Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows

by | Jun 3, 2012 | Columns | 0 comments

By now most of us know how to recognize a Tim Burton—Johnny Depp cinematic pairing:  Burton presents a quirkily embellished world populated by oddball characters, and Depp excels at playing an eccentric yet strangely endearing outcast in Burton’s unconventional setting.  Dark Shadows is no exception.  The film is based on the Dan Curtis daytime soap opera which ran from 1966 to 1971, although not initially well-received more than likely due to its low budget and many plot lines, the series ironically found new life when it added the element of death in the form of ghosts, witches and in particular, vampires.  The success of the series undoubtedly rests on the popularity of Barnabas Collins, a man cursed to be a vampire by a witch named Angelique after he spurns her advances.  Instead of the dimly-lit rather dismal atmosphere characteristic of the series—a fitting mood considering that the series is set in the fishing community of Collinsport, Maine—Burton takes a decidedly different turn.  He paints Collinsport in color, techno-color to be exact, setting his adaptation of Dark Shadows in psychedelic 1972, the year after the series ended.

Psychedelia is an interesting choice for the mood of the film considering that the term means the deeper awakening of the animated spirit, whether mind, body or soul.  Fittingly, Burton’s Dark Shadows features the awakening of Barnabas (played by Depp) after a two hundred year slumber and the return to his ancestral home, Collinwood.  Although returning to home, Barnabas is the ultimate outcast, not only because of his curse, but also due to being thrust two hundred years into the future. It is the fish out of water aspect of the film that makes for most of its humor. Barnabas encounters everything that would seem foreign to a visitor from another time in the early seventies: hippies, troll dolls, television and even disco balls.

The film takes a less humorous turn when Barnabas finds out that the witch Angelique (played with gleeful abandon by Eva Green) that cursed him has taken over the contracts of most of the fisherman in the town, which is causing the Collins family to fall into ruin.  What ensues is a battle not only to return the economic prosperity in Collinsport to the town’s namesake family, but also a quest for Barnabas to be reunited with his lost love Josette (reincarnated in the form of the new Collinsport governess Victoria), who committed suicide after learning of Barnabas’s curse.

The performances, including Michelle Pfeiffer and Johnny Lee Miller as surviving Collins family members, and Helena Bonham Carter as a psychiatrist are all quite good, though Pfeiffer and Miller do not seem to have enough to do at times. The true stars of the film are Eva Green and Johnny Depp.  As Angelique, Green portrays a perfect ice queen persona, yet one may question why she still claims to love Barnabas after all that has happened between them.  Depp seems to relish playing the character of a Romantic hero, but for all his gentleman-like qualities, there are a few scenes that remind viewers that he is also a killer—even if he does not want to be.

Overall, the film has a few moments where it is almost too much, like a acrobatic sex scene between Barnabas and Angelique, but that is what most of us expect when going to see a Tim Burton film.  And not unlike a page out of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, one of the most romantic yet heartbreaking love stories ever written (at least in this critic’s opinion), Dark Shadows offers the reward of a delightfully morbid happy ending that should manage to make even the cruelest heart leave the theater with a sense of hope–not bad for a cheesy vampire flick.