A Wicked Willy Wonka

The little kid with the big stick crushing the other boy's head was pretty heavy.

Same with the hacked-up dad, the dead sister and the family pets turned into a chunky, oozing stew of torn flesh and broken limbs.

When Rob Zombie's mind's eye gets projected on the big screen, everything dies.

It's a fantasia of death, most recently evidenced by his brutal remake of John Carpenter's "Halloween," where a young Michael Myers wreaks havoc like a prepubescent machete cleaving its way through the world.

But for a man so adept at making skin crawl, he rarely experiences the same sensation at the cineplex.

"I haven't really felt like I was scared by a movie since I was a little kid," Zombie says during a recent conference call. "The main film I think that freaked me out, which is such a common one, is 'Jaws.' I was never scared by monster stuff so much. First it was the flying monkeys and 'The Wizard of Oz,' and then 'Jaws.' And that's it. No other movies ever bothered me since."

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise, really. Zombie's made a career out of rendering the stuff of nightmares leering, libidinous pop art.

He's a trash culture auteur, a man obsessed with the underbelly of Americana, from serial killers to strippers to Satan. It's a study in the things that bother us, done with a knowing wink, set to a throbbing metal grind.

It's like throwing a bachelor party at the local morgue.

But while Zombie came to fame fronting a metal band, White Zombie, he's just as indebted to New York noise rock, gritty punk and even hardscrabble honky-tonk.

"I always loved Buck Owens because that was the one thing I remember as a kid," Zombie says. "I don't ever remember my dad liking anything -- not just music, anything. But he seemed to love Buck Owens -- 'Hee Haw.' So, we would always watch Buck Owens and Roy Clark. Somehow, 'Hee Haw' was very influential in my life."

Zombie's works always have had a seedy, low-budget, B-movie feel to them, and he's big on presentation: A former graphic artist, his shows are festooned with R-rated cartoons of buxom she-devils, acres of skulls and enough pyro and flames to melt an ice cap or two.

"The live shows have always been totally visual," Zombie says. "I have a huge warehouse of all the stage sets from over the years. I kind of piece together something totally different that we've never had before. If there's anything that movies teach you it's just the pace of things. You want to have a big beginning and then bring it down and bring it up. Sometimes you see a band and you know whatever they've done in the first five seconds is what they're going to do for the entire hour. It's never going to fluctuate. I like to put a lot variety into it. It's more like a show than just a concert."

Documenting said spectacle, Zombie recently released his first live album, the aptly titled "Zombie Live."

"I had been wanting to do this for many, many years and recorded a lot of shows, and I would always do band lineup changes and different things would happen and so I would always shelve it," he says. "This time, I knew the band wasn't going to change, and I knew it was probably the best-sounding band I'd had. If it was ever a time to record a live album it was at that point. If you wait much longer, no one's going to buy records anymore anyway, so there's no point."

Hearing Zombie speak, there seems to be little disconnect between the man and his grisly, plasma-coated art. Sometimes he sounds like a kid, a sinister Willy Wonka, who thrills at bringing the carnival to town because it means that he never has to leave the big top himself.

"We were in South Dakota last night, we pull up, it's just kind of like this really dismal looking ice rink in the middle of nowhere, and I just wanted the kids when they walked out of that place at the end of the night to go like, 'Holy (expletive), didn't expect that,' " Zombie says. "It just blew their minds, because that's really what you want it to do, and that's what I always wanted things to do to me as a kid. Whether it was a movie or a concert, you want it to just open up your mind to something different and go like, 'I never though of it that way before. I didn't know it could be that.' The main thing it's supposed to be is fun."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0476.