The Lords of Salem (2013)

The Lords of Salem arrives from 2012, a Rob Zombie production with complete creative freedom and a fondness for the Ken Russell end of the horror aisle. A recovering addict named Heidi spins hard rock at a Salem radio station, receives a wooden box, plays the record inside, and begins to unravel. The film is a mood, a slow drift through apartment hallways, covens, and vinyl hiss. It wants to unsettle us. It has no interest in instructing us, which places it at a comfortable distance from the sermonizing that marks the era's more earnest output.

The casting brings Ken Foree and María Conchita Alonso into a supporting ensemble, though the film never pauses to make a statement about it. Diversity here is incidental, the natural residue of a director hiring actors he likes. Heidi anchors the story, but she is a victim of a three-hundred-year-old curse, dragged toward a fate she cannot alter. A female lead is not the same as a feminist argument, and the film offers none. There is no LGBTQ subtext, no engagement with race despite the Massachusetts setting, no environmental lament, no class anger, no body-acceptance message. Heidi's addiction and hallucinations are rendered as supernatural affliction and relapse, not as a study of a differently wired mind.

The Salem witch trials function as backstory and spectacle. The accused are genuine Satanists, which is the opposite of a revisionist rescue of history. The film's only agenda is atmosphere, and it pursues that agenda with commitment. The result is a mood piece that trusts imagery over argument, and for that restraint it deserves a measure of respect, even when the imagery grows garish and the narrative frays. It unsettles. It does not preach. In this climate, that is nearly a novelty.