Rob Zombie has always wanted to direct - and we had a funny feeling he'd take the word "cut!" literally.

Cue evil laughter. There have to be at least 1,000 acts of sadistic depravity in his first feature film, House of 1,000 Corpses, opening in theatres Good Friday. The 38-year-old horror rocker's directorial debut is a tale of a rural family whose houseguests are treated to dinner, a little entertainment and then slowly tortured to death. It is precisely the opposite of a "life-affirming" movie.

For how macabre the Munsters were supposed to be, they never actually hurt anybody. House of 1,000 Corpses is a glimpse of what real Munsters might be like.

"I guess it's like if that family had gone bad," Zombie explains.

So that was his idea?

"No, but that sounds good."

Rob Zombie is an infuriating interview. Attempts to pull back the shroud to reveal the true person behind the artist are futile. His love affair with all things gruesome, as can be seen throughout his oeuvre, is pure tautology - it is because it is. It comes out that his family was in the carnival business, which may explain a few things. Young Zombie, little brother Zombie and all the cousin Zombies spent their summers playing in the haunted house or riding the tilt-a-whirl until they were sick. Zombie says he's been obsessed with horror, movies and music since he can remember. He'd watch movies obsessively, "eight hours a day, every day," devour the latest issues of Eerie or Creepy magazines and pine for the day he'd be released from the enforced bondage of school. He wasted little time finding a creative outlet in his heavy metal band White Zombie. He has since gone solo.

Some kids looked up to sports heroes. Young Zombie looked up to Frankenstein. Television was his best friend.

"I saw that as a better life," he says. "Wow, people on TV are having more fun than me. I gotta get there. "

That Zombie turned his childhood obsessions into a lucrative career filled with hit albums and major motion pictures seems "strange" to him now, but ghastly gore is a topic he'll never tire of.

"People keep asking me, 'when do you think you're going to outgrow this?' People must feel there's some need to outgrow things in their life. I don't understand why that is. And maybe that's the reason some kid went on to become a famous football player and another kid became a shoe salesman. What are you outgrowing? Outgrowing the things you love?

"I just do what I love. As a kid, you have an idea in your mind: I wanna be an astronaut, I wanna be this, I wanna be that. I knew I wanted to do music because I loved music. I wanted to be part of movies because I loved movies. These are the things that to me make life worth living."

Depictions of death make life worth living. How ironic.

Universal Pictures refused to release House of 1,000 Corpses because it was just too disgusting, which Zombie took as a compliment. Lion's Gate has since picked it up. But this isn't the most nauseating splatter flick ever made. Texas Chainsaw Massacre still holds up. And B-movies like Cannibal Holocaust or Make Them Die Slowly are "beyond brutal," Zombie says. "Most people I know can't even sit through them. Films like that would never get made today."

Shocking people wasn't his intention.

"I just wanted to make a film that was really bleak and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. A lot of times these films get bogged down - somebody must survive and the bad people must be punished. Sometimes that's not the experience you're looking for. I feel cheated by happy endings a lot of times."

We agree that Signs was totally ruined by its stupid happy ending. Some studio execs suggested that perhaps House of 1,000 Corpses should have an uplifting conclusion, but no one was too insistent about it.

Says Zombie, "I thought, realistically, in that scenario, nobody's going anywhere.

"You're kidnapped and bound and gagged in some redneck's house. You're screwed, man."

Hey, it's just fantasy. Asked about the meanest thing he ever did in real life, Zombie comes up with a Grade 3 memory of placing a sharpened pencil on a kid's chair, "not expecting him to sit on it with such force."

The kid had to be rushed to the hospital.

"It was gruesome - especially when he comes back the next day with the severed pencil in a plastic bag to show you. 'My mom wanted you to see this!' " Zombie chuckles.

A formative moment in the life of a gross-out auteur or just a prank gone horribly awry?

You be the judge.