As soon as it was reported that Rob Zombie was going to make a film version of the 1960s monster sitcom The Munsters, the discussion became centered around the movie’s visual appearance. At first, fans were worried that the movie might not be in black-and-white like the original. But once the movie’s first trailer dropped in July 2022, the floodgates opened to a deluge of insults, mockery, and online hate. Nearly every YouTube comment on the trailer was negative and, again, almost all were about the film’s appearance. “This looks like the old Goosebumps show if it had an extra 30$ added to the budget,” wrote Nekko G. “This looks more like a parody skit than an actual trailer to a movie,” wrote CAPTAIN_JUNEBUG99. “This looks like a movie I’d make in my HIGH SCHOOL film class,” wrote Xblade_Bukowski. Even some news sites jumped on the bandwagon. The entertainment-focused Paste Magazine ran with the headline “Watch the Embarrassingly Bad First Trailer for Rob Zombie’s The Munsters, If You Dare,” in which writer Jim Vorel described the trailer as “terrible,” “embarrassingly amateurish and cheap,” and “like a high schooler’s attempt to replicate Dario Argento’s Suspiria.”
But once the movie actually released, many changed their tune. Paste Magazine published a new article entitled “Rob Zombie’s Munsters Is a Miracle,” where Brianna Zigler sang a paean to Zombie’s ability to produce unique independent films in an industry that largely didn’t want him there. “In a release slate that has become progressively homogeneous,” wrote Zigler, “shouldn’t weird, outsider art probe us to consider that particular art as increasingly vital?” Somewhat ironically, many reviews of The Munsters now declared that the film’s visuals were its only redeeming quality — a complete about-face from the public’s initial reaction. The consensus for negative reviews was that the film was all style and no substance.
Rob Zombie’s The Munsters is a prequel to the original sitcom, and shows how the Frankenstein’s monster-inspired Herman Munster (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Bride of Frankenstein-inspired Lily Gruesella (Sheri Moon Zombie) met, fell in love, and moved to suburban California to raise a happy family. What is so remarkable about the film is that a major movie studio — Universal, who owns both The Munsters property and the 1930s horror films it was inspired by — was willing to hand the reboot over to a somewhat controversial independent filmmaker known for extremely gory and disturbing movies like House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. Even more remarkable, though, is that Zombie was able to direct the high-profile film for Universal without watering down his unconventional and idiosyncratic style.
The reason he could do so is likely at least in part because Universal had so little stake in the project. The Munsters was produced by Zombie’s own Spookshow International Films and by Universal 1440 Entertainment — the studio’s direct-to-video label which produces low-budget sequels and obscure fare like Tremors: Shrieker Island, Curious George: Cape Ahoy, and Bobbleheads: The Movie. It’s not surprising then that the film was made on a small budget. Although we don’t know the exact figure, Zombie stated in a Facebook post that the budgets of his five most recent films wouldn’t add up to $30 million, meaning by deduction that The Munsters must have cost somewhere under $9 million — and probably far under. His last three films, for example, had an average budget of $2 million. With so little money on the table, Universal was probably far less inclined to interfere with the film’s production, and for the most part to let Zombie do what he wanted.
Given how small the film’s budget was, it’s impressive how much the filmmakers were able to accomplish. They constructed more than half a dozen sets, such as the Transylvanian castle, the Frankenstein-esque laboratory, and the Munsters’ future home on 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Furthermore, many of these are highly stylized, elaborately detailed, and vibrantly colored to a degree that is shocking considering the $2-9 million budget.
It is true, though, that The Munsters can at times look rather cheap. Inside Lily and her Dracula-esque father The Count’s (Daniel Roebuck) mansion, for example, parts of the set look like something one could buy at the local Spirit Halloween; cheap stringy cobwebs and flimsy plastic decorations abound. Fog machines cover the floor in an absurdly thick layer of mist. What’s worse, the fog is unevenly distributed, so that it’s obvious where the machines are hidden — for example, just behind the staircase banister. Similarly, during many scenes, actors are bathed in a harsh green or red light on only one half of their body. The colored lights are set extremely brightly, are not diffused to make them less harsh, and aren’t placed evenly across the set. In these scenes, even a layperson could identify precisely where the lights are placed off camera. The makeup and hairstyling is also often cartoonish and unrealistic, especially Herman’s bright neon green face.
All together, these aspects of the movie’s visual and set design call attention to themselves and their artificiality, typically a faux pas in Hollywood filmmaking. Since the early studio days of the 1910s, the norm has been that of the continuity filmmaking system — in which the film is designed so that it seems to exist in a coherent, consistent world of its own and allows the viewer to suspend their disbelief and forget they are watching a movie. The most basic tenet of this filmmaking philosophy is that no aspect of the movie should ever call attention to the fact that it has been created by a crew on a film set. And yet, over and over, this is exactly what The Munsters does. We are repeatedly reminded that we are watching a movie — one with fog machines hidden behind the stairs, with bright lights placed just off frame, with actors in silly green makeup.
However, when one approaches The Munsters seriously, it becomes clear that its breaking of production norms is both intentional and artistically inspired, not simply the result of a lack of talent or funds. In addition to the aspects mentioned above, the movie frequently uses other ostentatious visual effects that call attention to themselves: a coffin-shaped wipe transition between shots, a splitscreen of two characters separated by a pastel purple lightning bolt, Lily staring at Herman with literal heart-eyes while a uni-color background swirls behind her, and so on. These moments emphasize the artificiality of the film’s production, and are closer to the stylistic world of comic books or anime than the realistic worlds that Hollywood tends to prefer. When Lily goes googly-eyed, for example, we know that she has not actually teleported to some black swirling netherworld, but just that the film has gotten a bit silly. We’re reminded that we’re watching a movie, that what we’re seeing is fake.
