Heidi, a radio DJ, is sent a box containing a record - a "gift from the Lords". The sounds within the grooves trigger flashbacks of her town's violent past. Is Heidi going mad, or are the Lords back to take revenge on Salem, Massachusetts?
Sheri Moon Zombie Bruce Davison Jeff Daniel Phillips Judy Geeson Meg Foster Patricia Quinn Ken Foree Dee Wallace María Conchita Alonso Richard Fancy Andrew Prine Michael Berryman Sid Haig Suzanne Voss Torsten Voges Lisa Marie Barbara Crampton Michael Shamus Wiles Ernest Lee Thomas Maria Olsen Camille Keaton Clint Howard Udo Kier Richard Lynch Bonita Friedericy Nancy Linehan Charles Flo Lawrence Brynn Horrocks Susan Gray Show All…
Rob Zombie Jason Blum Oren Peli Andy Gould Jessica Malanaphy Jeanette Volturno Jeremy Platt Bailey Conway Sarah Martin Rick Osako
Les Seigneurs de Salem, I archodes tou Salem, Los señores de Salem, Le streghe di Salem, 塞拉的领主, Повелители Салема, As Senhoras de Salem, Володарі Салема, המכשפות מסיילם, Salemas pavēlnieki, 로드 오브 세일럼, Господарите на Салем, Los Señores de Salem, Salemo valdovai, ロード・オブ・セイラム, Lords of Salem
CanadaR
Toronto International Film Festival
Spain
Sitges Film Festival
Italy
Torino Film Festival
UK
Glasgow Film Festival
USA
South by Southwest Film Festival
Denmark15
CPH:PIX
UK
Dundead - Dundee Horror Film Festival
USA
Massachusetts Independent Film Festival
Portugal
MOTELX - Lisbon International Horror Film Festival
France
Lyon Festival Hallucinations Collectives
USA
Cinematic Void
USAR
Russia18+
Brazil18
UK18
Italy18+
Spain16
Germany16
Spain16
JapanR15+
Sweden15
France
Germany
Brazil
Brazil
Canada
Denmark
France
Germany
Italy
Japan
Portugal
Russia
Spain
Sweden
UK
USA
This is Rob Zombie’s masterpiece. Fuck you. Slap an A24 logo on this and you dorks would worship it.
4/5 Meg Fosters spitting on a newborn
Revelation and revulsion. The sheer terror and agony of gradually relinquishing control, how painful and easy it is to just stop resisting the overwhelming powers all around you. Zombie delivers not just genuinely incredible, horrifying imagery but also expert tonal control. Straight-up evil vibes front-to-back.
Surreal, creepy, nonsensical, tense, and crazy atmospheric so yeah this movie is absolutely my jam. It’s a visual smorgasbord with a terrific nightmarish score and for me that outweighs any problems. The acting all around was a little sketch and like I know that Ms. Zombie isn’t an especially great actress (except in Halloween where I thought she was, in fact, great), but I still like her a lot. There were a couple of places where I thought a different choice would have made the scene even more effective, but it’s not my movie or my vision and there were many more scenes where I thought things worked very well so there you go.
I’ve never considered myself an outright Rob…
this movie shook me to my core.
it haunted me and is still haunting me. there is so much about it i feel deeply right now but don't yet know how to say :::
about the way we can be consumed by forces greater than ourselves. how we can resist but go willingly at the same time. how you want a way out but there might not be a way out. how i feel so deeply for Heidi, and how this movie cared for her too. how i can't figure out this Satan yet or these witches, but i will keep working.
how walking your dog in your giant bell bottoms is silently screaming for your life while you're silently drowning.
90
That long, faux-decrepit hallway, lined with one-bedroom apartments, is instantly made sinister. White lamps in perfect composition across the ceiling, and grey wallpaper blinding its pattern to the eye. A passerby wouldn't linger in it. Neither would a prospective tenant. If one resident saw another in the hall, it would be a rare occurrence. It is a necessary yet unhealthy space, traversed and never lived in, an almost perpetually empty portal. 'Almost' is important, as The Lords of Salem finds a myriad of presences for the void leading towards damnation. Rats and dogs and witches and victims are drawn to the door at the end of the hallway, opening and infinitely expanding, allowing an opera accompaniment for a tragedy, an ornate stage for baptism by fire. The places right outside your home become enshrouded in mystery. Personal demons are just that: your own.
*vague discussion of spoilers*
Complete devastation. Rob Zombie expands on the empathetic skills he'd long been honing before this picture in a truly satisfying whole. Sherri Moon Zombie plays a radio DJ dealing with persistent fears of a returning addiction to Crystal Meth. She has a long history with drug use, but it's rarely discussed. She is still fighting this battle every single day of her life in fear that she may lose, but her newfound sobriety is coinciding with a curse put upon her by the Salem Witches of old. With each passing day their influence grows stronger on her life, and she begins to crumble. Her slow decline is not unlike the same set of tools Zombie used…
a movie where you can’t win against your demons. there is nothing you can do. sometimes addicts just can’t beat it, the traumas, the pains in their lives, the inability to erase that suffering and that need for the drug that makes things stable, just for a little while. sometimes you can’t get better, not everyone gets to survive and that’s okay. it’s not their fault, they tried and that’s all we could ever ask. addiction is a disease and it hurts and it kills and that fact fucking destroys me. this is a movie about someone who because of the world around them, their trauma mixed with their disease mixed with the terrors infesting their life, can’t beat it.…
What a complete and utter piece of crap. Rob Zombie has finally made the trash he has stylistically been cramming into his films so far.
The Lords of Salem has a plot that could be written on the back of a napkin. A very small one. As that is the case, this automatically means that this is as predictable as it gets. Trust me, when you watch this there will be not one second where you don't know what will happen next, or what the eventual outcome of the film will be. This kills any possible suspense or possibility for us to invest in the characters and what happens to them.
So, if you've got no plot,what do you do?…
Sherri Moon Zombie is so completely in tune with Heidi's rapidly failing mental health. She minimizes herself subtly throughout until she's nothing more than a whisper waiting to be blown away by the wind. To Rob's credit he amplifies this through moments of stasis where the camera does little more than rest with her body. It gives us a point of view into her pain making the film unbearably sad. It was here and in Halloween 2, where Rob Zombie fully turned his gaze inward and asked viewers to empathize and understand victims of terror. These stories by extension tackled topics of lingering trauma, abuse and drug addiction and how they intersected with the mental health of those dealing with…
Difficult to put into words the visceral impact and sadness of The Lords of Salem. One viewing doesn't quite seem enough to put all the pieces together, as Zombie puts together a horror film so unlike any horror I've ever seen. The brutality of Sheri Moon's performance hits me in the fucking gut, and without ever having dealt with addiction, the film feels like a pained, strung out journey into the abyss. Some great female power, and a bone-chilling soundscape are icing on the cake.
This is the sort of movie seniors in high school explain to sophomores in high school.
