HAVERHILL, Mass. -- "We dare you to see the bloodcurdling Zombie House!" reads a cartoon inside the jacket of Rob Zombie's 1998 album Hellbilly Deluxe. "So scary you'll have nightmares for a week!"
So the Zombie fans come, like pilgrims to an unholy shrine, to the house where a Zombie grew up. Mom Zombie, a.k.a. Louise Cummings, greets seekers at her door like this: "How did you find this address?"
Circa 1999, when Zombie-mania was at its height -- and after the local paper printed directions to her house -- Cummings had to take a vacation to Alaska to escape the Zombie-heads. She says she has to field a steady stream of fans of the gore-loving shock-rocker, whose act seems to mirror a '60s horror flick.
When they arrive, the fans usually can't believe what they find: a white, boxy, vinyl-sided house. Totally C-SPAN boring. If they get inside, they see it's just books stacked neatly on a glass coffee table, walls covered with pastel paintings of Paris.
This is the Zombie house? Where are the corpses rotting on meat hooks? The portals to hell, not just the pantry?
And this is Mom Zombie? A quiet, stay-at-home wife wearing a flower-print tank top that nearly matches her couch?
"I'm Rob Zombie's mother," she says quietly, almost confessionally, "and I'm pretty normal."
She's the matriarch of one of Massachusetts' greatest metal rock families. Zombie, 36, after 13 years as the lead singer for the tongue-in-cheek Satan-worshipping band White Zombie, has hit pay dirt on his own. He's released three discs: the platinum-selling Hellbilly Deluxe, the gold-selling Sinister Urge, and a remix album called American Made Music to Strip By. Mike Cummings, her younger son by two years, is better known as Spider from Powerman 5000, another platinum-selling group.
Zombie gets some of the coolest gigs in rock. He's wrapping up a Ramones tribute album, which he produced and which includes greats such as Tom Waits, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rancid, Green Day, Garbage, Offspring, Marilyn Manson, U2, Eddie Vedder, Metallica and Kiss. Zombie himself lays down "Blitzkrieg Bop." The album is due out next month.
Zombie also directed a horror movie called House of 1,000 Corpses, although he may have put one too many corpses in it. The film initially got slapped with an NC-17 rating, and one industry executive called it a "celebration of depravity," which Zombie took as a compliment. After editing and re-editing, he got the "R" rating he needed. The film will be released across the country on Labor Day.
