The American Christian mythos, despite our pretentions to not being a Christian nation, has dominated nearly all factors of our cultural production. As the 21^st century has created a more fluid and open space for variances to emerge, there has, as well, been a strong push back from literalist and evangelical positions of authority. Yet there are those who consistently push against that power, and here I will discuss one of those artists, filmmaker Rob Zombie. Zombie’s visually, insistently incoherent film The Lords of Salem (2012), posits a recreation and repositions of the Christian tradition in American, and offers a new way of signification through the advent of the Witch as emergent holy figure. 

We begin with a shot of Heidi, played by Zombie’s wife and visual muse, Sheri Moon Zombie. In a close-up shot we see her apparently in a car yet nodding off to sleep. A montage Intercut with dark credits, then a goat under a red gel tinting the image. The goat, as we are aware in Christian mythos is a satanic image. Suddenly, we are given a long, disjointed sequence of a coven of witches performing their ceremony, narrated somewhat by a puritanical figure who is writing in his diary. Cut as it is between Heidi falling asleep and the credits (which will spring us back to the present) one must wonder if this sequence is a manifestation of Heidi’s unconscious. Within this dream, if that is what it is, we see the events which will set the narrative in motion, but they seem to exist in a world without borders, beyond the scope of realist horror. Zombie here posits an unnamable, unconscious dread. One which we all know, one which perhaps can only be rendered through the dreamscape. Slavoj Zizek refers to this as the “unknown known;” these things we don’t know we know, The Unconscious. And it is here that Zombie rests his horror. While in this opening sequence of The Lords of Salem we could see the witches as real diegetically, for the characters of the film, and the imagistic coherence, we cannot take them as given, as the space they inhabit is visually detached and half formed. Furthering this depiction of the unconscious, there is a consistent low rumbling to the score that runs the entire 5 minutes and 25 seconds of the sequence. A functional metaphor for the unconscious; itself a rather insistent and constant underlying psychic rumble. Since the unconscious is the unknown known, we must ask why we don’t know that we know it. And the answer here is because of repression.

I have not the space here to adequately explain repression itself, except to mention that not all repression is negative, nor particularly harmful in some cases. And that everything that is repressed has the potential to erupt into our conscious, however, the psyche has mechanisms of defense that attempt at all costs to continually jump into play when the repressed returns. Repression in some cases is absolutely required for the human being to function as part of the symbolic order of society, and to fall out of that order is, essentially, to slip into psychosis. What we see in The Lords of Salem is a movement towards the return of the repressed in a spiritual sense, an eruption in the fabric of the symbolic order, and rather than simply being psychosis inducing, it is an attempt to rewrite the symbolic order, to create, via the iconography of the Witch as phallic woman, a new Vulvar symbolic, rejecting the old phallic.  So, in a sense, this is well beyond the ubiquitous “return of the repressed” that Robin Wood speaks of. Rather, this is a film wherein the repressed tries to retroactively rewrite itself into the conscious rather than be relegated to the unconscious where, as the traditional, phallically structured, order demands it currently reside. 

The trauma of our past, or more precisely the past of the film and it’s “cunty witches” is a way of looking at the repressed within the unconscious, and at points in the film this is directly addressed, in tertiary fashion. The inserted shots of the past, whether real or fantasy is ultimately unimportant, are in a sense, concrete figures of what Walter Benjamin refers to as Jetztzeit or “time filled by the presence of the now.” They are not simply historical happenings, but again the repressed trauma intermingling with the immediate now. Adam Lowenstein explains this further saying that “Jetztzeit is a risky, momentary collision between past and present, when one can ‘seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.’” (2004, 148) Thus, the images of the witches, of our history and the repressed trauma of feminine jouissance and power is pushed forward into conflict with the existing symbolic order, causing it to strain and tear, and the images, which become increasingly expressionistic and fractured, reflect this.  Reality (or its phallic form) is shown in resistance by the inclusion of the academic researcher who in the film attempts to historicize, and this anesthetize the feminine jouissance about to erupt. Thus, the Witches must eliminate him, even though he seems rather innocuous. He is a repetition of the formal properties of repression, and it is ultimately his death which creates the gap through which the new Vulvar Signifier can erupt. 

There is a distinct abject quality to the imagery in this film, both specific and general, almost oxymoronically. We see Heidi urinating immediately following the languorous shots of her body. In Male Matters, Calvin Thomas theorizes the concept of the “scatontological” arguing that, in a sense, we are all, regardless of gender, sexuality etc…,  beings defined by shit. We are, generally as a species, disgusted or horrified of our own waste, signifying the horror of our very inherent being. Yet this is general, and if we follow that there is a distinct repression of the abject of femininity or woman, then we must turn to another abject that Julia Kristeva points to, that of menstrual abject. Kristeva argues that the excremental abject signals fear of outside influence, because of their association with decay and disease. Menstrual abject, however, is indicative of “the danger issuing from within the identity… it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate.” (Kristeva, 1982) In The Lords of Salem this menstrual abject if represented through often the red tinting of the shots, and in the final collage with Heidi seated on the glowing bench with long red cloth flows issuing forth. 

But there is a moment where the abject of menstruation, itself again constitutive, is reversed upon the masculine body in another dream sequence. Freud says that “reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite, is one of the means most favored by the dream work,” and here is both a spiritual and visceral physical reversal. As Heidi is beginning her journey toward the eruption that will culminate in the repressed’s return, she dreams she enters a church, a serene and soothing place. A young priest sits next to her and after a moment of platitude, he assaults her while spouting Satanic rhetoric, forcing her to perform oral sex on him. Kristeva asserts that Semen, along with tears, are not abject because they do not pollute. But at the moment of climax for the priest, instead of ejaculating, dark blood erupts from his mouth in abject reversal; the moment of climax becomes one of pure abjection. Often priestly iconography is shown to be polluted, corpses in vestments, reified dead Christianity. The phallic priestly symbolic has been pushed to its purely abject. It is the menstrual that imagines the female more abject in the symbolic order, but now in this moment the tables are made equal, and the phallic jouissance has been subdued by the feminine vulvar symbolic order. 

The vision of Heidi as virgin Mary in the final scene, standing resplendent upon the heaps of nude female bodies, demands the new symbolic based on a vulvar signifier, a new quilting point. Stuart Hall says that “the world must be made to mean.” And we can take this in two ways within the same sentence. However, if we allow that The Lords of Salem is a film that is visually invested in returning the repressed and creating a new mytho-poetic order of feminine jouissance and power, then we must accept that if the world can be “remade” to mean. And this is what the final moment of the film asserts. Here is the new woman, the new order, the signifier not of the phallus, but Vulvar, born as we are all from it. The spiritual mythic world reborn and recreated. A new oceanic feeling. An incoherent revision of the symbolic order, visually reckless and untried. A Vulvar signifier! And there is nothing more beautiful and horrific than that.