Can Dark Shadows be Adapted to Film? Answer Inside

As a child Johnny Depp wanted to be Barnabas Collins. I hope he feels accomplished.

This weekend I saw Tim Burton's Dark Shadows. Right before the previews first came out, and three months before it premiered, I wrote a blog post about remembering the 60's supernatural TV series, Dark Shadows. I found out about the most recent Burton/Depp project while researching for that post. At the time I was excited that someone was giving this cult TV show props, especially if Tim Burton was doing it. However, upon seeing the film, I was pretty disappointed. This blog post is not going to be about me complaining that the TV show was better than the movie. You have to forgive Burton for truncating the story to fit a film format, it never works out perfectly for any project like this. Though I greatly enjoyed it, I am no where near an expert on the TV series to go on and on about the possible discrepancies in the film. My grievances lie in the low-brow jokes and disproportionate focus on the time period the film was set in. 

not amused

At least 50% of the film was dedicated to cracks at the 1970s, and Barnabas's amusing struggles to acclimate. Dark Shadows the TV series was filmed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but they did not acknowledge popular culture of the time, certainly not Alice Cooper, as spooky as he may be. It was set in present day, which happens to now be 40 years in the past. If Donnie Darko can be set in 1985, and actually be about a supernatural phenomenon, Dark Shadows can be a movie that just happens to be set in the 70s, and therefore be authentic to the TV series in that aspect.

Burton also focused on 70's pop hits that contain relevant lyrical themes in relation to the film, instead of using the awesome original theme music of the TV show.

I hadn't seen Dark Shadows in years. Curious about how the TV show and movie plots compared, I looked up the episode synopsis on Wikipedia. With over one thousand episodes, and dizzying plot points that include a "Stairway into Time" built by a ghost, it became very clear that as eerie and grave as the show tried to be, it was quite absurd, even for a supernatural drama. Trying to translate this into a serious film today would either render the original plot unusable, or completely alienate audiences. It seems as though the slap-stick path Burton lead was a lesser evil. When you wipe away all the yucks about disco balls and being stoned, what's left of Dark Shadows is an extremely thin plot that resembles the TV series on the most basic levels.  
    

UPDATE:

Dark Shadows: A Vampire TV Show Resurrected

I was listening to MF Doom's song, Hyssop on the way home from work, and it dawned on me that I used to LOVE the 1960's supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows. In the song MF Doom samples from the show's theme. I've always known this, but it was just one of those daily epiphanies that kicks you right in the head, and brought me back to 1996. Exactly 30 years after it first aired, I watched Dark Shadows in syndication on The Sci-Fi channel on summer afternoons. Other 70s sci-fi TV shows like Night Gallery got in the line up as well, but DS was my favorite. The show had hauntings, possessions, witches, mansions, creepy theme music, and it's main character was a 200 year-old vampire named Branabas Collins.




Dark Shadows was an introduction to my interest in the macabre. As a 9 year-old, it was the first time I watched something that was scary but enjoyed feeling unsettled. I became addicted to that feeling. Dark Shadows explains everything from my love of David Lynch to the lady boner I have for True Blood. Dark Shadows can be considered a rough pre-cursor to True Blood, in that the main character(s) are vampire, there are warewolves, witches, and ghosts. There's drama, supernatural perils, and love stories (though True Blood is hard-core porn compared to DS). I still prefer scary movies that are more psychological than gorey.



I was very excited to hear that Tim Burton is making a movie adaptation of Dark Shadows. Do I even have to tell you that Johnny Depp is in it? What's interesting is that the film is set in the 1970s, just like the original version of the show (DS was also remade for NBC in 1991). Burton could have just set it in present day, which obviously was the original intention of DS, but it's clear he wants to be true to the TV series. I'm hopeful for the quality of the movie, but I hope the obscurity of Dark Shadows as a cult TV show doesn't keep the project underground. How many puns can you get out of that sentence? 

Here's one last Dark Shadows video to send you off on. Though the show was not exactly meant for kids, DS clearly made an impact on that demographic. Even 30 years later a kid like me got into it. How very 60s to capitalize off a soap opera by making a children's board game out of it!