White Zombie

• Genre: Alt Metal

About

Rob Cummings and Shauna Reynolds realized their dream of combining tawdry B-movie aesthetics and rock 'n' roll (just as Kiss, the Misfits and the Cramps had before them) by forming White Zombie in 1985. Taking the band's name from a Bela Lugosi movie and changing their own names to Rob Zombie and Sean Yseult, the two recruited a lineup with backgrounds in heavy metal and electronica. La Sexorcisto, their 1992 Geffen debut, offered listeners a bump-and-grind horror show of the occult and borderline blasphemous. White Zombie excelled at turning dance beats into brutal dance beatings interspersed with unbreakable guitar submission holds. Astro Creep: 2000 (1995) was this now-defunct band's finest hour -- a vision of sex and technology nearly as apocalyptic as J.G. Ballard's "Crash," while nearly as campy as Mars Attacks. The ramparts dividing Industrial and Metal had again been breached, and adult entertainers everywhere learned to remove their scanty habiliments to a whole new tune.

- Chad Driscoll