The Lords of Salem is the story of Heidi, an ex-junkie working as a late-night DJ in, of all places, Salem, Massachusetts, who finds her mundane life slowly turned inside-out beginning when a new unseen tenant moves in just a couple of doors down from her in her small apartment building. I won’t give away who the new tenant is but you’ll figure it out soon enough. Soon after, someone leaves a package containing a vinyl record from a group called The Lords for her at the radio station she works at. That night, she and her co-worker / “just a friend” played by Rob Zombie-look-a-like, Jeffrey Daniel Phillip, listen to the record and her world is never the same again.

The movie wears its influences proudly on its sleeve. Most horror fans will recognize the impressions such films as The Shining to Susperia to Rosemary’s Baby to The Lair of the White Worm has on not only the story but also the set designs, camera shots, and cinematography. Some of the visuals found in the movie are very mesmerizing but this is also one of the problems the movie has.

The movie suffers from a bad case of using nonsensical visuals to try and jolt the viewer with how extreme and provocative they were. While this can work if used sparingly, it can also backfire which happens here. They neither carried the story further nor did they induce any kind of scares. Some, sadly, were more comical than anything. To make matters worse, the movie also suffers from the dreaded “Is-this-a-nightmare-or-is-it-real?” cliché way too much. Again, one dream sequence is fine; more than that and you run the risk of the viewer just totally checking-out of the movie- which is what I did.

Even when the ho-hum climax came, I found myself thinking Zombie can be his own worse enemy in regards to his choices. There’s no doubt Zombie has talent as a director but as a screenwriter, he really needs to work on his stories. It is easy to compare the setup of the story to that of Rosemary’s Baby and other classic supernatural-occult movies of the late 60s and the 70s. But Zombie’s Achilles’s Heel is not only his wife, Sheri Moon, who he is bound-and-determined to cast in every one of his movies, but also his lack of telling a good story with a solid structure and characters you care about. What made movies like Rosemary’s Baby work was you felt like Rosemary did in that you didn’t know whom to trust in the movie: do you trust your husband? How about the kindly older neighbors who remind you of your grandparents? You feel helpless, not knowing who to trust as Rosemary’s life slowly crumbles in front of you.

Also, The Lords of Salem had no suspense or sense of mystery to it. The classic movies it tries so hard to emulate were very suspenseful and were very mysterious which made them even scarier. You didn’t know who to trust, or why this character did this or that. Here, you know right off the bat who the bad guys are and what they are doing. There is no mystery, no suspense, and no tension throughout the entire movie. Just a lot of flashy incoherent visuals, bad storytelling, and an emotionally-hollow ending with no sense of climax or confrontation whatsoever.

While there are glimpses of what this movie could have been, The Lords of Salem is just a poor imitation of much better horror movies.

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