If one has any doubt that these artistic choices are intentional, take it straight from the corpse’s mouth: in an interview with Variety, director Rob Zombie discussed the behind-the-scenes decisions that impacted the film. His original wish, he says, was to film in black-and-white; however, Universal refused to produce unless the movie was in full color. Unwilling to give up on the adaptation of the 1960s TV show that he loved so dearly, he pushed forward with the project despite his frustration. In the interview, Zombie talks about the early stages of planning the film’s aesthetic: “When I saw everyone in their makeup, I thought, ‘This looks like a live-action cartoon. They don’t even look like they’re actually real. They look like they’re made out of rubber. They look fake.’” As a result, he had to tailor the style of the entire movie around the makeup, the character designs of the original show, and the fact that the movie had to be shot in color. “I approached it in other ways at first,” Zombie said. “What if I light it realistically? It didn’t seem right. It needs to be hyperreal.” Because the characters looked so ridiculous in color, every other aspect of the movie had to be exaggerated to match it, blown up to preposterous levels.
As a result of this hyperstylized and exaggerated approach, the other aspects of the movie more fully complement its ridiculous premise: a romantic comedy about two classic Universal monsters. The over-the-top, hammy acting; the stereotypically Gothic design of the vampire mansion; the cartoonish color of Herman’s makeup; the outdated 1950s dad jokes; the vibrant and lush use of color — it all comes together in an absurd fever dream version of the half-a-century-old sitcom. And it’s hard to imagine it working better any other way.
Even when the movie does look cheap or fake, this still works in its favor. Paradoxically, the fact that the visual design displays its artificiality so blatantly brings the audience even closer in. This contradicts a major concept of film theory, that if a movie calls attention to the (f)act of its construction, it interrupts or makes difficult the viewer’s emotional identification with or consumption of the work. German playwright Bertolt Brecht called this distanciation — the act of pulling the viewer out of the work and putting a metaphorical distance between the two. Brecht would use techniques in his plays like speaking directly to the audience, using distractingly bright lights, and reading stage directions aloud to achieve this distanciation, or alienation effect.
The idea behind Brecht’s unusual techniques was to interrupt the audience’s subconscious acceptance of certain aspects of theater. This could mean, for example, interrupting the viewer’s tendency to subconsciously identify with the protagonist, or creating an emotional and intellectual distance from the subject matter that would allow the viewer to reflect objectively on aspects of their own society that they might otherwise unthinkingly accept as rational.
The Munsters‘ purposeful artificiality, however, does not create emotional distance as in Brecht’s avant-garde theater, but rather lessens this distance. Watching the movie can sometimes feel like one is watching a community theater production or a high-end public access TV show, and there is a homely quality to it. When we see the stretchy cobwebs or the plastic props, we might even get the feeling that with enough time and effort we could create something comparable in our own house. The cheapness of some of the props, the artificiality of the set design, the peculiarity of the acting, even the fact that Zombie has cast his wife and personal friends in the major roles, all make the film feel more approachable, strangely warm and comforting, and intellectually non-threatening. Clearly, unlike with Brecht, we are not being asked to think. This is a film — and a Universal film no less — stripped of all pretension, one which does not take itself seriously and does not expect us to.
One last ingredient in the witch’s brew that makes The Munsters‘ cheap atmospherics work so well is its deployment of nostalgia. The original sitcom was of course built around the Universal horror properties of the 1930s: Frankenstein’s monster, the Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man. But instead of belaboring references to these properties, Zombie targets a hodgepodge of cultural artifacts from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Throughout the movie, for example, Herman speaks in 1960s slang, saying things like “far out,” “I can dig that,” or “groovy!” Yet at the same time, he works as frontman for a 1990s-style punk rock band (perhaps a nod to the director’s own band in the ’90s, White Zombie). Elsewhere, the quality and feel of the production resembles old media like the 1980s horror anthology film Creepshow, or even 1990s TV shows like the children’s horror series Goosebumps, the mystery anthology Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, or the horror-themed prank show Scare Tactics.
Recall the YouTube comment from Nekko G mentioned earlier: “This looks like the old Goosebumps show if it had an extra 30$ added to the budget.” While likely intended as an insult, the observation is really not far off. The only catch is that the similarity is more than likely intended. The film mixes in culture many of us consumed as children alongside reruns of The Munsters. For Zombie, this is the old slang that he undoubtedly heard or even used in his youth in the ’70s. For a younger viewer like myself, it’s the similarities to ’90s TV. This usage of nostalgia helps to bolster the atmosphere of approachability and warmth, and adds an emotional resonance to its constrained production values.
While many initially mocked the film’s unorthodox style, it is stunning how much Zombie is able to achieve on such a small budget. He brilliantly uses financial constraints and studio demands to his advantage, crafting one of the most vibrantly colored movies in years as well as a uniquely warm, comforting, and nostalgic atmosphere. It brings a creative ingenuity, artistic idiosyncrasy, and passion for its source material that feels much more at place in the world of independent film than that of big studios — something exceedingly rare these days. Once the dust settles, The Munsters will hopefully receive its due recognition as one of the most interesting reboots in quite some time.
