When I saw the trailer for Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows for the first time I was chagrined to see that he had turned my childhood gothic horror soap into a campy dumbed down comedy. How could he do such a thing? Wasn’t he saying that he, like Johnny Depp, like myself, were one of those kids, millions of kids, that would run home from school each day to catch the next creepy episode? We were dying to see this tale of a family living in a haunted house, beset with vampires, werewolves and alcoholism; dysfunction of the highest order. The children in Dark Shadows were lonely, frightened, and had closer relationships with malevolent ghosts than with their own parents. We loved it because we could identify with it. Perhaps the show darkened our already maladjusted psyche even more! We watched this stuff not once a week, 13 episodes a season, but every day. I believe that I have seen all 1225 episodes during the original run and in reruns. Granted it was shot without retakes, they were reading the scripts, and the effects were totally cheap, but overall the acting and the writing was fascinating for what they had to pull off each and every day. The source material was more than Dracula and Frankenstein, but Jane Eyre and Turn of the Screw; it was some dark, dark stuff. Perhaps Mr. Burton has found the need to lighten up this story, to go back into his childhood and realize that perhaps he does not have to take it all so seriously, to shine some comedic light and let his inner child laugh and smile. What genre is your life? Drama? Tragedy? Comedy? Perhaps it is time to rewrite the script.
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