October 24, 2011

They’re creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky


Day 297 of Vintage 365


Though I've really been feeling softer hues and highly elegant Halloween elements this month, as October 31st draws ever more delightfully near, I can't help but yearn for a bit of spooky, dark fright night fun, too.

A marriage of both of those (masked) faces of Halloween lands you somewhere in the territory of glam goth, which in a roundabout way is where my creative inspiration stems from as we count down the last week until October 31st.

Though many of us think of the Addams family as being tied to either the classic television show of the 1960s or the movies that followed later in 90s, the creation of this much loved clan of morbid characters stretches back considerably farther, all the way until 1938 in fact.

Dreamed up by an American cartoonist by the name of Charles Samuel Addams, the Addams Family first appeared in a long running series of single panel cartons that appeared in the New Yorker magazine (between 1938 and 1988, when Charles Addams passed away), before making their way in the sixties to TV screens around the world.

I think it's safe to say that unless one has been living under a rock (or in this case, perhaps a tombstone), you're familiar with the Addams Family.

You know the cast - kooky Gomez, enchanting Morticia, odd-ball Uncle Fester, tenacious young Pugsley, goth-before-it-was-cool-to-be-goth Wednesday, venerable Grandmama with her somewhat cynical sense of humour, lumbering butler Lurch, the furry rapscallion called Cousin Itt, and of course, that most unique of disembodied hands, Thing – and you likely have a favourite or two.

Hands down (or would that be Things down in this case? Smile), Morticia was always my favourite of the Addams family members. However, it was the eccentric, endearing antics of the whole family that really made me a fan of this classic spooky family.

Well, that and the fact that they seemed to perpetually live in a Halloween world filled 24/7, which struck me as too incredibly awesome for words to me when I was a little girl (who grew up both watching reruns of the black and white TV show from the 60s and the spirited movies in the 90s).

I always adored the fact that the Addams family members were portrayed as being virtually oblivious to the fact that they struck the rest of the world (especially those neighbours whose houses shared a street with the family's fabulous Victorian mansion) as being bizarre, eerie, and off-beat.


The various Addams relatives may have come across as ghoulish at first glance, but in reality they weren't terrifying, dangerous or evil in the slightest.

As the classic Addams Family theme song (seen in the Youtube clip above) for their TV show said, They’re creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky.

The Addams family captures the wonderful old fashioned fun of Halloween, with a peppering of the (playful) macabre thrown in for good measure. And that, my dear friends, is precisely the vibe I'm challenging this week in the lead up to my favourite holiday of the year!

2 comments:

  1. My daughter (24) has decided to dress like Wednesday for Halloween, what a hoot!

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  2. As a child of the 60's, I loved The Addams Family and The Munsters. It's funny, I watch alot of old movies (as you already know), and Carolyn Jones and Yvonne Dicarlo (who played Lily Munster) show up in them, and I always think it's funny, because they are perpetually in my mind as their odd "munster" selves. It's hard for me to see accept them in other roles, especially Yvonne Dicarlo, as she was quite the bombshell beauty in 40's and 50's films. Lily Munster, a bombshell? Hard to believe.

    LOVE the video...that was always such a catchy tune.

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