PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Rob Zombie’s 31 is my favorite of his films after Halloween (2007) and The Devils Rejects (2005). Zombie’s films are hit or miss with people; either they hate them or they love them.
31 follows five carnival workers (Sheri Moon Zombie, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, Kevin Jackson, Meg Foster) who are kidnapped the night before Halloween and held hostage in a large compound. At the mercy of their captors (Malcolm McDowell, Jane Carr), they are forced to play a twisted game of life or death called 31. The film also stars Richard Brake and Judy Geeson.
Fun Facts:
1) Rob Zombie said the reason he set this movie on Halloween was because he read a statistic which stated that more people go missing on Halloween in the U.S. than any other day, and he thought it would make an interesting premise for a film.
2) Zombie called this his “most brutal film [to date].”
3) 31 was Rob Zombie’s first crowdfunded movie.
4) Zombie told Pancho Moler to say a lot of his lines in Spanish after he found out that Moler was fluent in Spanish.
5) A popular rumor surrounding this movie is that Bill Moseley and Sid Haig both turned down roles for various reasons, while the truth is that neither actor was ever offered a part in the movie.
6) David Ury referred to this movie as “by far the craziest I’ve ever worked on, and certainly the craziest stuff I’ve done on film.”
7) During Richard Brake’s performance as Doom-Head, in his opening monologue, he barely blinks his eyes in the single shot close up. The first time was 45 seconds in, then doesn’t blink again for 61 seconds. It really added to the overall discomfort of the scene.
8) This isn’t Richard Brake’s first Doom-ish role. Besides playing Doom-Head in 31, he also appeared as Portman in Doom (2005).
9) 31 was re-edited twice before the MPAA gave the film an R rating. The first two submissions came back with an NC-17.
10) Sheri Moon Zombie came up with the idea to use “Dream On” by Aerosmith at the end.
