Horror Flick Scares Off Universal

When Universal Pictures Chairman Stacey Snider was in college, a potential boyfriend took her on a date to see the blood-soaked slasher classic “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” “Needless to say,” she recalls with a laugh, “the guy didn’t get a second date.”

Now Rob Zombie knows how he felt.

Up until now, Zombie, a theatrical heavy-metal rocker, has been something of a poster boy for corporate synergy at Vivendi-Universal. As the leader of White Zombie and later as a solo artist, Zombie has sold millions of records for Universal’s Geffen Records label. In 1999, Zombie designed the Halloween Horror Night maze for Universal Studios Hollywood that featured creepy creatures and a 30-foot replica of Zombie’s head. And the dreadlocked rocker’s most ambitious project, a gory $7-million horror film called “House of 1000 Corpses,” was due for release this summer by Universal Pictures.

Well, so much for synergy. After weeks of negotiations and soul-searching, Universal Pictures has told Zombie that it won’t release the movie and instead has allowed Zombie, who wrote and directed the picture, to retain the rights and look for a new distributor. The studio plans to officially announce the decision today.

“We have the utmost respect for Rob, who made a really intense and compelling movie, but it turned out far more intense than we could have possibly imagined,” Snider says. “When I looked at the cumulative effect of the entire film, it was clear that the best version of the movie would end up getting an NC-17 rating, and we felt that would make the marketing and distribution of the movie impossible for us.”

Zombie says he’s not entirely surprised by the studio’s abrupt case of cold feet. “I have to admit that it would’ve been great if they’d released the film, but it felt weird from the get-go. Here we were, making this crazy [expletive] horror film, with this big corporate entity behind us. If you look at the history of horror films, the really scary ones, like ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ were made by little independent companies, not big corporations.”

Snider and Zombie both say the decision was the result of differences in artistic taste, not worries over the film’s playability or any chilling effect from the browbeating the entertainment industry received last fall from the Senate Commerce Committee and the Federal Trade Commission over marketing violent movies, music and video games to children.

Still, since this is the first time a studio has publicly disassociated itself from a violent movie since the hearings, Universal’s decision is bound to be interpreted as a sign that movie studios are taking a more cautious approach to youth-oriented films with violent subject matter.

There is already evidence to support that view. Zombie’s manager, Andy Gould, says he was involved as a music supervisor in several recent teen-oriented horror films, including “Valentine” and “Dracula 2000,” whose content was toned down in the wake of the FTC report on the marketing of violent films to children. And Snider acknowledged that “going to Washington did raise my consciousness in certain subtle ways, especially in terms of marketing films to young audiences.”

However she argues that dropping “1000 Corpses” was a “content issue, not a witch-hunt response. I would’ve responded the same way to the movie without ever having listened to [Sen.] John McCain at the hearings. This wasn’t about sending the movie out with an R rating and lots of warnings. This was overwhelmingly a matter of personal responsibility.”

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At first, everything seemed to be going smoothly on the project. Universal loved Zombie’s script, viewing it as a potential “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise, with the built-in marketing extra of a director who could promote the film at his own rock concerts.

The movie went into production last summer, filming on the Universal lot and around Los Angeles. The story involves two young couples whose car, in classic horror-movie fashion, breaks down in the middle of nowhere, leaving them in the hands of a family of creepy small-town crazies.

The family is headed by Mother Firefly, an aging glamour queen (played by Karen Black) who puts on shows with puppets made out of stuffed cats and squirrels. She has a daughter named Baby, who puts out cigarettes in the palm of her hand, and a 300-pound son named Tiny, who wears a leather mask to obscure hideous burns. Needless to say, they torture and kill the young couples in an especially graphic and lurid fashion.

It is surely no coincidence that White Zombie was Beavis and Butt-head’s favorite band. Snider says she knew what she was getting into; she listened to Zombie’s albums, watched his videos and went to see his horror maze.

“I certainly knew more about his work as a first-time director than I knew about the Weitz brothers before they made ‘American Pie,’ ” she says.

