by Tony Dayoub
It's ironic that Tim Burton—whose expressionism-by-way-of-acid-tinged
Batman was the forerunner of the modern superhero film—has a new film getting trounced in the box office by
The Avengers, the ultimate example of the very kind of genre he helped to usher in at the start of his career. And that this film is
Dark Shadows, not only a property with a fervent cult audience but probably the most satisfying effort from Burton in quite a long time. Based on the Gothic soap which ran on ABC from 1966-1971,
Dark Shadows is the apotheosis of Burton's artistic concerns, perfectly fusing his love of all things dark and creepy with his off-kilter family dynamics in a way only glimpsed at in previous efforts like
Beetlejuice,
Edward Scissorhands and most precisely (but all too briefly) in his 1984 short,
Frankenweenie. In films like
Sweeney Todd, Burton gets the sense of dark foreboding right, but misses that infectious feeling of benign wonder which his other movies are bursting with. And most of the rest of his oeuvre, though exuberant in its ability to astonish with imaginative production design and fanciful style, doesn't quite get that Hammer horror feel of movies like
Sleepy Hollow. Perhaps
Dark Shadows succeeds because, by Burton's own admission, it was a formative influence.
