Rob Zombie is back and he’s bringing his homicidal Firefly Family with him in 3 From Hell, debuting this week in theaters via Fathom. That’s a pretty neat trick, considering that all those characters died in a hail of gunfire at the end of their last film, The Devil’s Rejects, way back in 2005.
In a new interview with Bloody-Disgusting, we asked Rob Zombie about what it took to resurrect the characters, behind the screen and also on the page. And it turns out we have none other than English rock star Terry Reid to thank for the return of the Fireflies!
“I’ve always loved the characters. They were always close to me,” Zombie says. “I always thought about resurrecting them but I never did, obviously, for that amount of time. I would always move on to another project. But about three years ago the idea just struck me and I couldn’t get away from it. I just had to do it, or thought it was the right time to do it.”
“So I went to Lionsgate, spoke to them. They were excited about bringing it back and from there it was a couple more years until it was finally all put together and ready to go, but that’s when it started. About three years ago I think,” Zombie adds.
But the question remains, what gave Zombie that idea in the first place?
“It’s weird,” Zombie says, “but whenever I would listen to Terry Reid, there’s a lot of Terry Reid songs in The Devil’s Rejects, off his album Seed of Memory. But there’s a couple of songs that I didn’t use, that every time I would hear them, they sounded like songs that I should use, again, for the next.”
“I would hear the songs and I would so closely link his voice and that album with the characters that I would just start seeing images. And I started just coming up with these ideas how they could have survived and what could have happened. It was not like a full story arc or anything, it was just basic moments, and that’s what sort of got the ball rolling,” Zombie explains.
Terry Reid’s songs “Brave Awakening,” “To Be Treated Rite” and “Seed of Memory” all appeared on the Devil Reject‘s soundtrack. 3 From Hell features Reid’s songs “The Frame” and “Faith to Arise.”
But Zombie doesn’t give all the credit for 3 From Hell to Reid. He says he would have moved on from the characters if the fans hadn’t stayed interested after all these years.
“I never had a plan,” Zombie says. “I mean, I never made a movie where I thought ‘Oh, for sure I’m going to make another one’ as far as a sequel goes. It seems like every time every time I made a movie, that was the end. And with this one [The Devil’s Rejects] I thought that was the end, but I never could get away from it because both House of 1,000 Corpses and Devil’s Rejects seem to grow in popularity every year. So it wasn’t something that I’m thinking about that nobody else is thinking about.”
“It just seemed like every year that went by that the characters became more well known, the movies became more popular, and I would see every year tons of people dressed as the characters for Halloween and everybody would show me their tattoos of the characters and the t-shirts and the action figures. It would just never go away, so they’d never leave my consciousness. I think [that] played more into the idea of keeping it alive for me,” Zombie says. “If it had been a movie from 15 years ago that nobody was really talking about, then I probably would have just moved on in my mind, you know?”
Of course, bringing the Firefly Family back on-screen is one thing. Bringing them back from the dead after they were shot what looks like hundreds of times is something else. Zombie had to write them back to life, but it wasn’t quite as complicated as the fan theories made it out to be. No magic, no actual devil, just incredibly good luck.
“I always thought that it was like they got shot a ton of times but somehow they survived. You know, they’re in a hospital forever, they’re in comas, they’re a mess, but somehow they survived,” Zombie explains.
“I never thought like, ‘Oh, it’s supernatural,’ or some other crazy thing brought them back to life. I knew it had to fit into a realistic scenario on some level,” Zombie adds. “You know, anyone can put onto that some other meaning, like ‘Oh, they’re the devil’s rejects, they got kicked out of Hell’ and this and that, and that’s cool, but I always thought it had to be more reality-based. That’s why the beginning of the movie [3 From Hell] I did in a documentary fashion to help make it feel legitimate.”
You can see The Firefly Family’s return for yourself, in theaters, from September 16-18, via Fathom Events!
