In his manifesto Theatre and Cruelty, dramatic surrealist Antonin Artaud wrote, “If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war, and madness…This is why we will try to center our show around famous personalities, horrible crimes, and superhuman self-sacrifices, demonstrating that it can draw out the powers struggling within them, without resorting to the dead imagery of ancient Myths.”

At some point in my development as a metalhead, it wasn’t. Zombie’s 1998 solo debut Hellbilly Deluxe might have gotten me into metal, but once I broke into extreme sub-genres like black metal, death metal, and grindcore, I considered myself too good for it. The underground was older and wiser, full of glyphs, psychology, and the dead imagery of ancient Myths. From then on, anything sillier than Celtic Frost was unwelcome in the Krovatin household.

Part of me wants to explain to my younger readers who Rob Zombie is, but the beauty of Rob Zombie is that I don’t really need to, because Rob Zombie has never deviated from his prime directive of putting on the great Lon Chaney freakout. He’s the heavy metal horror master, king of the carnies, a grindhouse killer who changed his mind in the final scene and married the blonde who sort of sounds like Bart Simpson instead of butchering her. Isn’t that enough?

Everything about Rob Zombie’s music makes me want to throw my fists in the air—the jock-jam riffs, the schizo garblings about fried chicken and Frankenstein, the strip club-ready rhythms and choruses. But that’s not all—there's his live show, with its blaring circus of go-go dancers and giant puppets; his films, yanked straight from the subconscious of a horny teenage horror fan; his art, which takes “Big Daddy” Ed Roth’s Kustom Kreep style and makes sweet, furious love to it in the alley behind Jumbo’s Clown Room. I love it all, every second of it.

It’s funny that extreme metal fans don’t rep Zombie, because when underground bands take their cues from him, everyone busts in their pants over it. The Black Dahlia Murder write rollicking anthems about vampires and werewolves; Tribulation and Ghost make digestible theater-metal straight out of a Hammer horror movie; and Acid Witch even use that same metallicized 70s double feature aesthetic that Zombie helped cement in the rock 'n' roll psyche. So why does it feel like Rob Zombie gets little love from the extreme metal underground?

Is all of Zombie’s material perfect? Of course not. I don’t watch The Lords of Salem every night, and not every track from Hellbilly Deluxe II is on my Halloween playlist. But if you’re sitting around judging musicians by the B+ moments in their careers, then you’re a joyless shmuck. And anyway, the beauty of a prolific artist is that their work often grows into something bigger than one album or the other.

Then I recently received a promo announcing Zombie’s new box set (which is out now) , complete with oodles of vinyl, art prints, and a Phantom Creep mask. My first thought was, "Ah, Rob Zombie, gotta make that merch money, right?" Then I thought, "Man, this looks pretty cool, I do dig on this kind of stuff." And then I thought, "Holy fucking shit, I love Rob Zombie and always have." For the first time in years, I gave in to my complete fanboy adoration of the dude’s work. And it felt great. So I wrote a thousand-plus words singing his praises.

The result: I got bored. I realized that plenty of the breakdowns and esoteric subject matters used in underground metal were actually _over_used, and that one cult death metal track about the anticosmic ether was very similar to all of the others. All the while, I waited for an opening riff even half as exciting as that of “Scum of the Earth,” a spooky atmosphere that came anywhere near that of “Return of the Phantom Stranger,” or a bass line sleazy enough to rival that of “Pussy Liquor.”

There's an argument that Zombie's portrayals of women are kind of sexist, because much of his art involves big-boobed monster women in pornographic poses, and because he has songs with titles like “The Hideous Exhibitions of a Dedicated Gore Whore.” There is truth in that—the latter is all about poking tender sensibilities, and the former is the crass goofery of a horndog. But on the other hand, the more I consume Zombie’s art, it seems like the women he portrays are, first and foremost, powerful.

In Zombie’s films, women are either formidable villains, such as House of 1,000 Corpses’ Baby Firefly and The Lords of Salem’s vicious witches, or hardcore survivors, like 31’_s Charlie. Even his female slasher victims have more substance than their bumbling boyfriends (if the male protagonists of _House had listened to their girlfriends, they’d be alive right now). While plenty of other horror films portray women as useless bimbos, Zombie portrays them as mistresses of everyone’s destiny. He’s in awe of women, even if he also likes drawing them naked.

That seems to be the artistic consensus on Zombie: his art isn’t mature. The people who tout this line love to pontificate about noise-era White Zombie, claiming Rob was a much better musician when he made music that they’ve never actually listened to and that they wouldn’t particularly enjoy if they did. The thesis boils down to that art is only mature if there’s something to “get,” while a cartoon of the Mummy in a hot rod is childish because it is what it is.