FRESH BLOOD
Dark Shadows was a largely forgotten TV show in which a vampire comes back from the undead after 200 years. Who better to resurrect this comic Gothic horror than two of its biggest fans, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp.

Mark Salisbury

It's past the witching hour on a cold night in July as Johnny Depp's Barnabas Collins emerges from between mist–shrouded firs in a forest, wearing a long black cape coat and toting a wolf–headed cane, his face a deathly white, his mouth and chin dripping with fresh blood. In the distance, twin lights sweep through the darkness, heading closer. Barnabas, an 18th–century vampire who, after 200 years locked in a box, has just satiated his hunger by snacking on the unfortunate workmen who dug him up, stops moving, eyes wide and fearful. 'Show yourself, Satan,' he hisses, in the mistaken belief that the fast–approaching luminescence is the devil's eyes and he is in hell. In fact they are headlights, it's 1972, and he is about to get his very first glimpse of a motor car.

Fifty feet away, the director Tim Burton chuckles behind his video monitor, then steps out and asks Depp to go again. We are near Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, and it is day 44 of production on Dark Shadows, an adaptation of a supernatural soap opera that first aired 46 years ago on American television and is now largely forgotten by all but its most committed fans. A ripe, melodramatic horror–comedy–family drama, Dark Shadows is perfect material for Burton and Depp who for more than 20 years (this is their eighth film together) have lovingly and successfully repackaged and repurposed their childhood obsessions into a series of delightfully dark comic fantasies, from Edward Scissorhands to Alice in Wonderland.

'It's Gothic. It's vampires. It means Johnny can wear make–up again,' laughs Helena Bonham Carter, who co–stars as an alcoholic psychologist in a red wig, alongside Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green and newcomer Bella Heathcote. 'Both of them are genuflecting to their 10–year–old selves.

What's great is what gave them pleasure then still gives them pleasure now. They've not really grown up. They decide what they want to make, and have fun.' Dark Shadows ran for 1,225 episodes between 1966–71, and featured vampires, ghosts and werewolves when daytime soaps typically centred on doctors and nurses. In a time before Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Twilight saga or even Anne Rice, the show became cult viewing for children obsessed with monsters. 'It was like a weird dream or nightmare in the afternoon,' recalls Burton, who would run home from school to watch it, homework forgotten.

'It had this strange tone; the music, the performances, the daily routine of it. There was nothing else like it.' 'I used to watch it religiously,' reminisces Depp, many months later in Los Angeles, on a day off from filming The Lone Ranger, in which he plays Tonto. 'I was obsessed with Barnabas Collins to the point where I had posters and would buy Dark Shadows magazines and comic books.'

Played by the Canadian stage actor Jonathan Frid (who died last month), Barnabas was a vampire with a conscience, who regularly tortured himself about his homicidal tendencies. Even though he didn't appear until episode 202, Barnabas came to define Dark Shadows, and Frid found himself gracing magazine covers alongside David Cassidy and the Monkees, an unlikely teen idol. Yet it is a show that even its admirers concede wasn't very good.

'It was, in some ways, quite crappy,' Burton says. 'They had a day for an episode,' Bonham Carter adds. 'They began at 10 and finished at four, and if they didn't get it right, tough.' Nevertheless, Pfeiffer, who last worked with Burton on 1992's Batman Returns, remains such a huge fan of Dark Shadows that when she read Burton was making a film of it she rang him and 'grovelled for a part'.

It was Depp who brought the project to Burton. When he and Burton were shooting Sweeney Todd in 2007, Depp recalls, 'We were standing around talking and laughing, as we normally do, and I said something like, "Man, we should do a vampire movie, like Nosferatu." Then it popped into my head: Dark Shadows. We started talking about how much we had loved it and the absurdities of that period combined with the Gothic nature combined with this vampire out of time. The next thing, we were full steam ahead.' Depp is a producer as well as its star. 'Our relationship was the same,' Burton says.

