” Zombie adds.
But the question remains, what gave Zombie that idea in the first place?
“It’s weird,” Zombie says, “but whenever I would listen to Terry Reid, there’s a lot of Terry Reid songs in The Devil’s Rejects, off his album Seed of Memory. But there’s a couple of songs that I didn’t use, that every time I would hear them, they sounded like songs that I should use, again, for the next.”
“I would hear the songs and I would so closely link his voice and that album with the characters that I would just start seeing images. And I started just coming up with these ideas how they could have survived and what could have happened. It was not like a full story arc or anything, it was just basic moments, and that’s what sort of got the ball rolling,” Zombie explains.
Terry Reid’s songs “Brave Awakening,” “To Be Treated Rite” and “Seed of Memory” all appeared on the Devil Reject‘s soundtrack. 3 From Hell features Reid’s songs “The Frame” and “Faith to Arise.”
But Zombie doesn’t give all the credit for 3 From Hell to Reid. He says he would have moved on from the characters if the fans hadn’t stayed interested after all these years.
“I never had a plan,” Zombie says. “I mean, I never made a movie where I thought ‘Oh, for sure I’m going to make another one’ as far as a sequel goes. It seems like every time every time I made a movie, that was the end. And with this one [The Devil’s Rejects] I thought that was the end, but I never could get away from it because both House of 1,000 Corpses and Devil’s Rejects seem to grow in popularity every year. So it wasn’t something that I’m thinking about that nobody else is thinking about.”
“It just seemed like every year that went by that the characters became more well known, the movies became more popular, and I would see every year tons of people dressed as the characters for Halloween and everybody would show me their tattoos of the characters and the t-shirts and the action figures. It would just never go away, so they’d never leave my consciousness. I think [that] played more into the idea of keeping it alive for me,” Zombie says. “If it had been a movie from 15 years ago that nobody was really talking about, then I probably would have just moved on in my mind, you know?”
Of course, bringing the Firefly Family back on-screen is one thing. Bringing them back from the dead after they were shot what looks like hundreds of times is something else. Zombie had to write them back to life, but it wasn’t quite as complicated as the fan theories made it out to be. No magic, no actual devil, just incredibly good luck.
“I always thought that it was like they got shot a ton of times but somehow they survived. You know, they’re in a hospital forever, they’re in comas, they’re a mess, but somehow they survived,” Zombie explains.
“I never thought like, ‘Oh, it’s supernatural,’ or some other crazy thing brought them back to life. I knew it had to fit into a realistic scenario on some level,” Zombie adds. “You know, anyone can put onto that some other meaning, like ‘Oh, they’re the devil’s rejects, they got kicked out of Hell’ and this and that, and that’s cool, but I always thought it had to be more reality-based. That’s why the beginning of the movie [3 From Hell] I did in a documentary fashion to help make it feel legitimate.”
You can see The Firefly Family’s return for yourself, in theaters, from September 16-18, via Fathom Events!
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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