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I mentioned a little while back that everybody’s favorite horror-movie director, Rob Zombie, is an ethical vegetarian. He’s also a hell of a good sport, since he took some time this month to sit down and record our Holiday Hotline—a compassionate alternative to the infamous Butterball Turkey Talk Line, which offers fans of Butterball’s work the gruesome experience of listening to someone talk about how to slice up and burn the dead bodies of tortured birds.

Which, well, everybody likes a good horror flick, but I prefer to keep my encounters with the macabre entirely fictional, thank you very much. Speaking of segues: Here, ladies and gentlemen, is horror movie legend Robert Zombie with PETA’s Holiday Message:

Click here to hear PETA's holiday hotline recorded by Rob Zombie!

Mr. Zombie was also kind enough to sign his PETA T-shirt for us to give away on this here blog. So if you’re a Rob Zombie superfan, e-mail me by November 23 to let me know what you like best about the man and his work, and I’ll pick someone to send it to. I'll let you know if you're the lucky winner the week after the Thanksgiving holiday.

You can also click here to read the terms and conditions of this contest, if you like. But don’t expect it to be a particularly exciting experience.

umusic/Creative Commons

If you've been following Rob Zombie's career, you'll know that he's been successful in a number of different arenas, from his groundbreaking work with White Zombie in the '90s, when this blogger was a young alternative-music junkie ("More human than hu-man! More human than hu-man!") to his successful solo career, and more recently in his mega-hit slasher films House of 1,000 Corpses and Halloween. A lot of people who have watched the gore-fest that is this summer's Halloween get more squeamish when the young Michael Myers mutilates animals than they do when the killer graduates to human victims. Well, it so happens that this touches on one of PETA's major campaigns—to raise awareness about the well-documented link between cruelty to animals and crimes against humans.

With that in mind, PETA VP Dan Mathews wrote the following note to Mr. Zombie:

“We at PETA would like to thank you for making clear in Halloween that people who commit acts of cruelty to animals are likely to move on to humans. Although audiences wince during scenes showing the young Michael Myers mutilating animals, following it up with the school counselor articulating how this is the first step to becoming a maniac was perfectly done. Hopefully, with the attention focused by your movie on this link between animal cruelty and human violence, more people will recognize the warning signs among people they know and deal with it more forcefully.”

Not only was the cat used in this scene fake (of course), but guess what? Rob Zombie is an ethical vegetarian, and has been since 1982, when he saw slaughterhouse footage in high school. Turns out that some zombies don't eat flesh at all. Who knew?