The cult TV show Dark Shadows ran from 1966 until 1971. I wasn’t even born when the odd, supernatural soap opera went off the air, so it wasn’t something I was familiar with until a few years ago when Tim Burton talked about doing a movie based on the show. Frankly, the movie never really interested me since I had no connection whatsoever to the property, until I saw the first trailer. It would have been easy for Burton to set the movie in the modern age, but, no, he had to go retro with a 1970s period piece. And that alone interested me. Not enough to see it in the theatre, mind you, but enough to spend $1 at one of the 3,000 Redbox machines within two blocks of my house.
Going into the movie blind, with only the vaguest notion of what the central premise was, I can’t say that my “intrigued” attitude grew to become affection. I didn’t care about any of the characters, the comedy mostly fell flat for me, and the plot was less than inspiring. Yet I felt compelled to finish the movie, just because it was such a bold experiment in movie-making, mostly due to the set and costume design.
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