These days, it's also because of his Great American Nightmare Festival, taking place from October 10 through November 2 in Los Angeles. While Halloween isn't in the event name, what other festival features three different haunted houses? There are, of course, nightly live bands, including 3OH!3, Blood On The Dance Floor, Andrew W.K., Powerman 5000, the Butcher Babies and Rob himself. Zombie has made it his job to celebrate Halloween, professionally speaking.

"I've wanted to do this for a long time," Zombie tells Radio.com. "It's really a two-week-long Halloween extravaganza. There's haunted mazes, but every night there's bands playing metal, punk, alternative, dance�every night's different. Then, there's car shows and wrestling. You can go to everything or to one thing, but I wanted to do one sort of all-encompassing Halloween carnival craziness."

Of course, for Rob Zombie, nearly every day is Halloween. Whenever he takes the stage�including in blazing temperatures on this summer's Mayhem festival�he's wearing full-on monster gear. From his stage get-ups to album art to music videos, Rob's music (both as a member of White Zombie and in his subsequent solo career) has always had a huge visual element.

"I never had a moment where I thought the visuals are important�it never even crossed my mind that they weren't important," he said. "I was more shocked when people would act like they weren't. Visuals have always been incredibly important to rock music. Would anyone have cared if Jimi Hendrix was fat and bald, or if Jim Morrison was ugly? Rock has always had a lot of style."

White Zombie came out of a scene that didn't pack a huge visual punch: the New York art scene of the mid-'80s that also included Sonic Youth and Live Skull. But at some point, they were accepted in the heavy metal community, where Rob now enjoys near-icon status. His metal fanbase has supported him for over two decades now.

"The biggest thing about metal audiences that other forms of music don't have�some of them do, I'm sure�the longevity and the loyalty," he said. "You'll see people, they love it forever. They'll say, 'It's my 50th time seeing Iron Maiden!' That's whats great about it. It's that frozen in time loyalty to the bands that they love."

A lot of those fans showed up to see Rob headline Mayhem this summer, alongside Mastodon, Five Finger Death Punch and more. Mayhem is notable not as America's big touring metal fest these days, but also for advocating various veteran's charities. The charity that Rob worked with was the Puppy Rescue Mission, and while the idea of the demonic rocker loving puppies sounds funny at first, it's quickly clear that this is a cause that is near to his heart.

"The puppy rescue: it's a funny name," he admits. "What it is, is a lot of soldiers in Afghanistan would find these dogs and bond with them and sneak them on the bases, even though they weren't supposed to have them. It was probably the only moment of sanity for these guys, when they spent time with them. Some of the stories I've heard are horrible: people would torture these dogs, and kill them for fun. These guys saved these dogs, and really bonded with them. But they weren't allowed to take them home, and if they could, it was so expensive. That was a cause I could really understand and get behind. Imagine being that far from home and bonding with a dog and then being told to just leave him there and then get on a plane to go home. No way!"