The Addams Family (1991)
di Barry Sonnenfeld
Amid cobwebs, old candelabras, and a domestic hand wandering through the rooms, the Addams Family welcomes us
with its timeless charm. In a world still hostile to diversity, they turned it into their defining mark: elegant, eccentric,
and proudly unconventional, the Addams have transformed gothic into style and the macabre into a form of eternal refinement.
The Addams Family was created in 1938 by cartoonist Charles Addams, who brought to life
a series of ironic vignettes in The New Yorker.
In 1964, the characters found their voice in the television series aired on ABC. The sophisticated sarcasm of the cartoons
became an unmistakable language, where the dark meets comedy. Morticia, with her fluid silhouette and mermaid-style dresses,
immediately became a style icon; Gomez, with his pinstripe double-breasted suit and cigar in hand,
represented a new form of eccentric, chivalrous masculinity.
But it was with Barry Sonnenfeld’s films in the 1990s that the family reached its cinematic peak.
And with Tim Burton’s Wednesday series (Netflix, 2022), this aesthetic forcefully returned to the center of pop culture.
The young Jenna Ortega breathes new life into the character, becoming an “aesthetic manifesto.”