The Music and Movies of White Zombie, Pt. 1: An Introduction
I don’t know how many times I’ve told this story but it’s worth telling again. The year is about 1995 or so, I’m a 10 year old young thundercat who knows nothing about reality or alternate realities for that matter, I was basically all about chilling with my homies and playing Mortal Kombat on the Super Nintendo. Then one day, everything changed.
In between rounds of Mortal Kombat, with the blood cheat enabled, we turned on MTV and I caught a glimpse of something that would change my life forever. Beavis and Butthead were playing a music video from the band White Zombie and a song called More Human Than Human. The video was unlike anything I had ever seen in my short life.
I mean, sure, the Soundgarden Black Hole Sun video had a melting barbie doll and that lady with the crazy lipstick, but this video had weird clowns, the creature from the black lagoon and pumpkin head people. The band itself looked like a bunch of undergrounders from CHUD with wild dreadlocks in a shitty basement just rocking the fuck out. Not to mention the sound. At this point I had heard Green Day AND The Offspring but this was nothing like any of that and I needed more.
My father was very liberal when it came to the media that me and my brother consumed. For instance, my brothers favorite movie from about the age of five onward was Terminator 2: Judgement Day and the chick with three tits in Total Recall had been seen a million times already. So when we arrived at the record store and I grabbed White Zombie, my Dad didn’t think twice about buying it for me, there was just one problem, I bought the wrong record. You see, More Human than Human was on Astro-Creep 2000 the 2nd album by the band (Wikipedia says the 4th but I don’t count Soul Crusher or Make Them Die Slowly) but I bought their first album La Sexorcisto. At first I was bummed and then I played the record and my life has never been the same.
To this day I have never heard anything like La Sexorcisto, or any Zombie album for that matter. It’s bouncy, groovy metal with a dash of industrial swag. The lyrics are about skeletons and Frankenstein and all the songs have these crazy samples from horror movies. Many of the horror movies mentioned or sampled in these songs I have searched for specifically from the music and many have become my favorite horror movies of all time.
The goal of this series is to explore the world of cinema through the music of White Zombie and their singer, and horror film director Rob Zombie. Each entry will cover a few songs from the band and discuss the classics that they reference or have samples from and any references Zombie has made to them in his films. But first, we have to talk about the band's name…
The band's name comes from the 1932 independent film White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi. I wrote about this film extensively for a different series on HorrorBound “Have You Ever Watched” and if you want to know more about the film, I suggest starting there. What I will comment on here is how the film was used in Rob Zombie's horror films.
Of all the films referenced and mentioned in Zombie’s music this film never comes up, which is strange because it’s a public domain film and usually those films are easier to get licensing for. Zombie did however use the film in his 2007 remake of Halloween.
Halloween was more than a scene for scene remake, it had elements of a prequel which showed a young Michael Myers being bullied as a child at school and at home. Some people hate it but I really enjoyed how it showed exactly how a homicidal maniac is born. His stepdad is a bully, his sister is a jerk, his mother is a stripper and the kids at school bully him about it. After a miserable day when he gets in a fight, busted for killing animals and his sister bails on him for trick or treating to have sex with her boyfriend, Michael snaps and goes on a killing rampage and when he does, the climax of the film White Zombie is playing on the family TV.
For those who have watched White Zombie you will know the most beautiful thing about the film is the actual white zombie played by Madge Bellamy. In the dark, dingy world of Carribean Zombies, Madge stands out as Madeline Parker, the blushing bride to be in her virginal white dress who has come under the control of the mysterious Murder Legendre played by Bela Lugosi. Fans of Zombie’s films will definitely see the homage in his 2009 remake of Halloween 2 as Michael Myers’ mother Deborah who he sees in his dreams dressed in all white with a white horse.
White Zombie is an absolute horror classic and the influences to Zombie’s films appear in the most important and impactful ways. Now that we’ve sorted out where the band got their name from, how about that amazing album title, La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One and for that we have to look at the 1970’s Mexican Nunsploitation film
SATANICO PANDEMONIUM
Before we jump into this film we need to make two things crystal clear:
First, La Sexorcisto is not technically White Zombie’s first album, but to me it is. Now they released two albums prior, Soul-Crusher whose title was repurposed for a song on La Sexorcisto and an album called Make Them Die Slowly which is an alternate name for the film Cannibal Ferox. To me, neither of these albums sound anything like the albums that follow.
Second, Satanico Pandemonium aka La Sexorcisto is more of a soft core porn than it is a horror movie.
Seriously, here’s the plot: a nun is collecting flowers in a field when Lucifer appears as a naked man. The nun then has sex with all the other nuns and a young boy in the village, there’s lots of moaning and then the film ends.
I honestly wish there was more to it but the whole film is basically used to get the nuns naked. For instance, after the main nun, Sister Maria sees Lucifer, she takes off all her clothes and whips herself, full moaning engaged. Another nun comes to her and says she’s ill, so they get naked and have sex, which is apparently the cure. Post Nunilingus, Sister Maria has a flashback to her nun sex and again strips naked to whip her self and moan.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some horror scenes in the film, but they are all centered around Nekkid Nuns. There is one very sad nun who decides to commit suicide, but as she is standing on the table with the noose around her neck Sister Maria pushes her off and kills her, heavy gagging and moaning follow. Sister Maria tries to rape a sleeping man who looks like Lucifer and in the middle of the sex scene she stabs him with a knife that is clearly one of those plastic retractable knives from Halloween USA, heavy moaning follows. Sister Maria even has a nightmarish vision of submitting to Satan and being punished for it, this punishment is of course her getting naked and having phallic objects put in her mouth. In the end, all of the nuns in the convent get naked, dance around and stab Sister Maria before we find out it was all just a fever dream brought on by the plague.
Thank you Rob Zombie, I needed that in my life.
When it comes to the films covered in this series, I really want to keep it a secret as to what I am covering. Mostly for a bit of nostalgia, when these albums were released there wasn't any real internet to search where this stuff comes from. I was stuck waiting to watch the right movie to catch a sampled phrase to go “Oh shit! This is the movie?” It’s part of the fun. What I can say is that this series will run the gamut of strange and bizarre cinema. 36 films in total ranging from post apocalyptic cyberpunk fantasies to post apocalyptic dystopian nightmares and everything in between. There will be special appearances from Sid Haig, Charlton Heston, Charles Manson, Leonard Nimoy and Adam West. It will also be a truly global affair as the series will cover Mexican Nunsploitation, Brazilian found footage horror, Japanese hentai tentacle porn horror and good old American Blacksploitation.
Keep an eye out for the next installment of this series Welcome to Planet Motherfucker where we examine the films from the epic opening track to La Sexorcisto which includes two classics about the dead coming back to life, two white knuckle thrillers and one far out ‘50s film with all the hip slang.
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