With Tim Burton taking on Dark Shadows, it seems like an inspired match, and it’s also nice that today’s generation is going to get some old school vampires in the age of Twilight.
Of course, there’s the danger with Burton that the humor could get too cheesy, or that the story could be nonexistent while the movie still looks great.
So it’s interesting when you see the trailer for Dark Shadows, which actually looks pretty good, and you don’t mind the humor, which isn’t bad, and is to be expected because it could come across as pretentious if it takes itself too seriously.
But the music in the trailer is all wrong, and for me it ruined the experience. Again, it’s odd because visually it looks pretty good, Johnny Depp does a good job as Barnabas Collins, but the battle scene between him and the witch who cursed him is cut to Barry White?! Well, there’s a first time for everything…
Reaction hit the ‘Net pretty quickly, and while there’s a lot of negative comments, which is to be expected no matter what, some of them are on target here and there. On Deadline, the comments section filled up almost instantly, and they included, “What a major let down for a big fan of the original Dark Shadows, “It looks Mars Attacks awful,” and a pretty dead on comment, “Looks like he went for something close to the tone of the Addams Family films. Might not have been a bad decision.”
On Facebook, my friend John Charles wrote, “Good Lord. I wasn’t expecting the same approach as the TV series, but this looks like the ’90s Addams Family crossed with Love at First Bite.” Charles also included a i09 article headlined, “Tim Burton’s Most Ridiculous Movie Yet?” Then Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog wrote, “So where can I find this much-reviled Dark Shadows trailer?”
Not all the comments were bad, quite a few people are looking forward to it, and again, I feel the trailer looks good, but the music’s all wrong, making it obvious this is a goof, like the audience is too dumb to understand that. And mixing horror and humor is tricky business. The audience doesn’t like being told where to laugh, and you have to let them laugh in the release of fear, or laugh at what’s actually funny where they feel they should.
Still, trailers aren’t always the best indicators of how good or bad a movie’s going to be. I remember seeing the Ghostbusters trailer when I was a kid and thinking, this is gonna be the dumbest movie ever made…
