Entertainment Weekly unveiled the first look at Tim Burton‘s inevitable vampire movie Dark Shadows which stars Burton’s muse Johnny Depp as a 200-year-old vampire. Inspired by the cult tv melodrama from the late 1960s, Dark Shadows is a gothic-horror tale set in the town of Collinsport, Maine, where Barnabas (Johnny Depp) is the master of Collinwood Manor surrounded by various supernatural creeps played by Michelle Pfeiffer, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloë Moretz and Helena Bonham Carter among others.
The official synopsis : “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…”
Depp, who is a huge fan of the original series, told Entertainment Weekly: “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.”
Take a look at the two photographs below. It’s hard not to feel a little jazzed about Team Burton-Depp’s new exercise in high-camp macabre. It is, after all, what they do best.
Dark Shadows is due out May 2012.
