The Munsters’ DRAG-U-LA Was Just as Spooky to Build Behind the Scenes

Today, the DRAG-U-LA is best remembered from the admittedly face-melting Rob Zombie song of the same name, to the point that some fans don’t even know what, exactly, a “dragula” actually is. They keep needing to be told that it’s a racing car that was featured on The Munsters, having been built in the episode “Hot Rod Herman” after the Munster patriarch lost their everyday vehicle, the Munster Koach, in a race. Hey, it was the ‘60s — straitlaced family men, eerie or otherwise, were always getting into drag races. 

According to the 1966 film Munsters, Go Home!, the DRAG-U-LA was actually built for a different race using the motor of the Munster Koach, which is arguably more fun because it makes it a kind of zombie car.

Behind the scenes, the actual construction of the DRAG-U-LA was just as spooky, being even more entangled with the veil between life and death. When custom car designer George Barris, most famous for building the Batmobile for the 1966 Batman movies and series, started looking for the coffin that would comprise the body of the DRAG-U-LA, he ran into a legal issue: Buying a coffin without proof of a dead body to put in it was prohibited. At least, that’s what his project engineer, Richard Korkes, claimed. 

In a 2013 interview, he described arranging a cash deal with a shady funeral director who didn’t care about his lack of a death certificate to “accidentally” leave a coffin outside the parlor, where the crew picked it up in the middle of the night to avoid witnesses, at least living ones.

Now, there’s reason to question Korkes’ story. If everyone involved was cool with the extralegal dealings, it’s not clear why they had to concoct such an elaborate ruse — it’s not like police are stationed at the exit of all funeral homes, checking the papers of anyone leaving with a coffin. A moderately thorough Googling doesn’t even reveal any evidence of any such law in California at the time. But dammit, it makes for a scary story, and if Korkes wanted to give Munsters fans a fun new chapter in series lore, we’re not gonna give him too hard of a time.

And the DRAG-U-LA does appear to be near and dear to fans. For some time, it was an attraction that lured those who generally shunned sunshine and crowds to the Atlantic City Planet Hollywood, where it hung from the ceiling, and it was later acquired by the Hollywood Star Cars Museum in Tennessee. 

Ironically, the car featured in Rob Zombie’s music video is not the DRAG-U-LA but the Munster Koach. In fact, you can’t actually “slam in the back” of the DRAG-U-LA because it was a one-seater racing car. Nobody cares about history anymore — and by “anymore,” we mean “in 1998.”