'His primary focus is his performance and on set – that's where he puts his energy – and the script.' Depp's Barnabas is a playboy living in Maine in the late 18th century who breaks the heart of a servant, Angelique Bouchard (Green), unaware that she is, in fact, a witch. In best scorned fashion, Angelique exacts her revenge by compelling Barnabas's fiancée Josette (Bella Heathcote) to kill herself, before transforming him into a vampire and locking him in a coffin. When Barnabas reemerges after 200 years, the world has changed. In 1972 Tim Burton was a teenager, living in Burbank, a fairly nondescript Los Angeles suburb.

'That era was a very uneasy, strange period of life,' he remembers. 'I was feeling very isolated and dislocated from my world. Going back and revisiting the music and looking at magazines of that era, I almost got physically ill.' Was there anything he found particularly disturbing? 'Everything. It's like traumatic shock syndrome. It taps right back into your soul.' The film revels in Barnabas's man–out–of–time antics but, in addition to troll dolls, discos and hippies, he must contend with his beloved ancestral home,

Collinwood Manor, having fallen into disrepair, his dysfunctional descendants and their latest governess (Heathcote, again), who looks remarkably like his long–lost love. Moreover, he discovers that Angelique is not only alive and still carrying a torch, but also runs the rival cannery that has put the Collins family out of business. 'She's completely bonkers,' Eva Green says. 'But I don't see her as evil. She's just madly in love.'

Burton was taken by the French–born Green, who had impressed critics opposite Daniel Craig's 007 in Casino Royale, and who seduces Depp in several scenes of such wild, gravity–defying abandon that they were required to film on wires. Burton, who had Green dye her dark hair blond, liked to imagine that she might really be a witch. 'That was one of the things Tim said to me early on, that she, somehow, is a witch,' Depp notes. 'Not saying that in some horrible way, but she has this quality that is supernatural. It's like she hovers off the ground a little bit. She's a different breed of human.'

After the digital effects that dominated Burton's billion–dollar–grossing Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows marks a return to real sets, real actors and real props. Depp says it is the most fun he has seen Burton have on a film in years. Burton agrees: 'After not working with sets for a while it's nice to revisit texture and walk around and see how the sculptures are coming,' he says, while strolling the back lot at Pinewood last June. The production designer Rick Heinrichs has created Collinsport, an entire Maine fishing village (which Collinwood Manor overlooks from the top of a hill) on what, three months before, was a carpark and an outdoor water tank.

'One of the joys of movie–making is to feel all that happening,' he says. The plan had been to find a coastal village in Britain to transform into Collinsport. 'You always want to shoot on location if you can, to get the verisimilitude of the lighting and the existing conditions – and it's cheaper, if it works,' Heinrichs says. He scouted locations in Scotland, Devon, Cornwall and Wales, but soon realised British and American harbours differed architecturally and he would have to build it. Twenty–two weeks later Collinsport emerged, 15ft off the ground to accommodate a 3ft 6in–deep water tank for the harbour.

The set's infrastructure is elaborate, with a waterfront, interconnecting streets, 18 stores, two canneries, a taxidermist, cinema (the Roxy, showing, variously, Deliverance, Superfly and A Clockwork Orange), bar, and a petrol station with a lighthouse on top. 'It's a Shell, because it's near the ocean,' Heinrichs says, laughing, 'and that was OK with Shell.' Half a dozen wooden fishing boats are currently bobbing in the water and there's even a smell of real fish in the air. 'The detail of the sets is beyond anything I have seen,' says the producer Richard D Zanuck who, aged 77 and in his seventh decade in the film business, has seen quite a bit, and who in 1974 spent many months at sea making Jaws.

