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Tim Burton's big screen take on the infamous horror soap of the 60s is apparently a bit hard to pin down.
Having only a basic knowledge of the series its based on (our fearless editor Chris Alexander is really the authority there), I can't help but be a bit excited by DARK SHADOWS. Burton has turned into an endless, shallow retread of the Hot Topic image of himself, but it almost seems as if he's jazzed on his latest project, and you know, actually putting effort into it. Speaking to MTV about the general oddness of it, the BEETLEJUICE director said, "We're editing and doing effects. It's not an effects-heavy picture, but it's still got stuff in there. There's a strange tone to the movie. That's always what's fun about movies. You never know exactly what they are. It makes it both exciting and scary and why you like doing it. I have to keep remembering that."
"It's got such a strange vibe. And it's not something that a lot of people necessarily know. You're trying to do a weird soap opera. I felt really lucky, because the cast is really good. People like Michelle [Pfeiffer] grew up watching it. Some of the cast knew about it. Some didn't, but they were all game for it — getting into the weird spirit of what "Dark Shadows" was. It has a weird sense of heightened melodrama. There was a generation of us who would run home from school to watch it. That's probably why we were such bad students. We should have been doing homework; we were watching "Dark Shadows" instead. It was hard to put into words the tone it was. It had a weird seriousness, but it was funny in a way that wasn't really funny. We just had to feel our way through it to find the tone. We didn't do any real rehearsals, because the cast all came in at different times. But there was an old photo of the [original] cast which I always remembered, so a couple days before shooting, we got the whole cast together to take a similar shot so everyone could see each other and get that vibe from doing a group photo. That helped set the tone more than anything."
He goes on to add that the film is mostly set in the 1970s and incorporates a "tiny bit" of time travel.
Additionally, Johnny Depp fansite Johnny Depp-Italia dropped a new image of the man as Barnabas Collins. DARK SHADOWS is out May 11, 2012.
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