Just before sunup, Rodriguez finally sends his zombie actors home. He prepares the next scene, in which a convoy of trucks races through a gauntlet of zombies on a backwater road, sending blood and guts flying. Rodriguez sits in his director's chair strumming a flamenco guitar while the film's special F/X guys pour jugs of Karo syrup and red dye into the heads of dummies as if they were filling jelly doughnuts.
Rodriguez puts down his guitar and yells ''Action!'' The convoy speeds toward the dummies, and the F/X guys race into the bushes nearby like kids who have just lit firecrackers. The trucks get closer...and closer...then, splatttttt! Gore flies everywhere. Rodriguez runs over to assess the damage. There's a leg in one lane and a mangled head in the other. Rodriguez starts cracking up as he bends over to pick up a stray finger that's landed 20 yards from the point of impact.
Watching this, you can't help but wonder: How does a 38-year-old man with five kids find himself giddily pulverizing zombies at four in the morning? Rodriguez says it all goes back to one particular night at a San Antonio drive-in. He was 11 years old. And he and his nine brothers and sisters were piled onto the top of their parents' van watching harmless family films. ''My mom said to us, 'Don't look at the other movies!' But on the drive-in's other screen was Alien. And I remember sneaking a look at the exact moment when the alien popped out of the guy's chest.''
For his part, Tarantino insists that his passion for grind-house movies didn't grow out of being unathletic or unpopular as a kid, or out of the fact that he never really knew his dad when he was younger. ''That whole scenario is that there's got to be something wrong with me!'' the director says with a laugh. ''Really, it's just that ever since I was a kid, movies were the one thing I gravitated towards. If you go to any elementary school, there's a kid who's into cars, and if he's not talking about cars, he's drawing cars. And there's the kid who's into sports and the kid who's into comic books. I was into movies.''
Tarantino grew up in South Bay, a collection of blue-collar neighborhoods on the southern fringes of L.A. From the time he was 10, he was spending every weekend at the Carson Twin Cinema. When he was older, he'd venture to the dodgier theaters in downtown L.A. and sit through chopsocky triple bills, racy cheerleader movies, and anything else that promised the remote possibility of pimps, samurais, or nudity. ''When I give props to these movies, you have to understand — it's not like they were all good. There's an expression: You have to drink a lot of milk before you can appreciate cream. Well, with exploitation movies, you have to drink a lot of milk-gone-bad before you can even appreciate milk! That's what part of the love of these movies is — going through the rummage bin and finding the jewels.''
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