There's nobody else in the entertainment industry quite like Rob Zombie.
He's known as much for his horror movies as he is for his heavy metal music.
Keep watching to discover the untold truth of this one-of-a-kind entertainer.
Rob Zombie splits his time between two worlds that could both be described as carnival-like.
He's a hard rock musician who travels from venue to venue with a large crew who sets
up an elaborate stage show.
He also directs major motion pictures, which involve building entire worlds from scratch.
In a way, the zaniness of these pursuits is old hat to Zombie, as he spent part of his
childhood on the carnival circuit alongside his relatives.
As he explained to LA Weekly,
"It was my mom's side of the family.
That was the family business, basically [...] When we were kids [...] me and my brother would
get dragged along to these things all the time and have to work.
It sounds exciting and interesting now, but as a kid, it was a drag.
I think no matter what your parents do for a living, it doesn't seem exciting as a kid."
The carnival life abruptly came to an end in 1977, when a 12-year-old Zombie's parents
quit the business for good.
A riot broke out that he and his brother got caught in the middle of, and then his dad
switched gears and started working other jobs.
At age 18, Zombie left his home in Massachusetts for New York City to attend the prestigious
Parsons School of Design
But he dropped out and then worked a succession of odd jobs.
He managed to put his design skills to good use, though, as he did graphic and layout
work on adult magazines.
As he told Metal Hammer,
"I just had to make sure everything was straight.
Nobody was really concerned with it looking pleasing."
Zombie eventually broke into entertainment as a low-level production assistant on the
surreal children's show Pee Wee's Playhouse.
As he recounted in an interview with Westword,
"It was a cool job to have.
But I was probably nineteen years old.
It was everything from delivering stuff to doing little crap work around the set.
I don't even know if I was a P.A.
Whatever is just below a P.A.
[...] There were all kinds of people I really liked on the show.
So it was pretty exciting."
It's not just a wonderful coincidence that the guy famous for thunderous metal music
and intense horror movies is known as "Rob Zombie."
That's obviously his stage name, but it's also his real name, at least as far as the
government is concerned.
He was born with the ordinary name of Robert Cummings, but in 1996, he legally changed
his surname to Zombie.
He first started using that moniker in the late 80s.
He's credited as "Rob Zombie" for the first time on White Zombie's 1989 EP God of Thunder.
That name came from the 1932 Bela Lugosi movie White Zombie, which is about living
dead girls and boys.
Before deciding on Rob Zombie, he played around with other pseudonyms, such as Rob "Dirt"
Straker on the 1987 White Zombie album Soul-Crusher.
Rob Zombie first gained fame during his days in White Zombie.
The band's unique mix of metal riffs, thunderous drums, sound clips of old movies, and grooves
you could dance to took a while to shake out.
They started in 1985 as part of New York's art rock scene.
While they played regular gigs at the famous CBGB club, they struggled to fit in.
They were too metal for art rock, but too off-the-wall for metal.
As Zombie recounted to Metal Hammer,
"We got gigs opening for other bands like Danzig and Anthrax and Megadeth, and the crowds
were looking at us, like 'What the f--- is this?'
Almost all the metal bands had the Metallica look – skinny black jeans and whatever - and
we looked like a bunch of freaks, so we never really fit in.
And then when grunge hit, we were too metal to be grunge and not alternative enough to
be alternative!"
Despite their struggles to fit in, White Zombie trudged along, releasing three albums and
several EPs on smaller labels to little notice before eventually getting signed to Geffen
Records.
In the mid-90s, heavy metal and hard rock bands didn't get as much airtime as they used
to on MTV.
But the network presented a couple of advocates for these acts with the 1993 premiere of Beavis
and Butt-Head.
Portions of each episode featured the two dimwitted title teenagers sitting on a dirty
couch and offering commentary on music videos.
Every so often, they'd strike gold and find a heavy metal band that they could totally
head-bang to.
Beavis and Butt-Head was so popular that if a band received its seal of approval, it translated
into a big jump in record sales.
The show almost single-handedly elevated White Zombie from relative obscurity into the big
time.
Before Beavis and Butt-Head enjoyed the group's "Welcome to Planet M.F." on one episode, the
1992 album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1 had sold just 75,000 copies.
But after the video aired on the show and Beavis and Butthead declared "White Zombie
rules!", sales of La Sexorcisto quadrupled, and the band hit the Top 40 of the Billboard
album chart.
In 1993, Zombie was introduced to dancer and DJ Sheri Moon by a mutual friend, and they
had their first date at a New Haven, Connecticut club called Toad's Place.
They hit it off over pizza, and a month later, they moved in together in California.
Zombie also hired Moon for some White Zombie videos, including "Feed the Gods."
The romantic partners soon became frequent professional partners as well.
As Moon recalled to Girls and Corpses Magazine,
"When he went solo he always wanted to have dancers on tour.
So I just became involved with that and choreographed the numbers.
I found the girls, and made the costumes."
When Zombie moved into films, he brought Moon along, casting her in every movie he's directed.
In 2002, Zombie and Moon made it official by getting married after nine years together.
