Oooo spooky…Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and I are are watching and posting about spooky cinema for the next two months, here and over on our Instagram accounts. We are starting fairly family friendly and working our way up to the scariest!! I love a thriller or chiller!

You can check out Lisa’s post here!

This week our featured film was The Addams Family, circa 1991, that mysterious and spooky, and altogether ooky family.

The Addams Family is a mad spooky creation that first formed in the brain of Charles Addams, a cartoonist with a sense of the macabre. His Addams Family cartoons first actually appeared in The New Yorker, if you can believe it, in the 40s and 50s and the characters were later developed into the original tv show. And if we want to play six degrees of Cary Grant (if you have read my summer classic movie posts you will know why) we can get there easily – apparently Hitchcock had Cary Grant namedrop Charles Addams in the classic movie North by Northwest. (If you want to read more about the cultural history of The Addams Family, The Smithsonian has this fantastic article)

When the movie came out in the 1990s, my teenage goth loving self was beyond excited. But of course being all gloomy and clad in black, I could only express that by the smallest of smiles. (Joke) I was very excited and I couldn’t wait to see it and it was everything I wanted in a creepy silly movie! And let’s face it, it is much more silly than it is scary, but that doesn’t diminish the fun of it by a long shot. All the little gags and jokes, and of course Wednesday Addams, who I always wanted to be for Halloween but never did it. The light hearted yet dark banter I think was more designed to make people widen their eyes at the audacity of it all, like a young girl chasing her brother around with a knife or putting him in an electric chair, just so matter of fact and nonchalant, rather than scare. As a teen I ate that movie up.

As an adult, I can see a deeper theme beyond the nonsense. The love of family, loyalty, that stick together through all adversities and do our best attitude. They just go about those things in a much different way. There is no doubt that this creepy family loves each other, very deeply. Morticia is a devoted mother, Gomez a devoted husband. They are generous, fun loving, and stand by each other through thick and thin. Not bad things to be, not at all.

There is a new series out now, produced by Tim Burton, which will reach a whole new generation of kids, 80 years later. It appears that the world is still entertained by this madcap spooky family, after all this time, which I think is pretty darn cool.

Next up is Shaun of the Dead. I am super excited about it because I love all those Simon Pegg movies!

Would anyone be interested in playing along with us, if we made this a linky? Let me know! Or if you don’t want to be so formal, just watch and let me know what you think of these movies in the comments every week!