Otis B Driftwood 10 Things You Didnt Know About The Rob Zombie Character

Otis B Driftwood: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About The Rob Zombie Character

Otis B Driftwood is a crazed, sadistic member of the Firefly family, created by director Rob Zombie. Learn some extra trivia about this character!

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Played to perfection by actor Bill Moseley, Otis B Driftwood is a crazed, bearded sadistic member of the Firefly family, a family of equally psychotic killers and possibly ‘devil worshippers’. He appears as a regular character in director Rob Zombie’s hyper-violent and disturbing film trilogy, starting with House of 1000 Corpses, followed by The Devil’s Rejects and 3 From Hell.

He’s one of the most underrated icons in 21st-century horror, evoking a sense of fear even when he laughs. That’s because he derives pleasure out of gory pastimes like skinning people and wearing their skins as costumes. Here we discuss 10 things that you probably didn’t know about this perplexing character.

10 He was named after a Groucho Marx character

Several characters in Zombie’s films are named after classic characters from classic comedy movies by The Marx Brothers, which were popular in the early decades of the 20th century. Otis B Driftwood too is the exact name of a character from A Night At The Opera, a 1935 comedy musical in which Groucho Marx plays this character.

Other characters that are named after creations by the Marx Brothers include the creepy clown Captain Spaulding, and the patriarch of the Firefly family Rufus Firefly. Why did Rob Zombie choose such family-friendly comedy films to christen his bloodthirsty characters, that we are still unsure of.

9 A Manson Easter Egg

The whole concept of a homicidal cult-like family of which Otis is a part of is eerily similar to the real-life Manson family. Some even suggest that Otis’s unkempt appearance is also based on Manson. The family under the leadership of Charles Manson was notorious for killing actress Sharon Tate.

In The Devil’s Rejects, Otis utters a memorable quote while torturing and killing his victims, ‘I am the Devil and I’m here to do the Devil’s work.’ This quote has been interpreted as influenced by a similar quote by Charles Watson, a member of the Manson family. Watson is said to have said this quote during the Tate Murders.

8 Bill Moseley and Otis shared the same hygiene

Otis, like the other characters in the series, surely seems to look dirty and unclean in all their scenes. His hair and beard are never trimmed, and his skin is always covered with grime. After shooting scenes as Otis, actor Bill Moseley had quite a fun time playing this demonic character.

In fact, his family suggests that he got into the character behind the scenes too. He even stopped having showers for some time. Now, that’s definitely some unconventional kind of method acting!

7 Basement Torture

There’s a particularly disturbing scene from House of 1000 Corpses when Otis tortures a few cheerleaders. This scene was in fact shot at Rob Zombie’s basement after filming had been wrapped. He shot this scene himself with his 16mm-handheld camera.

The same process with the basement and the handheld camera was used in a few other cutaway scenes too, most notably the opening credits (with the exception of the shot of a setting sun in the credits).

6 I remember that pistol

In one of the most iconic scenes of House of 1000 Corpses, country singer Slim Whitman’s I Remember You plays as we see a montage of scenes where the Firefly family members kill various police officers. Otis, in particular, uses a 1911 pistol to shoot Don Willis (played by Harrison Young), the father of a girl called Denise who is trapped in the titular house of corpses.

This pistol in itself is a reference to both the actors’ careers. The gun was the official sidearm of the US Army for World War II and the Vietnam War. It’s interesting to note that in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Bill Moseley played a Vietnam vet while Harrison Young played a World War II veteran in Saving Private Ryan.

5 He had a cameo in an animated film

Not many know that apart from the Firefly trilogy and Halloween reboots, Rob Zombie also directed a horror musical called The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. It is based on Zombie’s comic book series of the same name and was intended to be both a parody and tribute to horror and exploitation films.

Even Captain Spaulding and Otis B Driftwood have cameo appearances in the film. According to Zombie, this implies that this adult animation film can also be seen as a ‘sidequel’ to The Devil’s Rejects (as El Superbeasto was released before 3 From Hell). In fact, he was working on the film’s screenplay while shooting The Devil’s Rejects.

4 His albinism was cured for partial reasons

In House of the 1000 Corpses, Otis usually sports a paler appearance and is referred to as an albino by the other characters. But by the second installment, his skin gains a normal complexion and his albinism seems to be cured.

No particular reason has been offered for this sudden change in the physical appearance of the character. Zombie wanted his sequel to be grittier and more down-to-earth and he felt the albinism would look like a cartoonish gimmick. That would explain the transition for there’s no particular reason given in the movie’s story for it.

3 Otis’s childhood and first murder

Those who are deep into the character’s fandom piece together his story starting from his troubled childhood. Apparently, he was born in 1929 and his parents were abusive and neglectful to him. The official website also stated that he committed his first murder at the age of thirteen.

He then went on to become a drifter in his youth traveling in various cities in Texas. It was in the year 1965 when he visited the city of Ruggsville and was adopted in the Firefly who took an instant liking to him. As we see, later on, he shared a close sibling-like bond with Captain Spaulding’s daughter Vera-Ellen too (whom he later names Baby and that’s how she is known throughout the series).

2 Inspirations from Classic Psychos

In The Devil’s Rejects, the influence of other classic psychotic characters can be seen in Otis’s mannerisms and scenes. The scene where he attacks a girl in a shower clearly seems to be a callback to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 cult thriller Psycho. The classic ‘killing in the shower’ scene has been reinterpreted and parodied in many a film so this doesn’t come as a surprise.

Another influence rings closer to home for Bill Moseley. The scene where he wears a man’s skin as a mask is also vaguely similar to a scene from the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

1 Taking the teens back to the 70s

Almost all of Rob Zombie’s films have been a tribute to classic exploitation films from the 70s and 80s. Otis’s victims (especially in House of 1000 Corpses) have been many teenagers, giving a throwback to the times when teens were preyed upon by homicidal maniacs in series like Halloween and A Nightmare On Elm Street.

While obviously, the actor Bill Moseley doesn’t advertise this behavior in real life, he did joke about the nature of his character and the first movie in an old press conference. He remarked, ‘It’s a bloody, violent movie, a throwback to the golden age of ’70s horror when the teens weren’t the stars – they were the rib roasts!’

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/rob-zombie-otis-b-driftwood-trivia/

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