They planned to have the wedding in November, but then they ended up eloping on Halloween,
which they insist was a coincidence.
As Zombie told the New York Post,
"It sounds like we're trying to be all spooky and weird, but that really wasn't the plan."
A lot of the Rob Zombie image is just that: an image.
He may be a purveyor of gore with his horror-laced music and serial killer movies, but he only
likes slaughter if it's fake.
In real life, he doesn't live up to his flesh-eating name at all.
He saw some slaughterhouse footage when he was in high school in the early 80s, and that
turned him off from meat forever.
The anti-animal cruelty organization PETA even publicly commended Zombie for a scene
in his 2007 Halloween remake that linked cruelty to animals to violent crimes against humans.
Avoiding meat is just one element of Zombie's health regimen, which he started as a teenager
to self-treat his ailments.
As he told Men's Health,
"I was a really sickly kid, one of those kids like, 'Here's your 25 pills, and you can't
be in gym class.'
One day in high school, I was like, F--- it, I'm not taking any more medicine.
I'm going to join the track team, and if I drop dead, fine."
He added,
"And of course I got healthier.
I stopped eating red meat.
Even my asthma went away.
I still eat super, super healthy all the time, and I take health quite seriously.
I haven't had red meat in 25 years."
"Anything vegan will make me happy."
Rob Zombie is a metal star and horror filmmaker.
Tom Papa is a mainstream stand-up comedian, a guy who tells jokes about relationships
and regularly opens for Jerry Seinfeld.
But somehow these two guys are pals and collaborators.
They met when a mutual acquaintance brought Zombie to one of Papa's shows, and they then
wound up at a destination wedding together, where they hung out the entire weekend and
became good buddies.
When Zombie made the animated film The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, he thought it would
be funny if a low-key guy like Papa voiced the title character, a hulking wrestler.
Papa took the gig and then wound up also co-writing the script.
And when it came time for Papa to shoot his first special, Tom Papa: Live in New York
City, Zombie stepped in as the director.
It might not be obvious from his spooky reputation, but Zombie is actually a huge consumer of
comedy.
He discovered the Marx Brothers movies as a kid, and he even signed on to direct an
upcoming Groucho Marx bio-pic.
He also casts his favorite comics in his movies, like Chris Hardwick in House of 1000 Corpses
and Brian Posehn in The Devil's Rejects.
He even has a special affinity for a certain CBS sitcom.
As he told Thrillist in 2016,
"I watch The King of Queens and go, 'This show is f---ing genius.'
It's so f---ing funny, man, I love that show.
Kevin James is a f---ing genius.
Jerry Stiller is a f---ing genius on that show, as he was on Seinfeld.
I love comedy."
While Zombie still tours and records music, he's primarily known more for his filmmaking
nowadays.
That transition didn't happen without some resistance from Hollywood, though.
His feature directorial debut was 2003's House of 1000 Corpses, a horror film he also wrote.
It's a sleazy and extremely violent movie he made for Universal Pictures about a family
who torture and kill some lost travelers.
As he told the AV Club in 2005,
"I told them that I wanted to make a drive-in movie, something very gritty and nasty and
weird.
And they were all like, 'Okay, great, great great.'
Maybe they just didn't know what I meant by that."
"Sorry!
You lose!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"
"Ahhhhh!"
After the film finished production in 2000, executives balked at releasing it.
As Zombie explained to AV Club,
"Universal, like a lot of the other major studios, had been pulled in front of Congress
to testify about marketing violent movies to children, because the Columbine High School
shooting had just happened, and there was all this stuff floating around in the air
concerning that.
And I just think that our movie seemed like too big of a publicity risk for the studio."
Universal allowed Zombie to shop the movie around to other distributors, and it finally
hit theaters in 2003, three years after production wrapped.
Rob Zombie has made a lot of movies, but if things had gone a little differently, he would've
made even more that never ended up happening.
In 1997, he was set to make his feature film debut with The Crow: 2037, the planned third
film in The Crow franchise.
He wrote the screenplay for the movie, which was to take place in the future and concern
a boy killed by an evil priest who becomes the reborn Crow and sets off on a journey
of violent revenge.
But that project never came to fruition.
In 2008, Zombie was announced as the director of a movie called T-Rex, about a former criminal
who gets caught up in an extremely violent and bloody underground boxing ring.
Key art was publicly released, but the project was never completed.
A planned remake of the horror classic The Blob followed a similar trajectory.
In 2009, Zombie was set to direct, and key art was released to the media, but then the
film died.
A few years later, Zombie even planned to move into other genres, as he agreed to direct
The Broad Street Bullies, a film about the 1970s Philadelphia Flyers hockey team.
He worked on the project for two years but left after growing frustrated with studio
delays.
"I always love hockey.
I wanted to be a hockey player when I was a little kid, and that was my thing."
Despite those frustrations, Zombie's managed to quietly work on several projects outside
of his typical fare.
In 2010, for example, he directed "L.A.," a very special episode of CSI: Miami set in
Los Angeles.
And the following year, he helmed a horror-style commercial for Woolite laundry detergent that
warned people not to torture their clothes.
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