

It might stand to reason that the man behind the family, Charles Addams, was a lost soul with a troubled background who brought his pain to the pages of the New Yorker. How exactly did they find themselves in this kooky situation? Let’s fire up the Packard V-12 hearse and take a spin down Memory (0001 Cemetery) Lane.

Unlike Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, or any of the machete-wielding madmen at the multiplex, the Addamses have been both surprisingly difficult to forget but equally challenging to bring back to life. Throughout their various iterations, the family has cemented itself in the mausoleum of pop horror culture history, which to some degree is strange within itself. Mysterious and spooky and all together ooky, the Addams Family is back, this time as an animated big screen version to deliver Halloween frights for young fans meeting them anew and for old-timers who remember the original cartoons hatched in the twisted mind of artist Charles Addams. It introduced the world to an unnamed brood that will, once again, be returning to the big screen on Friday. In the summer of 1938, a determined salesman dropped in on a haunted mansion to peddle his “vibrationless, noiseless” vacuum doubling as both a “great time and a back saver” that “no well-appointed home should without.” It was a single-panel cartoon on page nine of The New Yorker fetching the author a tidy $85 sum.
