Horror Framed

For the past 20 years, Rob Zombie has been carving out his own little dark corner of hell. His original band, White Zombie, threw together post–industrial heavy metal, white trash culture, schlock horror film and comic book geekdom to create its own brand of high–concept, low–art sonic assault. Since the band broke up, he’s been on his own, releasing four solo records and starting a career in film. He debuted with Beavis’ hallucination scene in 1996’s Beavis And Butt–Head Do America before writing and directing his first feature, House Of 1000 Corpses, in 2003, a sadistic ode to original Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper. This August he releases the follow–up, The Devil’s Rejects, part road flick, part carnival freak show, all gritty evil–exactly what you’d expect from Rob Zombie.

Casa de Zombie, a Gothic Victorian near the southern edge of Hollywood, is also what you’d expect; it’s more horror museum than house. The rooms are packed with everything imaginable: full–sized Egyptian sarcophagus, dozens of mounted animal heads, skulls built into doorframes, a Plexiglas Creature from the Black Lagoon, devil sculptures, and–his pride and joy–hundreds of horror movie posters.

“I’ve been collecting posters for 25 years and seriously for the past 10,” says Zombie. They are everywhere, on every available surface, on every wall. In the living room is a 1947 original Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, a poster so big that it had to be framed inside the house. “When I move, we’re going to have to tear down a wall to get the thing out.” Most of the posters are from golden age horror flicks—the early Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney era—some costing over $200,000.

“It’s worth it,” says Zombie. “Old posters represent a dying art form. A level of craft that doesn’t have anything to do with selling a movie, just with someone making something really cool. In the ’80s movie posters started to suck. Once actors got to be gods, once they started demanding that the poster be a photo of their face, that’s what killed it.”