Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are reunited for this remake of the gothic soap opera which ran on American television from 1966-1971. This film has a lot to live up to for fans of the original series, but self-confessed Dark Shadows fanatics Burton and Depp (who was so obsessed as a child he thought he was Barnabas) have the camp original very much at heart. Several members of the original series cast, including the late Jonathan Frid, make welcome cameos.

In 1752, Joshua and Naomi Collins set sail from Liverpool with their young son Barnabas to start a new life in America. Two decades pass and Barnabas (Depp) has the world at his feet. As the master of Collinwood Manor he 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 remnants of the Collins family have fared little better: Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer), her ne’er-do-well brother, Roger Collins (Jonny Lee Miller), her rebellious teenage daughter Carolyn Stoddard (Chloe Moretz) and Roger’s precocious ten year-old son David Collins (Gulliver McGrath) all harbour their own dark secrets.