Slasher or torture films always have an iconic villain, but House of 1000 Corpses actually has interesting villains. Baby is a psychotic Daisy Dukes, whose high-pitched voice can be alternately annoying and unsettling, depending on the situation. Otis is a kind of sick philosopher or preacher, delivering his ‘wisdom’ to a hapless, kidnapped cheerleader. Tiny, the perfunctorily mute, deformed inbred son, seems tragic, giving us a moment of hope when he releases Denise that there might be a shred of humanity in the Firefly clan. Sid Haig steals the show as a foul-mouthed, crude, greasy clown, Captain Spaulding. He’s as hilarious as he is inappropriate.

Perhaps this is an overused, cop-out argument, but House of 1000 Corpses is a film not meant to be taken seriously. The instances of crude, black comedy, most notably with Captain Spaulding and the show the Firefly family puts on, and the homage to trashy horror films undermine any notion that this is a ‘serious’ horror film. I agree that the solarizations and interpolated clips of old films seem like an effort to make this film weird, but I never found them a distraction or calling attention to the director, since they just added a layer of strangeness that seemed to fit with the rest of the film, if not neatly. House of 1000 Corpses is entertaining and there are some genuinely creepy elements; I found the finale scary because the evil of the Firefly family expands its reach to the underground network of Dr. Satan’s lair, which seems to stretch for miles. However, it doesn’t belong on the weird list. It’s a good horror/exploitation film, but its eccentricities aren’t special and it certainly doesn’t belong with the art house cinema on the list. I’d readily recommend it to horror fans, but I’d probably recommend it only to the most charitable of non-horror fans, given the above responses to the movie.