Rob Zombie Gets Horrifyingly Clownish With '31' Trailer
When not churning out his own particular brand of ghoulish spook-metal tunes, Rob Zombie directs some of modern cinema’s craziest horror movies (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects). The first trailer for his latest nightmare, 31 (watch it above), looks like it might be his most harrowing effort to date.
Related: ‘31’: Sundance Film Review
Following up 2013’s criminally underrated The Lords of Salem, Zombie’s fall release is a twisted tale about a group of travelers kidnapped on the night before Halloween by psychos in clown make-up. The abductees are then forced to play a game of “31” — which involves trying to stay alive in a secluded compound while being hunted by sadistic lunatics for 12 hours. In other words, it’s going to be another dose of extreme funhouse mirror-style madness from the filmmaker, who had to make numerous edits to his original version in order to avoid an NC-17 rating (a gorier unrated cut will follow on home video).
As the trailer reveals, 31, which premiered this past January at the Sundance Film Festival, will feature just about every one of Zombie’s stylistic trademarks, from a ’70s-era setting, to trucker-style beards, to villains with a penchant for indulging in long-winded speeches, to his wife Sheri Moon Zombie in revealingly sleazy clothing. Plus, it’ll reunite Zombie with Malcolm McDowell, who played Dr. Loomis in Zombie’s two Halloween remakes, and who here (as a character named, we kid you not, “Father Napoleon Horatio Silas Murder”) appears to be dressed as some depraved old-world English aristocrat.
Related: ‘The Amityville Horror’ House and Other Famous Scary Movie Homes For Sale
No doubt Zombie will again push the horror genre to its in-your-face limits when 31 debuts on VOD on Sept. 16, and then in theaters on Oct. 21.
Rob Zombie flashback: Watch the trailer for ‘The Lords of Salem’:
