Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows Finally Gets A Trailer

With only two months till release, people were begining to wonder if Warner Brother’s Dark Shadows was so embarrassing that they were not going to promote the film at all, and merely unleash the movie on audiences and sit back and hope for the best. But alas, that is not the case, as we finally have our first trailer for Tim Burton’s update of the classic show, starring Johnny Depp (who else?) as vampire Barnabas Collins.

The original Dark Shadows was a cheestastic gothic soap opera that ran weekday afternoons and was a huge sensation in its heyday of the 60’s/early 70’s. The acting was awful, the plotlines were wonky, but it does get credit for being the first portrayal of a sympathetic vampire lead in a major mainstream property, years before Lestat, Angel or Edward Cullen. The show’s convoluted supernatural plots and “takes itself way too seriously” approach lives on today in the form of the CW’s The Vampire Diaries.

Judging from this trailer, it appears that Burton has decided to go the route of making a straight up spoof of the old show, which is probably wise. I still count Burton as one of my all time favorite directors, despite the fact that his last decade or so of output has felt a bit on the soulless side (Sweeney Todd being the exception, in my opinion) Let’s see if this is another meh movie from Burton for the Hot Topic crowd, or a return to the days when his black little goth heart was still in it.