Johnny Depp and Tim Burton explain vampire history in this Dark Shadows featurette

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

If they offered a college course called “Vampire History 101” and it was taught by Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, I would take that class in a heartbeat.

But, for now we will have to make due with this featurette for DARK SHADOWS in which Depp and Burton give a brief overview on vampires through cinematic history. There is not really anything we did not know about the subject, but seeing these two talk about it makes the old seem new again.

Plot: In the year 1752, Joshua and Naomi Collins, with young son Barnabas, set sail from Liverpool, England to start a new life in America. But even an ocean was not enough to escape the mysterious curse that has plagued their family. Two decades pass and Barnabas (Johnny Depp) has the world at his feet—or at least the town of Collinsport, Maine. The master of Collinwood Manor, Barnabas is rich, powerful and an inveterate playboy…until he makes the grave mistake of breaking the heart of Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green). A witch, in every sense of the word, Angelique dooms him to a fate worse than death: turning him into a vampire, and then burying him alive. Two centuries later, Barnabas is inadvertently freed from his tomb and emerges into the very changed world of 1972. He returns to Collinwood Manor to find that his once-grand estate has fallen into ruin. The dysfunctional remnants of the Collins family have fared little better, each harboring their own dark secrets. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer) has called upon live-in psychiatrist, Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), to help with her family troubles. Also residing in the manor is Elizabeth’s ne’er-do-well brother, Roger Collins, (Jonny Lee Miller); her rebellious teenage daughter Carolyn Stoddard (Chloe Moretz); and Roger’s precocious 10-year-old son, David Collins (Gulliver McGrath). The mystery extends beyond the family, to caretaker Willie Loomis, played by Jackie Earle Haley, and David’s new nanny, Victoria Winters, played by Bella Heathcote.

I love the little touches put on the design of this film. There are elements from both Universal and Hammer horror films combined in with the signature style we have come to expect from a Tim Burton movie.

DARK SHADOWS opens May 11th.