Leave the ditchdigging to the county and give those witches a chance to cool off: Rob Zombie has kept the Dragula, Grandpa Munster’s coffin-mobile, on the tips of our nation’s goths’ tongues for decades, and now he’s finally reaping the rewards. “Attention Boils and Ghouls! The rumors are true!,” the White Zombie musician and director of horror films like The Lords of Salem and 3 From Hell wrote on Instagram Monday. “My next film project will be the one I’ve been chasing for 20 years! THE MUNSTERS! Stay tuned for exciting details as things progress!” According to The Hollywood Reporter, the project is reportedly being made by Universal Studios’s 1440 Productions, suggesting the film is “likely going to Peacock, instead of getting a theatrical release.”
The original CBS sitcom about a family of kindly monsters, The Munsters, premiered in 1964 and ran for two seasons, but remained undead and loving it through the ’90s, conjuring up 1966’s Munster, Go Home!, 1973’s animated The Mini-Munsters, 1981’s The Munsters’ Revenge, 1995’s Here Come the Munsters, and 1996’s The Munsters’ Scary Little Christmas. After a Munsters movie from Keenan Ivory Wayans, Marlon Wayans, and Shawn Wayans flatlined in the early 2000s, Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller attempted to resurrect the IP as Mockingbird Lane, a reboot series featuring Eddie Izzard, Jerry O’Connell, and Portia de Rossi. In the end, however, the series was staked through the heart and its pilot aired as a Halloween special on NBC in 2012.
A revival series, The Munsters Today, aired from 1988 to 1991, finding the family waking up in their coffins 22 years after the original series. As recently as 2017, Seth Meyers and NBC were hoping to reboot The Munsters as a TV show, this time transporting the family to modern-day Brooklyn. Even if Rob’s take on your second-favorite spooky family (after the Addams Family, of course) doesn’t end up burning the witches like Universal hopes, history suggests The Munsters won’t go quietly into their crypt for very long.
