What is so familiar about that strange Addams Family?

For their annual film concert, Flagey and the Brussels Philharmonic travel to the bizarre world of the Addams Family.

The great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy began his novel Anna Karenina with the world-famous sentence: “All happy families are alike, even when, like the Addams family, they flourish in the eccentric, macabre, and grotesque.” We can hardly blame him. The Addams family may consist of a childishly enthusiastic father (Gomez), a sarcasm-fuelled – “Salt, pepper, or cyanide?” –, uprooted mother (Morticia), a vulnerable brother (Pugsley), a daughter who puts her dolls under the guillotine and decapitates those around her with strident one-liners (Wednesday), and a creepy bald uncle (Fester) who likes to roast himself on the electric chair in the basement.

So what if the Addams family lives in a dreary mansion next to a graveyard and a swamp and are assisted by a butler who looks like Frankenstein’s monster (Lurch) and a severed hand (Thing). None of that matters. Follow their adventures and sooner or later you’ll be singing your conclusion to the music of Sister Sledge: “We are family.” Well, at least if you are part of a happy family, because every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way but that’s another story.

The story of the Addams family begins in 1938 when, for a cartoon series in The New Yorker, Charles Addams comes up with the bright idea of performing a gothic version of the American nuclear family in a pitch-black parody. The fears of any normal family are what makes the Addams family happy and that to which a normal family aspires makes the Addams family unhappy. So everything is exactly the same, just the opposite. But it works both ways. There is the contrarian humour, the slapstick, and the recognisable, relatable mockery of normality and the ideal family, and in the same pen stroke all the outcasts, outsiders, eccentrics, lovers of the macabre, too much mascara, and funeral clothes are brought together.

Strange and yet familiar. It doesn’t just work in cartoons from the 1940s. It also works in TV series, films, musicals, and games from all subsequent decades. The Netflix series Wednesday by Tim Burton, patron saint of outsiders, which features a delightfully vile and deadly funny Jenna Ortega as a swarthy, rebellious teenager, has become wildly popular. We had loads of innocent fun in the 1990s lot with two Barry Sonnenfeld films starring Christina Ricci as Wednesday. This was partly due to an outstanding Anjelica Huston who, as Morticia, gets away with jokes like “Hush, Mama! It’s for charity! Widows and orphans. We need more of them.” But the very catchy film music by composer Marc Shaiman also made you sense how fun and colourful these morbid weirdos really were.

So it is hardly that odd that Flagey is gearing up for a film concert. The music will be played live by the Brussels Philharmonic conducted by Dirk Brossé during the screening of The Addams Family (1991). Put on your jolliest funeral costume and bring a decapitated doll. Anyone who makes fun of you for such eccentricity has failed to understand The Addams Family.