Rocker and horror filmmaker Rob Zombie is going away from his normal gruesome style to deliver The Munsters. The classic characters being brought to the modern world will get a lift in color, which Zombie spoke about in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“I knew that if I went in and demanded ‘This movie’s going to be in black and white or forget it!’ we would not be talking about the Munsters right now, because it would have never happened. I guaran-f***ing-tee it,” Rob Zombie said on The Munsters and his use of color. “But what I did do is I made the colors sort of hyper-real. I noticed when the actors were in their makeup and they were just walking around, getting lunch or whatever, they looked like cartoon characters come to life. They were just so insanely colorful. I was like, I have to light the movie in the same fashion. It really seemed at all times like a live-action cartoon, which was really exciting.”
While color is new to the family of monsters, being family-friendly is not. For Rob Zombie, making The Munsters, was new territory for him. For a guy who has shocking theatrics to his live sets and brutal films like Halloween and The Devil’s Rejects, he will be making his most approachable film that will welcome the whole family. For him, it was about authenticity and paying respect to the original series.
“Yeah, it’s 100 percent in the spirit of the show,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be different. I wanted to totally retain the vibe that it had in the ’60s.”
Rob Zombie gathering the cast of The Munsters
The film will star Cassandra Peterson (Elvira: Mistress of the Dark), Dee Wallace (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), Sylvester McCoy (Doctor Who), Jeff Daniel Phillips (Westworld), Sheri Moon Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses), Daniel Roebuck (Final Destination), and Jorge Garcia (Lost). For the casting, the director aimed to get as many people together who had worked together before for chemistry that worked.
“I wanted to cast people that had worked together a lot,” he said, who shot the film in Hungary. “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.”
You can see what a Rob Zombie The Munsters movie looks like this fall when it releases.