The first trailer for Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows has appeared, appropriately, on the stroke of midnight and it’s a very interesting glimpse at  Tim Burton’s latest gothic oddity. While it’s tonally a little uncertain there are some great lines and there’s a Beetlejuice/The Frightners feeling to the whole shebang which can only be a good thing after the Bleached Burton of Alice and her Wonderland.

Despite the soap opera origins there’s the requisite arcane atmosphere at play here and this trailer gives us our first indication of what Burton and Depp did next. Alice in Wonderland was a baffling success but what it does mean is that we’re seeing Burton with a blank cheque in his hands and thus he threw a thousand stop motion volts through Frankenweenie and we have that to look forward to later in the year. Dark Shadows is the other result and from what we can see here it’s another slice of Burtonian fun.

Johnny Depp lines up with Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley and Chloe Moretz to bring us a family tale run through with supernatural dysfunction. A few months separate us from this film, expect more to be revealed in that time.

Here’s your trailer.

                                                                                                                              

So there we have it. Still confused like a sleep deprived hamster in a bent kettle? Here’s a synopis of the whole shebang.

“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 Bouchard (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. Also residing in the manor is Elizabeth’s ne’er-do-well brother, Roger Collins, (Jonny Lee Miller); her rebellious teenage daughter Carolyn Stoddard (Chloe Moretz); and Roger’s precocious 10-year-old son, David Collins (Gulliver McGrath). The mystery extends beyond the family, to caretaker Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley) and David’s new nanny, Victoria Winters, played by Bella Heathcote.”

That’s that sorted then.