When you take zombie as a surname, you might seem to be limiting your career options, not unlike getting a face tattoo. Yet Rob Zombie, who burst onto the scene as frontman for the theatrical hard rock act White Zombie in the late 1980s and early ’90s, has carved out not only a successful but a varied entertainment career as a musician, multimedia producer, filmmaker and graphic novel impresario.
His latest film as writer-director, however, The Lords of Salem, is a horror offering right in his experiential wheelhouse. When Massachusetts radio deejay Heidi Hawthorne (wife Sheri Moon Zombie) receives a package with mysterious music, it triggers headaches, hypnosis and visions of her town’s violent past. Is Heidi, a recovering addict and trauma survivor, slipping back into madness, or is something even more sinister afoot? Recently, I had a chance to speak with Zombie one-on-one, and while I didn’t ask him about his studded iPhone case we did chat about his movie, what hell is to him (hint: in involves drunk strippers), and what’s next professionally. The conversation is excerpted over at Yahoo, so click here for the read.