The Devil’s Rejects

I watched this because it was a part of AV Club’s “New Cult Canon” series: Scott Tobias thought it a powerful reflection on authority in the post-9/11era.   Well, sort of, in the sense that the Sheriff John Quincy Wydell (William Forsythe) is as brutal and sadistic as the bad guys, willing to do whatever it takes to beat them.   But the comparison falls apart pretty quick; he’s not all that interested in being the good guy; he’s more interested in getting revenge for what the Rejects did to his brother.   He never pitches this as a battle of Good vs. Evil, in which Good must do whatever it takes to defeat evil.   In fact, it’s pretty easy to believe that his badge is little more than a means to gain the power and freedom to seek the vengeance he is after.    And in that light, “The Devil’s Rejects” is an exercise in nihilism, and maybe atheism; the undergirding law being Only the Strong Survive.  

No one in their right mind should watch this; it delights in being realistically, relentlessly gory and torturous; there is not a hint of camp anywhere.   Rob Zombie is a stylish, more than competent director, but his palette is basically unpalatable.  

And yet, as I watched the terrible, nightmarish torture and exploitation scenes,  somewhere underneath my recoil reflex, I started to reflect upon the threat of death.   The Devil’s Rejects humiliate, exploit, and mock their victims before killing them, and they do so because they have the power to do so, and they have the power to do so because they hold life and death in their hands.   But what if their victims weren’t afraid of death?   What if one of them decided, well, you’re going to kill me anyway, and I’d rather you do so before you violate my wife instead of after you make me watch?   Horror films like this almost always force you to consider what you would do in such a terrible circumstance, and I hope my answer would be to walk steadily, unblikingly into my death, instead of holding on desperately to the finest thread of hope, willing to do whatever humiliating thing to keep that hope — and my own humiliated, degraded skin – alive.    

What happens when you tell the killers, the degraders, the humiliators that you aren’t afraid of them?    Maybe they kill you anyway.   Probably.   Or maybe it takes the fun out of it all for them, because they realize, with a sinking feeling, that they can take your life, but that’s all.   They can’t take that which you value more than life.     

(And then they kill you anyway.)