Dark Shadows: Back in 2012

The Dark Shadows movie will be released in May 2012

If you ran home from school every day to see Dark Shadows as a kid, like Johnny Depp did, you’ll probably love the movie.

The first cast photo of the Dark Shadows movie is finally released. Not impressed with remakes? The people involved may change your mind. Tim Burton is directing the film. Could you imagine anyone else as director? Neither could I.

From left to right: Helena Bonham Carter (Dr. Julia Hoffman), Chloe Moretz (Carolyn Stoddard), Eva Green (Angelique Bouchard), Gulliver McGrath (David Collins), Bella Heathcote (Victoria Winters), Johnny Depp (Barnabas Collins), Ray Shirley (Mrs.  Johnson), Jackie Earle Haley (Willie Loomis), Jonny Lee Miller (Roger Collins) and Michelle Pfeiffer (Elizabeth Collins Stoddard)

There’s another two luminaries cast in the upcoming film: Christopher Lee, Jonathan Frid (the original Barnabas Collins from the TV show), and… yes, really… Alice Cooper!!!

For those of you who don’t understand the hubbub, here’s a little background. Dark Shadows originally appeared on ABC. This series was not your average soap opera: it was a gothic journey. The episodes were discussed every day on the school yard.

Granted, the original Dark Shadows looks a little cheesy, but never lost its charm. The show ran from 1966-1971. The new movie tells the tale of how Barnabas was made into a vampire in 1772 by a witch whose heart he broke. She entombs him for 200 years, until he emerges in 1972—that’s where the movie picks up.

Warner Bros. provided the following synopsis of the movie:

In the year 1752, Joshua and Naomi Collins, with young son Barnabas, set sail from Liverpool, England to start a new life in America. But even an ocean was not enough to escape the mysterious curse that has plagued their family. Two decades pass and Barnabas (Johnny Depp) has the world at his feet-or at least the town of Collinsport, Maine. The master of Collinwood Manor, Barnabas is rich, powerful and an inveterate playboy…until he makes the grave mistake of breaking the heart of Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green). A witch, in every sense of the word, Angelique dooms him to a fate worse than death: turning him into a vampire and then burying him alive. Two centuries later, Barnabas is inadvertently freed from his tomb and emerges into the very changed world of 1972. He returns to Collinwood Manor to find that his once-grand estate has fallen into ruin. The dysfunctional remnants of the Collins family have fared little better, each harboring their own dark secrets. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer) has called upon live-in psychiatrist, Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), to help with her family troubles.

Johnny Depp fought for years to make a movie from the Dark Shadows. He is a fan of the original television show: I do remember, very vividly, practically sprinting home from school in the afternoon to see Jonathan Frid play Barnabas Collins. Even then, at that age, I knew—this has got to be weird.

Tim Burton also obsessed over Dark Shadows as a boy. He told media, I remember seeing a group photograph of the cast of the original series. For me it captured the weird Dark Shadows vibe in a single image. I had a brief window of opportunity to have our cast present at the same time, the day before principle photography began. We decided to stage a similar picture instead of rehearsing, to see if we captured the Dark Shadows feeling.

Paparazzi took long shots of the actor wearing ghostly white makeup, large sunglasses and a pulled down fedora. Some fans of the original 1966-71 supernatural soap opera bristle with complaints he looked simply too strange. What the hell do they expect a 200-year-old vampire to look like? Jonathan “Barnabas” Frid looked pretty strange for his time, too.

Dark Shadows opens May 11, 2012.

Who remembers the original Dark Shadows (or not) and plans to visit Collinswood, Maine (where else?) in 2012?

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