Movies
First Official Look: Cast Photo for Tim Burton’s ‘Dark Shadows’ Offers Huge Sigh of Relief
In response to the horrible paparazzi photos, Warner Bros. Pictures has rushed out an official look at the cast from Tim Burton’s now-filming Dark Shadows, which offers a big sigh of relief.
Posted by EW, clicking over to the site will give you a breakdown of each and every cast member on display: Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), Carolyn Stoddard (Chloë Moretz), Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green), David Collins (Gulliver McGrath), Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote), Mrs. Johnson (Ray Shirley), Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley), Roger Collins (Jonny Lee Miller) and Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer).
The original followed the life of vampire Barnabas Collins, played by Depp, and his run-ins with various monsters, ghosts, and supernatural creatures. The film is in theaters May 11, 1012.
“In the year 1752, Joshua and Naomi Collins, with young son Barnabas, set sail from Liverpool, England to start a new life in America. But even an ocean was not enough to escape the mysterious curse that has plagued their family. Two decades pass and Barnabas (Johnny Depp) has the world at his feet–or at least the town of Collinsport, Maine. The master of Collinwood Manor, Barnabas is rich, powerful and an inveterate playboy…until he makes the grave mistake of breaking the heart of Angelique Brouchard (Eva Green). A witch, in every sense of the word, Angelique dooms him to a fate worse than death: turning him into a vampire, and then burying him alive.
Two centuries later, Barnabas is inadvertently freed from his tomb and emerges into the very changed world of 1972. He returns to Collinwood Manor to find that his once-grand estate has fallen into ruin. The dysfunctional remnants of the Collins family have fared little better, each harboring their own dark secrets. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer) has called upon live-in psychiatrist, Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), to help with her family troubles.“
Remember the Jim Carrey movie The Mask back in the 1990s? The film ended up being a family friendly affair, but did you know that it began its life as a New Line horror project?!
Chuck Russell (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob) directed the 1994 movie starring Jim Carrey, which was based on the comic series from Dark Horse Comics. The darker, more violent comics ultimately became a family friendly slapstick comedy, but New Line actually originally hoped to use the property to create their next Freddy Krueger.
As Russell himself explained way back in 2017, “It’s a great example of really fighting for your vision in a film. We changed it from a horror film into a comedy. It was originally conceived as being a horror film. That was a real battle. New Line wanted a new kind of Freddy movie.”
“I had seen the same original Mask comic they ended up buying, and I thought, ‘That’s really cool, but it’s too derivative of Freddy Krueger.’ He would put on the mask and kill people. And have one-liners. It was a really cool, splatterpunk, black and white comic,” Russell continued. “They’ve redone the comics to be more like my movie, but the original comics were really cool, dark and scary. But I knew, as a film, it would be very reminiscent of Freddy Krueger.”
Could The Mask someday return to the screen with a darker adaptation more in line with the original comic books? One filmmaker who has thrown his hat into that race is Sébastien Vaniček, who follows up his spider horror movie Infested with the now-in-theaters Evil Dead Burn. In a Reddit AMA this week, the French filmmaker floated the idea in a response to a fan.
When asked which intellectual property he’d be interested in getting his hands on next, Vaniček replied: “I think I would dig into The Mask, but make it closer to the comic books.”
He added, “The comic books are actually very, very violent and dark.”
What would 1994’s The Mask look like as a horror movie? Find out below!