Freaks Across the South: Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson Descend on Atlanta and Charlotte

Photos by Jeff Hahne & Max Stewart, Cover Photo by Jeff Hahne

Review by Max Stewart

The freaks are still very much on parade. Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson rolled through the Southeast this week with back-to-back stops at Ameris Bank Amphitheatre in Alpharetta, Georgia, on Sunday night and Truliant Amphitheater in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday, bringing along The HU and Orgy for a four-band bill that felt like a traveling celebration of everything loud, strange and wonderfully-excessive. What makes Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie such a natural pairing is that they have spent more than three decades building different wings of the same haunted house. They are two artists forever linked to the 90s but hardly interested in treating these shows like nostalgia exercises. Across the two nights, fire, towering video screens, industrial riffs and enough horror imagery to fill a midnight movie marathon turned the Freaks on Parade Tour into exactly what its name promises.

Marilyn Manson occupied the darker half of the equation. Where Zombie’s show is an explosion of color and movement, Manson’s world remains shadowy, confrontational and intentionally uncomfortable. “Disposable Teens,” “The Dope Show,” “Tourniquet,” “mOBSCENE” and “The Beautiful People” still carry plenty of venom, while his twisted rendition of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” remains one of those rare covers that has practically become its own song. Newer material slid comfortably alongside the classics, but it was the songs from Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals that served as reminders of just how strange it was that music this abrasive once occupied the center of American pop culture.

Rob Zombie turned the stage into a psychedelic horror convention. Zombie has never understood the concept of “too much,” and we are all thankful for that. Giant monsters, B-movie clips, strobes, flames and radioactive visuals surrounded a band that continues to hit with the precision of a muscle car doing 100 through a graveyard. “Superbeast,” “Living Dead Girl,” “Feel So Numb” and “Dragula” provided the solo-era ammunition, while the White Zombie staples like the slide-guitar heavy “More Human Than Human” and “Thunder Kiss ’65” remain absolute wrecking balls in a live setting. Zombie still prowls the stage like the world’s most enthusiastic horror movie carnival barker, conducting thousands of people through songs that have somehow become both nu-metal standards and communal sing-alongs.

But Charlotte received the ultimate surprise and what makes this tour so special. During Zombie’s set, Manson came to the stage and the two tore into The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” the song they recorded together in 2018. It is a treat that fans will likely get whenever Zombie performs first (they seem to be alternating who performs last each show). It is undoubtedly one of the defining images of this tour, Manson and Zombie shoulder-to-shoulder, two of rock’s most recognizable outsiders digging into one of the nastiest songs the Beatles ever recorded.

Taken together, Atlanta and Charlotte showed why Freaks on Parade continues to work so well. Manson brings the darkness, Zombie brings the funhouse. And somewhere between “The Beautiful People,” “Thunder Kiss ’65,” “Dragula” and that unexpected blast of “Helter Skelter,” it became clear this isn’t simply a victory lap for two survivors of another era. The freaks never disappeared. They just kept the circus moving from town to town.

Photos by Jeff Hahne – Charlotte, NC – Truliant Amphitheater – 8/24/26