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# The Munsters (2022) | 50 Days of Horror, Day 25
- URL: https://www.tomdahm.com/50-days-of-horror-day-25-the-munsters/
- Published: 2026-10-05T20:50:19.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-05T20:50:19.000Z
- Description: Day 25 of 50 Days of Horror: Rob Zombie trades grime for Technicolor in The Munsters, a candy-colored love letter to the sitcom and a seasonal palette cleanser.
- Author: Tom
- Tags: 50 Days of Horror, Horror

Halfway through the countdown, and I'm declaring a snack break. Night twenty-five is Rob Zombie's The Munsters, a movie that shows up to the horror marathon wearing a party hat and has no plans to scare you. Think of it as the one night this month where the scariest thing in the room is the wallpaper.

And what wallpaper. This is the guy who made his name on sweat, grime, and people having a very bad time in a very dirty building, and he went and made a movie that looks like a Halloween postcard got a sugar rush. Painted castles. Cobwebs the size of a bedsheet. Lightning that looks like it was borrowed from a vintage trick-or-treat cart. I'd happily live in this production design, bad plumbing and all.

The story itself is a monster romance stretched to feature length, following Lily and Herman from awkward courtship to full-blown chaos, all of it delivered with sitcom rhythm and a heart that is shockingly, almost suspiciously, sincere. The puns are bad. The angles are Dutch. The affection for the original show is leaking out of every frame like a very friendly ghost, and the whole thing commits to its own joke so completely that you either surrender or you don't. I surrendered.

Is it polarizing? Oh, absolutely. It's the kind of oddity that feels destined to get kinder reviews with each passing October, mostly because the contrast is the entire gag. The reputation says one thing and the movie says "what if you made it neon?" As a mid-marathon pit stop, it works like a palette cleanser should: pumpkins without the panic, right when a long run of darker titles was starting to feel like homework. It's also the easiest sell on this whole list for the friend who says they "don't do horror" but would absolutely sit through a monster sitcom with *snacks*.

Collectors, here's your cheat sheet. If you own it physically, dive into the featurettes, especially the costuming and set-build material, which shows how Mockingbird Lane got built out of color instead of shadow. The Blu-ray keeps the palette vivid and stable; ease the brightness back a notch so the highlights don't clip, and switch the motion smoothing off unless you want it looking like a daytime soap. On the shelf it could fit right in next to Beetlejuice or Elvira, a tiny neighborhood of horror-adjacent weirdos who all pay their rent in campyness.

So here's the burning question, and I'm only half joking: does this belong in the permanent October rotation, or is it a once-a-decade guilty pleasure you quietly bring up at parties?

Part of the [50 Days of Horror](https://www.tomdahm.com/50-days-of-horror/) series.