News of Dark Shadows Recently Overshadowed...

Over the last few weeks, Hollywood has mainly been buzzing with all kinds of new information about the upcoming release of the first installment of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Simply scrolling through all the posts on the MTV Movies Blog is enough to illustrate my point.

But there's one story I'm a little distraught that didn't raise a bigger fuss. (Don't get all judgy on me, claiming I'm not excited about one of the final HP films finally arriving in theaters; I totally am, but it shouldn't need this much publicity. After all, it is Harry Potter.) No, I'm upset that nearly none of my friends have recognized or even heard about the announcement of Johnny Depp and Tim Burton's latest project, a film adaptation of the '60s TV show Dark Shadows.

Depp & Burton on the set of their last project Sweeney Todd 

Maybe I'm just weird like this, but ever since I'd heard the rumors about the project, I've been anxiously waiting for official confirmation. So when I saw the post on MTV Movies Blog called "Johnny Depp Sinking His Teeth into Vampire Role for Tim Burton's 'Dark Shadows'," I pretty much flipped out. With the vampire's sudden popularity, I was just waiting for the day when Tim Burton would undertake a vampire project. Which is largely due to the fact that his spin on vampires probably won't be as romantic or sex-driven or cliched as most of the vampires in recent popular character.

Not to mention Johnny Depp would probably make one of the coolest, most badass vampires.

But when it comes down to it, I don't really know a whole lot about the original TV show. So I went over to good ole IMDB and checked out the summary they had, which wasn't all that helpful: "Dark Shadows is a gothic soap opera, which follows the strange happenings to the Collins family and their surrounding friends. The show features everything from Vampires, to Witches, werewolves... you name it." But I have since done a little bit more research, just shy of watching the show somewhere online, and the most important thing I've learned so far is that the show circled mainly around the vampire Barnabas Collins (who will be Depp's character in the movie adaptation) and his supernatural friends who live in and around the small Maine town of Collinsport. And this doesn't tell a whole lot about the central plotlines of the TV show, but I did find the original opening credits to the show. You can check it out below:



The general storyline certainly seems like a good one for Burton to sink his claws into: A small town with some kind of supernatural beings haunting it. (Hmmmm...Sleepy Hollow, Nightmare Before Christmas, or Corpse Bride, anyone?) And of all the major Hollywood actors who could possibly get roped into the vampire scene, who better than Johnny Depp? Maybe he can do to vampires what he ended up doing to pirates.