Otis B. Driftwood

Otis B. Driftwood is a fictional character created by Rob Zombie. He was portrayed by Bill Moseley in House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects.

Character background

To promote the release of Rejects, Rob Zombie created backstories for the three protagonists of the film on the official website, using early photographs of the actors and fake newspaper clippings for realism. According to his biography, Otis B. Driftwood was born December 23, 1929. He was horribly neglected and abused by his parents, who didn't even give him a name. Otis would later write that he had committed his first murder at the age of 13. He is a drifter for much of his life, travelling over the country from Wilmington, Delaware to Hurst, Texas. In the small town of Ruggsville, he meets "Cutter" a.k.a. Captain Spaulding, and is soon living with his new friend's family, whom he nicknames "The Fireflys" after various characters from Groucho Marx comedies. This family consists of Spaulding's wife, whom Driftwood calls Mother, her two sons and her daughter, Vera-Ellen, with whom Otis forms an immediate bond and nicknames her Angel Baby. Otis and Baby roam across the country, murdering anyone in their path. Beginning in the summer of 1975, Otis begins committing his now famous "Son of Satan" murders. In the winter of 1976, Baby returns to Ruggsville alone and resumes her life on the Firefly farm. Otis, meanwhile, continues his murderous rampage, eventually returning home.

Films

Otis from House of 1000 Corpses.

Driftwood is by far the most sadistic member of the Firefly family. He often considers himself to be a revolutionary and an artist; he makes sculptures out of his victims, or skins them to wear as costumes.

Driftwood's character was altered somewhat for The Devil's Rejects. In the first film, for example, he is an albino, but he is of average Caucasian skin color in the sequel. Zombie did this because he felt the albino look was too "cartoonish" and was out of place in the grittier sequel.^[1] By the second film, he is characterized as a vicious, depraved killer, devoid of the the first film's humorous elements. In one particularly brutal scene, he skins the face of a man and then forces the man's wife to wear it as a mask, driving her insane. Rejects also explicitly characterizes him as a rapist, something only suggested in the first film; in one scene, Otis forces a woman to strip and perform lewd acts with him, at gunpoint, in front of her husband. At the end of the film, Driftwood is shot down by the police along with Baby and Captain Spaulding.

References