Total Film, July 2012 – Dark Shadows
Title: Dark Shadows
Author: Matt Glasby
Publication: Total Film
Issue: July 2012
AWOKEN AFTER BEING buried for 200 years, reluctant vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) comes across his first taste of 1970s-style civilization: a tarmac road leading through the forbidding forest. “This is curious terrain,” he pronounces. It most certainly is.
The latest salvo in a lifelong mission to bring outsider cinema inside, Tim Burton’s 15th feature mixes the personal and the populist, the offbeat and the inappropriate to create a genre-defying Frankenweenie of a movie. It doesn’t always work, but there’s much beautiful mess along the way.
Created by Dan Curtis, who made cult favourites The Night Stalker and Burnt Offerings, the original Shadows TV show was a gothic soap opera that ran from 1966-71 before being syndicated to infinity. As children, director and star were enraptured by what the New York Times termed its “breathtakingly low-rent production values and equally breathtakingly purple dialogue”. Thankfully Shadows 2012 has rather more of one than the other. The film features a troupe of Burton regulars plus ace cameos from Christopher Lee and Alice Cooper, and supporting turns from a vampy Eva Green and the ever-creepy Jackie Earle Haley. It’s a good fit but still an odd choice, and when you’re retooling a 1,225-episode show, which story do you tell? At times it feels like all of them…
Vampire bats
A ravishing Sweeney Todd-alike intro introduces us to Barnabas’
