As of this month, Rob Zombie has turned his 2003 horror hit House of 1,000 Corpses into a full-fledged horror trilogy. The story of the homicidally maniacal Firefly Family, first introduced as the purveyor of roadside attractions, mutated into an ultraviolent neo-western with The Devil’s Rejects, and into a prison break thriller with next week’s 3 From Hell.
But although Zombie has continued telling the stories of Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), Otis (Bill Mosley) and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), there’s one major character from House of 1,000 Corpses that the filmmaker has never resurrected: Dr. Satan, the subterranean cyborg mad scientist who appeared at the end of the original movie and *almost* made it into The Devil’s Rejects.
In a recent interview with Bloody-Disgusting, we asked why Dr. Satan still hasn’t resurfaced after two sequels. According to Zombie, the franchise’s shift to realism made the once-important character look “stupid.”
“Yeah, I got rid of him on The Devil’s Rejects. I brought in the character with the idea that I would incorporate him into the [sequel] and try to bring him into the more realistic world that the films had evolved into, but it just looked stupid. So I just abandoned it,” Zombie explained.
“Like, House of 1,000 Corpses was so cartoony and psychedelic and weird you could kind of do anything,” Zombie added, noting the dramatic shift in tone between his first Firefly movie and his second. “But when I shot the scenes for Devil’s Rejects with Dr. Satan, almost instantly I was like, ‘This is stupid. This is not going to work.’”
Which raises the question, of course, of whether Dr. Satan’s appearance in House of 1,000 Corpses was ever real at all. We asked Rob Zombie where he stood on an ending that seemed straightforward, but which now, after a retcon, looks like it may all have been a dream.
“I left it so that it could be whatever,” Zombie said. “Is it real? Is it probably just the girl, that Denise, after a long night of being tortured and watching all of her friends killed, maybe she just went cuckoo and was imagining all these crazy things? You know, I thought for that film it’s best just leave it as however people want to interpret it.”
“But to try to go, ‘Okay, we’re going to go out into the sunlight with Sheriff Wydell and the Rejects on the run, and hey! There’s Dr. Satan in the back of the van!’ You go, ‘Okay that’s just so dumb I can’t even think about it,’” Zombie laughed.
You won’t see Dr. Satan, but you will see the last surviving members of the Firefly Family in Zombie’s 3 From Hell, in theaters next week from September 16-18, via Fathom Events!
