The Making of Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, Part 1

Tim Burton has never made a secret of the fact that he was a fan of the original Dark Shadows, which is why he knew he had to be the one to helm this new movie version. “The show had a specific vibe,” he says. ”It was a soap opera, but with a weird, supernatural undercurrent.”
   Johnny Depp was just as big a fan, which is why he was involved in capturing the rights and was determined to play vampire Barnabas Collins. “There was nothing like it,” Depp points out, “certainly not in the daytime, with its vampires and ghosts and witches. I’ve always been attrracted to that genre, even as a very young kid, so when I got a hold of Dark Shadows I didn’t let go. [And] obviously the one person who immediately came to mind to bring this project to life was Tim. He became really pumped up about it as we began to develop it.”
   “Johnny always puts 100 percent into everything he does, and I could tell right away he had a passion for this,” adds Burton. “I was excited to see where we could go with the story and I knew it would be a lot of fun.”
   In bringing Dark Shadows to the big screen, Burton wanted to retain the spirit of the show, while recognizing “it’s a hard thing to try to capture. It’s not something you can remake exactly because there were more than 1200 episodes and there was such an elusive tone to it, but it was always our inspiration.”
   One point that producer Graham King emphasizes is that you don’t have to have been a follower of the show – or even be old enough to remember it – to enjoy the film. “We know there are still a lot of Dark Shadows fans out there, Tim and Johnny among them. So we always wanted to be respectful of the series, but the movie was obviously made for today’s audiences, so, with the added layer of Tim’s magical direction, it stands on its own. It’s big in scope with some outrageous characters, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s funny and quirky as hell.”
   Producer Christi Dembrowski elaborates, “I knew that Johnny and Tim would create a new life for Dark Shadows and birng the magic back in their own unique way. I think this version is something the original fans will appreciate, while it introduces a whole new audience to the characters we loved.”
   Producer David Kennedy had been partnered with the series’ creator, the late Dan Curtis, years after the show wrapped, and Curtis would come to entrust Kennedy with perhaps his mst inventive creation. Kennedy reveals that the satirical bent in Burton’s new incarnation of Dark Shadows was always part of Curtis’ vision. “When Tim and Johnny talked about what they wanted to do with Dark Shadows, they had such a sense of fun that I just knew it was in the right hands. I honestly don’t think the movie could ever have happened without them, and also Christi. I’m sure there are going to be hardcore Dark Shadows fans who are going to say that the original series didn’t have that much humor in it. And it didn’t. But Dan always wanted it to, and I think he’d be really happy with where we ended up. For me personally, it’s a dream come true.”
   In writing the screenplay, Seth Grahame-Smith, who also crafted the story with John August, says, “We wanted to make sure there were moments of real fright, as well as romance, lust and comedy. To me, the fun was in weaving in those elements of humor and horror.”
   Much of the humor arises from the fish-out-of-water circumstance of Barnabas Collins, an 18th century lothario who breaks the heart of a heartless witch by the name of Angelique. When Barnabas declares his love for another, the ethereal Josette, Angelique exacts her revege on both of them: taking Josette’s life while giving Barnabas an eternal one as a vampire. It’s not much of a life, however, as she proceeds to bury him in a coffin forever… or at least the foreseeable future.
   Nearly 200 years later, Barnabas is released from his would-be tomb by a rather unfortunate team of construction workers. The world of 1972 is, of course, markedly different from the one he left.  “It sparked a whole series of ideas,” says Depp. “The thought of this very elegant man of the 1700s, having been cursed and locked away for 200 years, coming back to 1972 — maybe the worst time, aesthetically, in human existence, where people accepted everything from ugly little troll dolls to macrame jewelry and resin grapes to lava lamps. We thought what a great way to incorporate this vampire being the eyes that we never had back then, the eyes that can see the absurdity of these things.”
   Burton, who was a teenager in the 1970s, agrees, adding, “It was not so much making fun of the time, just seeing things from a different perspective. When you think of mood rings and Pet Rocks… I suppose you could find peculiar things in any era, but, looking back on that stuff, as eras go, that one does seem stranger than most.”
   A stranger in a strange era, Barnabas returns to the one place he knows: the once grand Collinwood Manor. He finds the mansion in dreadful disrepair and his few remaining relatives equally fractured. Burton says, “It all boiled down to trying to capture the dynamics of this family, who happen to be a little out of the ordinary. I mean, there’s a certain internal dynamic that occurs in any family, and that was something that interested me.”
   TO BE CONTINUED