A contingent of Universal executives first saw the completed film at a test screening in mid-January. Although the film received a positive reaction, Zombie noticed that Snider wasn’t exactly enjoying herself. “It was obvious that Stacey was disturbed by the movie, which I took as a compliment,” he says. “It was like, great, she’s really freaked out by it. It must be a really scary movie. To me, what was most important was that the audience dug it.

“My feeling is that horror movies are like heavy-metal music. If you show it to the wrong person, they’re going to be disgusted by it. Horror movies are supposed to be dark and disturbing. What offends some people is exactly what makes it cool to other people. So for me to cut out all the violence would be like saying, ‘Hey, we made a porno movie, but we’re taking out all the sex scenes.’ I mean, why do you think people are going to see it?”

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Still, Snider wasn’t alone in her reaction. Terry Curtin, Universal’s head of publicity, was also on hand and agreed the movie had gone too far. “I’m not sure where the line is, but it was clear from watching the film that it had crossed it,” she explains. “It’s probably the first time in my career that I felt I’d have trouble working on a movie. What made it even more bizarre was that it didn’t seem to offend the audience a bit, which disturbed me even more.”

The Universal executives’ reaction highlights one of the crucial dilemmas in dealing with cutting-edge pop culture: Who decides the difference between artistic freedom and cynical exploitation? Where is the line between raunchy good fun and objectionable material? And what does a good corporate citizen do when an artist appears to cross it?

The line is drawn in different places at different corporations--and even within the same company. Miramax Films is owned by Walt Disney Co., yet Miramax has released movies that its family-oriented parent company would never touch. At the same time that Universal’s film division is refusing to release a gory horror film, its music division is selling millions of albums by controversial rap star Eminem. In fact, according to a Recording Industry Assn. of America survey conducted at the time of the FTC report last fall, Universal’s music division was overwhelmingly the leader among major record labels in releasing CDs stickered with parental-advisory warning labels for foul language and violent imagery.

To make things more complicated, Universal is co-distributor of “Hannibal,” a horror film whose star attraction is a serial killer who cooks and eats the brains of his victims. Yet Universal has no problem raking in huge profits from that film--and audiences seem to have no problem accepting its violent content. So why does “Hannibal” get a pass and “House of 1000 Corpses” get the boot?

“The difference is all about tone,” Snider says. “ ‘Hannibal’ is clearly theatrical and based on a popular book that’s part of our mainstream culture. The conceit of Rob’s movie, which has no recognizable stars, is that it’s not a fantasy. It could be real and that’s what makes it more upsetting. I can tell ‘Hannibal’ is a fantasy because when I watch Tony Hopkins or Ray Liotta, I know I’m going to see them in People magazine next week. But with Rob’s movie, I was concerned that there was just an uber-celebration of depravity.”

The script graphically describes the film’s mayhem, and I told Snider that it seemed hard to believe that she, as a seasoned film executive, wouldn’t have been disturbed by the film in script form. But she argued that it appeared far more horrific on screen.

“There are hundreds of choices Rob made where things played differently than they did in the script,” she says. “On the page, when you see a cop killed, it reads like a convention of the genre--’Oh no, we’ve tightened the screws on our heroes.’ In the movie, everything was underlined and emphasized, it was a celebration of the assassination of a character.”

When Universal submitted a rough cut of the film to the Motion Picture Assn. of America on Jan. 19, several days after the screening it came back with an NC-17 rating. But many hard-R films initially receive that rating, and Zombie says he has always been willing to honor his obligation to deliver an R-rated film. Will Universal’s refusal to release the film give it the appearance of damaged goods? Zombie doesn’t think so.

When Miramax wouldn’t release “Dogma” last year, Lions Gate picked up the film and turned a tidy profit. Several years ago, when Universal’s then-subsidiary October Films dropped “Happiness,” it quickly found a new distributor. In fact, executives at two independent film companies have said they are planning to screen “1000 Corpses” for possible distribution.

“Maybe some people will be offended, but I think the title ‘House of 1000 Corpses’ doesn’t leave much to the imagination,” says Zombie, who hopes to have the movie out later this summer after the release of his new solo album. “It’s not some weird art movie. It’s for Middle America, for people who work at 7-Eleven and listen to Metallica and love horror movies. And whether this movie ends up on 300 screens or 3,000 screens, I bet its audience is going to find it.”

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.