DARK SHADOWS - BY LILI KENT: GINGER NUTS GOES TO UNI

Dir. Tim Burton, USA, 113 minutes

​In trying to combine horror, comedy and soap opera elements, the film captured none of the above, save for a few repeatable one-liners from Depp, rendering it directionless and unsatisfying

 Dark Shadows’ attempts to combine the horror, comedy and soap opera genres in 113 minutes result in defanged fright and humour without bite. It is a lesson in how aiming for too much can ultimately achieve so little.

Tim Burton has directed successful horror cinema from the whimsically creepy stop animation Corpse Bride (2005) to the starkly horrifying slasher musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). His films often meld nightmare with humour while using strong visual aesthetics and befitting colour schemes to create a unique viewing experience. Dark Shadows looked no different with its appealing blend of 70’s and Gothic style. Despite its all-star cast, featuring Burton’s favourites Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, it’s unlikely the film will linger in our memories for as long as Burton’s previous work.

Dark Shadows was inspired by the original 1966-1971 soap opera of the same name. It opens with an expositional sequence in which the wealthy Collins family moves from Liverpool to Maine in 1760, establishing the fictional fishing town of Collinsport and their Gothic mansion Collinwood. When the Collins’ son Barnabas spurns the immortal witch Angelique, she murders his parents and fiancée, Josette. Angelique curses him to an everlasting life of suffering as a vampire and seals him in a coffin for two centuries.

In 1972, Barnabas escapes and returns to the now-ruined Collinwood to meet his descendants: head of the family, Elizabeth; her moody teenage daughter, Carolyn; Elizabeth’s brother, Roger; and his son, David, who believes he can see his mother’s ghost. Dr Hoffman and Victoria Winters live with the family, having been hired as David’s child therapist and governess respectively. Barnabas swears to re-establish the Collins’ once-successful fishing business, all the while rebuking the renewed affections of Angelique and realising a strong attraction to Victoria, who bears an inexplicable resemblance to Josette (both played by Bella Heathcote).

If you’re looking to be even mildly creeped out, don’t watch Dark Shadows. Although it’s classed as a horror-comedy, there’s nothing horrifying about it, and its comedy is disappointingly inconsistent. What little that connects it to the horror genre is its subversion of traditional Gothic tropes, of which the only humorous take is Depp’s performance as Barnabas. Every single successful joke comes from Barnabas interacting with and adjusting to the ‘future’. It was entertaining to see the trope of the cool and cruel immortal turned on its head, as Depp naively misunderstands common expressions and the norms of modern civilisation – early on, he mistakes the glowing ‘M’ of a McDonald’s sign as the mark of Mephistopheles.

Depp, who also starred in Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Alice in Wonderland (2010) among many others, is impressively unrecognisable as himself when adopting the role of Barnabas Collins. Michelle Pfeiffer and Helena Bonham Carter were well-chosen as Elizabeth, the collected albeit initially resigned matriarch of the family, and Dr Hoffman, the blunt, alcoholic psychologist (even though the trope of the resentfully aging woman is massively overdone). I would have liked to see more from them both, especially Bonham Carter, whose storyline unfortunately had no impact on the plot, but the focus rarely strayed from Depp and Eva Green as the obsessive Angelique.

Although Pfeiffer, Green and Bonham Carter performed well, they didn’t contribute to the comedy unless they were interacting with Depp, and even then, there were exceptions to this rule. In particular, the physics-defying sex scene over halfway through had me physically cringing. Though Depp was the sole source of Dark Shadows’ effective comedy, he wasn’t consistent in his humour, and when he was funny, I never keeled over with laughter; at most, I smiled to myself. The fault lies with Seth Grahame-Smith’s script rather than the acting; it often used cheap jokes and clichéd dialogue that could only ever be awkwardly delivered.

I also attribute the inconsistent humour to Burton’s difficulty mimicking the tone of the original soap opera, struggling even to put it into words: “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” (Mitchell, 2012). A lot of the film’s failings can be explained by Burton’s attempts to capture this soap opera style.

Due to the ongoing nature of soaps, they explore a myriad of ideas with no time constraints while movies are limited in time and in what they can develop.  Dark Shadows had a whole nursery of subplots running around unsupervised with hardly enough screen time to give them the attention they deserved. There were hints at underlying familial issues I would have enjoyed seeing explored. I presume a later reveal is meant to justify Carolyn and Elizabeth’s strained relationship, but the explanation does not equal resolution. A final heart-to-heart between the two would have brought this subplot to a satisfying conclusion. Instead, I was left wondering why Burton bothered to signpost their rocky relationship at all. Most of the subplots were left similarly unresolved or hastily explained in the climax, a supernatural fight that felt rushed despite its glacial pace. The finale struggled to tie up the plot’s loose trails, ultimately asking more questions than it answered.

Because there were so many half-realised ideas crammed into two hours, characters were often forgotten or developed at the last minute. Although the 1972 storyline begins with Victoria moving in, seemingly establishing her as the main protagonist, the focus jarringly switches to Barnabas as soon as he is awakened twenty minutes in. The script then forgets Victoria’s existence, save for a few shots in a three-minute-long montage, until it’s once again necessary.
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The ending appears to set up a sequel with one seemingly concluded subplot reopened in the last frame, though this was never followed up. The suggestive final scene was explained by Burton as being “more to do with [the film’s] soap opera structure” than the intention to produce a sequel (ibid.) This sounds more like a last-minute justification based on the movie’s moderate failure. It received generally negative reviews and grossed $29 million in its USA opening weekend despite its $150 million budget (IMDb, Dark Shadows, n.d.).

I really wanted to like Dark Shadows. It was obviously a passion project for Burton and some members of the cast who were fans of the original series as children (Radish, 2012). In trying to combine horror, comedy and soap opera elements, the film captured none of the above, save for a few repeatable one-liners from Depp, rendering it directionless and unsatisfying. For that, I give Dark Shadows a four out of ten.

Author Bio:
Lili Kent is a second year Creative and Professional Writing student and the Deputy Head Editor of the University of Derby’s student-led newspaper, Phantom. While interning for Writing East Midlands (WEM), she conducted a written interview with Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, which can be found on the WEM website. Although she is a comedy-fantasy writer, her favourite author is Vladimir Nabokov; she enjoys his exploration of reality using unreliable narrators. Her favourite book is his Lolita. She is interested in Korean mythology and hopes to incorporate this into her future writing.

Click on the links below to read the other two entries in this series of reviews 

DARK SHADOWS -  BY LILI KENT: GINGER NUTS GOES TO UNI

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, A FILM REVIEW BY MEGAN HARRIS: GINGER NUTS GOES TO UNI

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