American gothic

Warner Bros.

You can now officially count me as a Johnny Depp/Tim Burton fan.

Those two wild and crazy guys have collaborated on some of my all-time favorite moving pictures:

• Edward Scissorhands (1990)
• Ed Wood (1994)
• Sleepy Hollow (1999)
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
• Corpse Bride (2005)
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
• Alice in Wonderland (2010)

And now Dark Shadows, which is scheduled to be released on May 11:

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 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 Bouchard. 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...

Dark Shadows was an American-produced gothic soap opera that originally aired weekdays from 1966 to 1971. The original story did not mention any supernatural elements. It was unprecedented in daytime television when ghosts were introduced about six months after it began.

The series became hugely popular when vampire Barnabas Collins appeared a year into its run. Dark Shadows also featured werewolves, zombies, man-made monsters, witches, warlocks, time travel, and a parallel universe.

I. Can't. Wait.