Has House of 1,000 Corpses and Halloween remake auteur Rob Zombie directed “the greatest love story ever told”? That is the somewhat unlikely, and probably somewhat tongue-in-cheek, assertion which opens the trailer (below) for Zombie’s upcoming movie version of The Munsters.
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There is no doubt that the filmmaker loves classic 1960s sitcom. In fact, the new film is the result of a two decade-long quest by Zombie to bring Herman, Lily, and Grandpa Munster to the screen.
“This project dates back twenty years,” says the director. “When I was doing my very first film, House of 1,000 Corpses, at Universal Studios, the chairman of the studio at the time asked me, ‘Oh, any ideas what you might want to do for your next film?’ I just, without even hesitating, was like, ‘The Munsters!‘”
“There were two shows, there was The Munsters and The Addams Family, and they were always sort of neck-and-neck,” he explains. “They came out at the same time, they ended at the same time, they were same-but-different, both high quality, both completely memorable. But The Addams Family had two major movies, they had a Broadway show, they had all kinds of stuff. And The Munsters didn’t really have that going on. I thought, a big Munsters film would be amazing. Then it didn’t happen.”
The director finally got his chance to revive the franchise during the pandemic, when he shot the movie in Hungary with a cast led by Zombie veterans Jeff Daniel Phillips, Daniel Roebuck, and the filmmaker’s wife Sheri Moon Zombie.
“I wanted to cast people that had worked together a lot,” says Zombie. “I couldn’t risk getting on set in Budapest and going, my leads aren’t getting along, they have no chemistry. So that’s why I chose the cast I chose. Jeff Daniel Phillips and Sheri Moon Zombie and Daniel Roebuck, they work together a lot and I knew they would just fall right into it.”
Universal 1440 Entertainment Daniel Roebuck, Sheri Moon Zombie, and Jeff Daniel Phillips in ‘The Munsters’
The film’s cast also includes Jorge Garcia, Richard Brake, Catherine Schell, Sylvester McCoy, and Cassandra Petersen (a.k.a. Elvira), who plays real estate agent Barbara Carr.
“We’ve been friends with Cassandra for I don’t even know how long,” says Zombie. “She was at our wedding, she was at Sheri’s shower. We’ve been friends with her for at least 25 years. So that was another good person that could come in and fit right in, totally familiar.”
The Munsters will be released this fall. Watch the film’s trailer above.
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