“Every family has its demons,” the tagline for Dark Shadows promises. The 2012 film delivers on that count and little else. Tim Burton’s Gothic horror comedy runs 113 minutes, frees an 18th-century vampire into the world of 1972, and never decides what it wants to be.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Entertainment.
A Vampire in 1972
The premise is strong. In 1760, Barnabas Collins and his wealthy family left Liverpool for Maine to build a fishing empire. They founded Collinsport and built Collinwood Mansion. Sixteen years later, Barnabas was engaged to Josette. He had been having an affair with the family servant Angelique, who was secretly a witch. When he broke it off, she murdered his parents, cursed him, and cast a spell that made Josette jump to her death from Widows’ Hill. Barnabas tried to follow her, failed, and discovered the curse had turned him into a vampire. Angelique rallied the town and had him buried alive.
He wakes in 1972. A construction crew frees him, and he drinks their blood to restore himself. He returns to Collinwood to find the estate and the family in ruin. Angelique, still alive, has built a rival seafood company, Angel Bay, that has outcompeted the Collins business for generations.
That is a real engine for a movie. Burton has the pieces.
Depp, Pfeiffer, and a Full House
Johnny Depp plays Barnabas as a man out of time, hypnotizing the caretaker Willie Loomis and revealing the family curse to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Michelle Pfeiffer plays Elizabeth. Helena Bonham Carter is Dr. Julia Hoffman, the family’s vain and often inebriated live-in psychiatrist, hired to treat young David’s trauma over his mother’s death. Chloë Grace Moretz is Carolyn, Elizabeth’s rebellious 15-year-old daughter. Bella Heathcote plays both Josette and Victoria Winters, the governess who resembles her. Eva Green is Angelique, whose face and body begin to crack late in the film like a porcelain doll.
The cast list itself tells the story of the problem:
- Depp as Barnabas, the vampire
- Pfeiffer as Elizabeth, the matriarch
- Green as Angelique, the witch
- Bonham Carter as Dr. Hoffman
- Moretz as Carolyn, later revealed as a werewolf
- Heathcote as Victoria and Josette
- Jackie Earle Haley as Willie Loomis
That is seven principals and a werewolf reveal, in 113 minutes. No one gets room.
Cameos and Coincidence
Christopher Lee appears in a small role, his 200th film appearance and his fifth and final collaboration with Burton. Jonathan Frid, star of the original Dark Shadows series, makes a cameo; he died shortly before the film was released. Producer Richard D. Zanuck died two months after it opened. Alice Cooper plays himself.
The film opened in limited release on May 10, 2012, and went wide in North America the following day. It performed poorly at the United States box office and did well in foreign markets. Reviews were mixed. Critics praised the visual style and the consistent humor, and felt the film lacked a focused or substantial plot and developed characters.
That split is honest, and it is also the whole review. The look holds. The jokes land more often than not. The story does not.
What the Film Does With Its Witch
Angelique is the best idea in Dark Shadows and the least used. She has posed as five successive generations of women running Angel Bay, outcompeting the Collins family across two centuries. That is a villain with a grudge that has outlived everyone who might have settled it. The film gives her a cracking porcelain face and a confrontation at Collinwood, then lets the plot wander.
Barnabas, meanwhile, spends his first act hypnotizing Willie and showing Elizabeth the manor’s secret passages and hidden treasure. Those are good scenes. They are not a spine.
As of 2026, Dark Shadows is also Burton’s last movie with Depp and Bonham Carter, two collaborators he returned to for decades. That fact gives the film a weight it did not earn on its own. It reads now as the end of a run rather than a chapter in one.
The 1972 setting is the sharpest tool here, and the film uses it for costume gags instead of culture shock. A vampire who lost his fiancée, his parents, and two centuries should have more to say about what he finds. Barnabas mostly wants his family’s business back.
5.5 of 10
Dark Shadows is not a failure of craft. The visual style is consistent, the humor is consistent, and the cast is overqualified in the way Burton’s casts usually are. It is a failure of shape. The film has a witch, a werewolf, a ghost, a governess who is the reincarnation of a dead woman, a psychiatrist, and a vampire, and it never decides which of them the movie is about.
The strongest material is Angelique’s two-century vendetta and the Collins family’s decline into irrelevance. The film treats both as background.
What is worth watching is the first half hour and any scene where Green is on screen. What is not worth watching is the back half, which mistakes a pileup of reveals for a climax.
If you want Burton and Depp at their best together, this is not it. If you want to see what a great cast does with a script that never finds its center, Dark Shadows is exactly that.
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