Depp to Star in Remake of Dark Shadows

Keeping in the Halloween spirit, I'll tell you that it's been announced that the legendary, and slightly mad, director Tim Burton has signed Pride And Prejudice And Zombies writer Seth Grahame-Smith to adapt the late '60s horror-soap-opera Dark Shadow into a film starring the slightly mad Johnny Depp. Apparently, Grahame-Smith was offered the job because Burton enjoyed his lesser known zombie-history novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. In fact, Burton liked it so much that he bought the rights and Burton is currently in pre-production on the film version of that novel.

In the movie version of the of Dark Shadows, the cult vampire daytime soap opera that ran from 1966 to 1971, Depp is set to play the lead Barnabas Collins, who throughout the show's 1200 episodes experienced storyarcs including time travel, parallel universes, and encounters with many things that went bump in the night. Shooting on the film is slated to begin in January 2011 and this project will be the eighth collaboration for Depp/Burton, who last teamed up on Alice in Wonderland, a film not meant to be viewed without 3-D glasses and/or copious amounts of mind altering substances. Meanwhile, Depp is currently filming the next Pirates of the Caribbean installment.

Amazingly, actor Jonathan Frid, who played Barnabas Collins in the television show, is still alive and kicking and has his own website. And here I thought he'd only played a vampire.

Trick or Treat . . . . . .