'When all the boats were moving and the extras were dressed in 1970s, it stopped me for a bit. Suddenly I went back in time.' The pretence is broken only by the 240x60ft blue screen at one end of the tank where the Atlantic will be added, digitally, in post–production. But once night falls, the illusion is complete. 'I wanted to go and stay in a little bed and breakfast in that town, to have coffee in the morning, out there, at that dock,' Pfeiffer says. 'It was so beautiful.' Throughout his career, and especially with Burton, Depp has often hidden his handsome features beneath heavy make–up. As Barnabas, his face is veiled behind a pallor that appears white but is a mix of blues, reds, blacks and purples. His look is a homage to Jonathan Frid, who makes a brief cameo in the film, along with several other stars from the original show. 'We talked about different things and different hairstyles,' Burton says, 'but at the end of the day you go back to what the inspiration was, and pay tribute to that.'

Vocally, Depp opted for a cross between Frid and Richard Burton. 'There was a slight amount of Welsh in it,' says Depp, whose daily transformation required enlarged ears, a Caesar hairdo, a Roman nose and elongated fingers. The extra–long digits were Burton's idea and while it increased the time in make–up – each prosthetic finger contains a golf tee beneath the skin – the effect is dazzling, especially during the scenes when Barnabas uses them to hypnotise people. 'It took some getting used to because there was probably a good two extra inches on my fingers,' Depp says, 'but they were leading Barnabas to things, as if they had their own brain, and they became very important.'

E Stage at Pinewood has been transformed by Heinrichs into Collinwood's grand foyer, its wood and stone interior reflecting old–world craftsmanship and the Collins family's nautical heritage, with seahorses, mermaids and marine motifs everywhere. Even the floor tiles are in a wave pattern. This morning's scene takes place in the aftermath of 'a happening' thrown by Barnabas to celebrate an upturn in the family's fortunes. (The musical act is Alice Cooper who, according to Burton, 'almost looks better now than he did back then. There's some kind of Dorian Gray thing going on.') It's a pivotal moment when the family – bar Pfeiffer's steely matriarch, Elizabeth, who is in on the ruse – realise Barnabas is not, in fact, a distant relation from England, but a centuries–old vampire, after sunlight flooding in through the dramatic window sets him ablaze, and Pfeiffer, standing on the foyer's majestic stairway, archly states, 'Barnabas. You're on fire.'

As Depp frantically bats at his clothes to extinguish the flames that will be added later, Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley), the family's butler/ cook/chauffeur, grabs a metal bucket from the floor, throwing soapy water over the burning Barnabas. At least, that is how it will play out in the final film. On set, it is Burton who wields the bucket and drenches Depp. The first take is a good one, but after Depp has dried off and had his vampire face touched up, Burton films a second. Again it is the director who douses Depp. And, over the course of the long shoot, Burton will further squirt, soak and saturate his star with blood, water and, for the climactic sequence, green vomit, claiming it is because he is the 'best shot'. 'He's lying,' Depp roars.

'He likes to torture me. In Sleepy Hollow when I get the blood squirted in the eye – that was Tim. The horrible spew, green vomit [on this] was Tim, covered in protective clothing and trash bags, shooting me in the face with this green slime. It's always been him, off camera, doing that. It makes him laugh.'

Laughter on set was, according to Depp and Pfeiffer, a regular occurrence, given the material. For the cast, though, finding the right tone and acting style was, at first, somewhat trickier. Burton's advice to his actors was to 'treat it seriously, not make it jokey. That was the key thing, to keep it serious, and pretend it's a real story, and pretend it's all real.' Bonham Carter remembers looking to Pfeiffer, who would watch episodes of the televi sion show in her trailer every morning while being made up, for pointers. 'At the beginning Tim said, "I want soap opera acting." It's all really earnest and the stakes are always high. Michelle was really good at it. So I was trying to copy her.'

In mid–March 2012, with less than two months until Dark Shadows is released, Burton continues to wrestle with the elusive tone in a north London editing suite. The first trailer, which appeared recently, went for the comic jugular, an approach that upset some fans of the television show but which doesn't necessarily reflect the film. Depp, for one, admits he always saw it as being funny. 'Even now it's an odd one,' Burton says. 'I'm always this way with films. Definitely there's humour. How funny is it? I don't know. Is it laugh–out–loud funny? It's hard for me to know. It's probably the most ethereal thing I've worked on.' And he means that in a good way.