Critics reviews

Zombie lovingly guides us back into the womb of genre film. Like many classic horror films, Lords of Salem is more concerned with a woman's mental health than what's coming for her. It takes great pains to show us the tragedy of her closest friends' devotion which she rejects, believing as so many of us do that she's unworthy of care and attention. That is more horrific than any witch or demon, that help is reaching out for us and we don't reach back because we don't think we can.

[...It's] the most interesting and disturbing American horror film to be released so far this year... Zombie has pared away most of his most commercial (and irritating) tendency as a filmmaker (the jokey sadism) in favor of shocks that are less easily contained and digested. The terror in Zombie's films has never been fun, and now it's no longer even purely visceral, as the filmmaker seems to be intent on capturing nothing less than immobilizing personal desolation.

Zombie finds formal inspiration in Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick, prioritizing atmosphere over blood and guts and, as the DJ slides further into madness, all but abandoning the plot in favor of unbridled hallucination. Polished and calculated, this is a nerve-shattering fright fest bolstered by immaculate technique.

Compared to the nearly unbearable depravity found in Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, the shocks here seem downright sedate; early scenes in which invisible (to Heidi) ghouls lurk in the background of her dingy apartment achieve a genuine frisson of paralyzed creepiness. Before long, however, Zombie just starts tossing out every vaguely demonic idea he can think of, making the movie play like little more than a moving collage of album covers that Tipper Gore would have wanted banned.

The Lords of Salem is a genuinely nasty and disturbing piece of work, but its cumulative nerve-shredding effect is not just the product of effective direction. Sheri Moon Zombie delivers her best serious dramatic performance yet. Character actors Davison, Ken Foree, and Jeff Daniel Phillips also make it easy for viewers to hope for the best while praying for the worst to happen to their impotent, inconsiderate characters.

Even as a coven assembles, the movie forgets to scare. Regardless, how can you not admire a filmmaker who's gone from Lynyrd Skynyrd–scored gore to Kubrickian polish, the camera creeping toward maturity and maybe—in another film or so—throwing a real spell?

No director working today understands horror like Rob Zombie, the musician turned auteur who, with The Lords of Salem, indisputably establishes himself as cinema's reigning prince of darkness. Zombie recognizes what his compatriots do not: that what truly frightens and lingers most aren't jolt scares, especially in this age of desensitized audiences, but rather, unforgettably terrifying imagery.

Once Lords gets moving, Zombie's primary sources start coming to the fore: The Shining and Rosemary's Baby... Zombie is an incurable cinephile, which no doubt explains the richness of his cinema compared to that of his "peers." He thinks in images. The halls of the residential hotel, of course, are a Shining riff, but more than this, The Lords continually plays with a motif of symmetry versus asymmetry, uniformity versus freedom.