First trailer for Rob Zombie's 'The Munsters' is the love story of when Herman met Lily

In another year packed with genre projects, Rob Zombie's The Munsters stands out for several reasons. For one thing, it's the first major movement on stories featuring the title family since Bryan Fuller's Mockingbird Lane. For another, it's a major departure for Zombie, who's promised to veer from his usual grim horror for a more family friendly take on the characters, which pays homage to the original 1964 TV series. 

For months now, we've seen glimpses of what Zombie and his stars Jeff Daniel Phillips, Sheri Moon Zombie, and Daniel Roebuck have in store for us, but we haven't gotten much of a look at the full story of this new take The Munsters. Now, the first full-length trailer is finally here, and it's teasing an epic monster romance.

First released via Zombie's Instagram account, the trailer teases a film that blends a lot of the original visual sensibility of the TV series with Zombie's brightly colored new vision for the family. This time, instead of looking in on them as an established couple, The Munsters will show us the story of how Herman (Phillips) and Lily (Zombie) -- a freshly made monster and a vampire -- came to fall for each other in the first place. Apparently, Lily's been looking for love for quite some time, and she's been depressed by meetings with subpar men. Then Herman comes along, and it's the perfect match. He makes her blood run cold, and she makes him...well, rock a smoking jacket, apparently. 

Check out the trailer below:

A few things stick out here. For one, though it's full of visual homages to the show, The Munsters also looks very much like a Rob Zombie movie, with his in-your-face camera angles and dynamic low-budget presence.

For another, there's a clear effort on the part of the cast to capture something of Fred Gwynne, Yvonne De Carlo, and Al Lewis, the three actors who originally embodied these characters. In terms of both their physicality and their voices, there's a lot of homage happening there, and it'll be interesting to see how the cast balances that out with forging their own way for the Munsters characters.

Then, of course, there's the plot, which basically sets the film up as a prequel to the TV series, telling us the story of how the Munsters ended up in that house on Mockingbird Lane, trying to live like an average family with average family concerns. With that setup, you can bet that Eagle-eyed fans will catch more than a few references to the couple's coming adventures along the way.

The Munsters arrives this September from Universal Pictures and 1440 Entertainment. 

Looking to relive some of that original Munsters magic? Head on over to Peacock and stream away!