There are certain Hollywood brands that feel destined to get screwed with for all eternity—well-known enough to trigger that “Oh, people have heard of that” brain impulse that makes executives think there might be money in reviving them, but not so much that people actually ever go see the damn things once they’re revived. It’s hard not to see Dark Shadows—the Gothic soap opera that managed to crank out 1,200 of witchy melodrama back in the 1960s and ’70s—as falling into this particular ditch. Like, if an only-somewhat-past-their-primes Tim Burton and Johnny Depp couldn’t get this thing going again in 2012, what hope does anyone have now?
Nevertheless: THR reports today that Warner Bros. is taking a stab at a slightly novel approach to dragging this sucker out of the grave, announcing that the series is being brought back as an adult-aimed animated series. Unlike Burton—who pitched his film as a period project set in the 1970s—it sounds like this latest version will resist the siren call of camp: A Discovery Of Witches vet Lisa Holdsworth will serve as showrunner for the series, which sports a logline promising to blend “gothic, horror, and supernatural genres, this coming adaptation promises all the dark twists and romantic intrigue that defined the transformational series across its 1200-plus episode run.”
In basically all of its incarnations—including attempted TV revivals in 1991 and 2004, the latter co-starring a young Jessica Chastain—Dark Shadows centers on Maine’s Collins family, whose efforts to just run a damn fishing business keep getting interrupted by all these witches and vampires and other supernatural threats. (Most notably long-undead family patriarch Barnabas Collins, who didn’t actually show up on the original series until about two years in, but quickly became it’s most famous character.) No word yet on when the animated series, announced this weekend at the Annecy International Film Festival, is expected to arrive on TV, but we have to assume there’s some demographic out there somewhere who’s ready to get either very excited or very angry about its existence.
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