Director Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp go together like peanut butter and jelly, like smoke and fire, like whiskey and Coke.  Their efforts together began with Edward Scissorhands, and now, twenty-two years later, their eighth collaboration is about to hit theaters from sea to shining sea.  That would be Dark Shadows, and to most audiences, the new film is likely a whole new quantity, a mixture of garish, gothic visuals and a comedic sensibility.

But Dark Shadows is, in fact, a theatrical update of the creaky soap opera created by Dan Curtis in 1966.  The series, which followed the exploits of the highly dysfunctional inhabitants of Collinwood Manor, has maintained a passionate cult of die hard fans devoted to the characters, particularly the vampire Barnabas Collins, originally played by Jonathan Frid.

In the new version, Depp plays Barnabas, a wealthy gentleman in the Colonies just before the Revolutionary War who is cursed with vampirism and buried alive for two centuries.  When he's unearthed in 1972, he naturally returns to his home and finds his descendants presiding over the dilapidated Collinwood Manor.  Depp leads a cast that includes Eva Green, Jonny Lee Miller, Helena Bonham Carter, Bella Heathcote, Chloe Grace Moretz, Gulliver McGrath, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Joel Amos from Moviefanatic.com was on hand for the film's press day, where cast, along with Tim Burton, writer Seth Grahame-Smith, and composer Danny Elfman discussed the influence of the original series, soap opera acting, being part of an ensemble, and the film's unique tone.

Even before Kick-Ass hit theaters in the Spring of 2010, there was talk of a sequel to the adaptation of Mark Millar's ultraviolent comic book series.  After the film debuted, sequel discussions continued, even as a follow-up looked increasingly improbable, if not impossible.  Often, reports of progress on the next installment in the Kick-Ass saga came from hyperbole-prone Millar himself, but apparently Kick-Ass 2 might actually, really happen soon.

Very early in a new video featurette on Dark Shadows, Michelle Pfeiffer begins, "The Collins family is," before pausing briefly and concluding, "odd."  Pfeiffer plays Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard, the matriarch of a highly dysfunctional family inhabiting the ancient, dusty old Collinwood Manor.  Every member of the family, and indeed a few characters who aren't official family members, get their moment in this new three-minute featurette.

The upcoming theatrical revival of Dark Shadows is indeed a comedy, but as a new minute-long international TV spot makes abundantly clear, it is very much the Johnny Depp show.  International Movie Star Depp plays Barnabas Collins, a role originated by the recently departed Jonathan Frid, and though Dark Shadows is populated by all manner of odd characters, it's clearly the vampire Barnabas who has the run of this particular show, a comedic update of the television series that ran from 1966-1971.

MGM and Screen Gems seem determined to ensure that the Carrie remake doesn't end up a generic rehash that goes the way of 1999's misbegotten The Rage: Carrie 2.  In order to avoid that sequel's fate, the remake of Brian De Palma's 1976 horror classic has been attaching interesting talent, including director and star.  With a young actress set to play the eponymous telekinetic high school student, it looks as though a four-time Oscar nominee may very well play Carrie's deranged mother.

It's the end of the week, and Warner Bros is kindly offering four official images from Dark Shadows, the comedically-inclined theatrical update of the gothic 1960s soap opera created by Dan Curtis. 

Two of the stills, the first and last, are familiar, as we've previously seen lower quality scans of both.  The middle two are all new, though.  One gives us Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins, posing in front of a painting of himself, while the other is actually a behind the scenes look at total BFFs Depp and Tim Burton.

Last week, a series of character posters promoting Dark Shadows desaturated the color in the faces of the film's major characters and plopped those faces in front of poppy, colorful backgrounds.  Now, a new set of character banners again gives all the players their chance to shine, but this time they're all shown from head to toe.  There's still that interplay between the bright colors and gothic colorlessness, though, as well as the tagline, "Strange is Relative."

Since MGM found a director for the Carrie remake earlier this year, the natural question regarding the film-to-be is simply who will play the title character?  After all, Sissy Spacek was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as a telekinetic teenager in Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation of Stephen King's first novel.  The question of just who will be covered in pig's blood at prom is close to being answered, it seems, as the candidates to play Carrie are down to two actresses: Chloe Grace Moretz and Haley Bennett.

Last week, Warner Bros revealed the first theatrical trailer for Dark Shadows, Tim Burton's update of the 1960s-1970s soap opera created by Dan Curtis.  The trailer showed that, instead of being a gothic slog, the film is instead a surprisingly colorful 1970s-set comedy with no small amount of eccentricity.  Today, the studio followed up with nine character posters, one for every member of the sprawling ensemble cast.

Hey, it's a one-two punch of news relating to summer projects from Tim Burton and Seth Grahame-Smith.  First we had the teaser trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the 3D action-epic produced by directed by Timur Bekmambetov, produced by Burton, and based on the mashup novel by Grahame-Smith.  Now we have a new image from Dark Shadows, the cinematic update of creator Dan Curtis's creaky but nonetheless beloved gothic soap opera that ran from 1966-1970.