I am watching “spooky season” movies through September and October with my bloggy friend Erin over at Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs.

So far we have watched Clue together and this week it was The Addams Family. This is a break from our Classic Movie Impressions feature which is where we gave each other ideas for classic movies to watch and we each watched a different one. With this joint effort, we are both watching the same movies and giving our own impressions of them.

So on to The Addams Family.

Bizarre. That is the word that came to mind as I watched The Addams Family with my 15-year-old.

I think I saw the show when I was a kid a few times, but I was always afraid of monsters, witches, vampires, etc. and also wasn’t allowed to watch shows or movies about them. This whole watching sort of creepy or quirky Halloween-themed movies is actually out of my wheel well because they weren’t something we watched while I was growing up. I think if I had asked to watch movies like these when I was a teenager, my mom might have allowed it, but wouldn’t have really been happy about it.

She didn’t have to worry because these types of movies simply weren’t “my thing.”

That isn’t to say that I’m not having fun watching them now with my teenager or family (and Erin too really, though not in person) because I am. Now I know what everyone else has been experiencing for years.

I do have to say that The Addams Family was even weirder than I expected it to be, yet also not as weird in some ways, as I thought it was going to be, if that makes sense.

Christina Ricci was super creepy as Wednesday.

Angelica Houston as Morticia was just strange. A bit of trivia: according to IMBd, Cher actually wanted the roll of Morticia. I think she might have been able to pull it off.

The insane sexual tension between Gomez and Morticia is both hilarious and cringeworthy.

According to Wikapedia, “The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th-century American family: an odd wealthy aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware or unconcerned that other people find them bizarre or frightening.”

Researching the film, I was surprised to learn that The Addams Family show from the 60s was actually based on drawings by a cartoonist name Charles Addams.

Where have I been all these years that I didn’t know that? He created 150 unrelated drawings that appeared over a 50-year period in The New Yorker. (Sadly he eventually lost the rights to all his cartoons to an evil ex-wife, but that’s for another blog post, another day.) The cartoons were later adapted into the show and characters included: Gomez and Morticia Addams, their children Wednesday and Pugsly, and extended family members Grandmama and Gomez’s brother Uncle Fester, and their butler Lurch.

A disembodied hand called Thing was introduced to the cartoons in 1954 and later Gomez’s cousin Itt and Morticia’s pet lion Kitty Kat were also introduced. The 60s TV show lasted for only two years but spawned an animated show and then was revived with this movie, which was followed by The Addams Family Values a couple of years later when another Addams child, Pubert was introduced.

An animated show and a couple of movies came from the 1991 and 1993 movies and then in 2019 they rebooted the movies again with a new version, which spawned a 2021 sequel.

The original 1991 movie stars Houston, Ricci, Raul Julia, and Christopher Lloyd. The plot of the movie centers around what Gomez believes is the return of his brother Fester, but is Fester really Fester? That’s what we try to find out as the movie continues, taking us on a strange journey into the world and minds of the Addams.

The Addams are a family who don’t like anything that “normal people” would see as normal. Things that are considered weird, twisted, and disturbing appeal to the Addams family more.

The more blood and gore, the more delighted they are. Apparently, my son should have been an Addams because during one particularly bloody scene he said, “this is beautiful” while laughing. Honestly, there are days I feel like The Boy and The Husband are a completely different breed, like the Addams family. Or maybe I’m the one who is of a different breed. *wink*

This movie is plain fun and isn’t as gory or shocking as it could have been if someone like Timothy Burton had directed it. All the crazy characters and twists and turns made me smile, laugh, and cringe in scared anticipation.

I’m sure I’ll be doing the same thing for our next pick, which I saw years ago, Shaun of the Dead.

After Shaun of the Dead, the list continues with:

Hocus Pocus

Young Frankenstein

Transylvania 6500 or Practical Magic (wild card)

Creature from the Black Lagoon (Classic Creature Feature)

Legend of Sleepy Hollow 

And …. If I can take it… Halloween from 1979.

See Erin’s post about The Addams Family on her blog.