When Rob Zombie re-booted the “Halloween” franchise, he subverted expectations by taking the story’s central mystery (“why does Michael Myers kill?”) and painstakingly/joylessly providing a plausible explanation, instead of a fun horror movie! Now the ruining-stuff auteur is looking to do the same with his upcoming “Munsters” reboot!
Vampires, Frankensteins and spooky-ass surf rock, “The Munsters” had it all. Riding the last wave of the Universal Monster films’ popularity, “The Munsters” was a slightly ahead-of-its-time satire of late ‘50s to early ‘60s wholesome family television. While the show’s overall campy-ness has helped it maintain somewhat of a cult status to this day, it’s yet to enjoy a second life comparable to “The Addams Family.” Zombie hopes to change all of that through excessive violence, depictions of rape and a total lack of mystery and intrigue!
One of the show’s quirks is the fact that Eddie Munster, the son of Herman (Frankenstein’s Monster) and Lilly (a vampire) appears to be a wolf-boy for some reason. Zombie already has an iron-clad explanation for this mystery:
“First thing we’re gonna do is show that when Herman Munster was sewn together from dead body parts, his dick was taken from the body of a guy who was a werewolf,” explained Zombie in an AMA about the project. “That’s why his son is part werewolf, even though he’s technically half Frankenstein’s monster and half daughter of Dracula.”
Eddie isn’t the only character having his origins tediously over-explained. Zombie hopes to establish that Lilly was a product of incest, Herman killed his own creator after reading “Paradise Lost” and Marilyn, while seemingly a normal, attractive young woman, has an insatiable urge to kill that terrifies the rest of the family. Pretty ambitious for what the studio is expecting to be a 90-minute family comedy.
In addition to clarifying the back story for each main character, Zombie also hopes to inject a dose of reality into the once-campy franchise, particularly in areas where doing so will be a huge bummer.
“If you pay attention to the show, they establish that Grandpa Munster is in fact Count Dracula. My film will highlight his inherent sadism. This guy wouldn’t be spooking girl scouts away from the front door by mistake, he would be impaling their heads on the front gate! I mean, that’s just a ‘for instance,’ but it is in the movie.”
Despite the “not your grandpa’s (blank)” attitude that permeates his film career, Zombie isn’t without a sense of nostalgia. He promises that the film will contain several homages to his own earlier work. “We will reference the fact that Grandpa Munster built the Dragula car, conservatively, 47 times in this 90-minute film.”