Movies
[Discussion] How Do You Think Otis, Spaulding and Baby Have Come Back for ‘3 from Hell’?
As it turns out, maybe Hell really doesn’t want them.
This year’s 3 from Hell is set to bring Otis, Captain Spaulding and Baby Firefly back to life, but how the hell is Rob Zombie going to pull that off? Well, today’s teaser trailer gave us no real clues in that department, instead highlighting a random collection of images with no real context. Mind you, it’s only a teaser, but for now all we can really do is continue to speculate.
At the end of The Devil’s Rejects, Otis, Baby and Captain Spaulding were of course gunned down by the police, the murderous trio going out in a blaze of glory while Skynyrd’s “Freebird” played 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 were definitively killed off on screen fourteen years ago, how can they come back for a sequel? The key may lie in that moniker: The Devil’s Rejects.
As implied by the title 3 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 Devil’s Rejects, and certainly could be looked back on today as an early teaser image for 3 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 3 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 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. Then again, maybe they just survived the shootout and that’s that…
How do YOU think Zombie will bring the Firefly trio back? Let’s talk below!
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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