Preview: Houses dark and silent in May thrillers

By Ray Bennett

A camp gothic soap opera that suddenly turned to the supernatural, “Dark Shadows” was on US television in the late 1960s and early 70s. The tale of a man named Barnabas Collins was introduced and soon vampires began to take a large bite out of daily afternoon TV audiences.

The series became a huge cult success and it’s bizarre combination of time travel, werewolves, zombies, witches and gothic romance seem made for Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, whose new film “Dark Shadows” (pictured) brings the concept to the big screen.

Depp plays rich playboy Barnabas, a role made famous by Jonathan Frid, a Canadian actor whose career expired when the series ended but who makes an appearance in the new film. It’s basically a family saga but one that is what Burton calls hermetically sealed with warring generations and the occasional bite in the neck.

Michelle Pfeiffer plays the reclusive family matriarch with Helena Bonham Carter as her shrink. Jonny Lee Miller is her troublesome brother with Chloe Moretz and Gulliver McGrath as precocious children. Eva Green plays a beautiful witch with Jackie Earle Haley as a caretaker and Bella Heathcote as a nanny.

Burton, who watched the series when he was young, says he has tried to match what he calls its “weird sense of heightened melodrama”. He tells MTV: “There was a generation of us who would run home from school to watch it. That’s probably why we were such bad students. We should have been doing homework; we were watching ‘Dark Shadows’ instead. It was hard to put into words what the tone was. It had a weird seriousness, but it was funny in a way that wasn’t really funny.”

It’s a mixture that has spun box office gold for Burton, Depp and Bonham Carter in the past. Their “Alice In Wonderland” grossed $1.02 billion worldwide in 2010 and before that there was “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street” ($152.5 million, 2007), “Corpse Bride” ($117 million, 2005) and “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” ($475 million, 2005).

The director says he decided not to use 3D because he wanted the feel of the 1970s and it is not heavy on effects: “It’s got such a strange vibe. And it’s not something that a lot of people necessarily know. You’re trying to do a weird soap opera. I felt really lucky, because the cast is really good. People like Michelle grew up watching it. Some of the cast knew about it. Some didn’t, but they were all game for it — getting into the weird spirit of what ‘Dark Shadows’ was.”

For those who want to see what the original fuss was about, Metrodome will release “Dark Shadows: The Original TV Series (The Barnabas Collins Episodes)” on DVD on April 30.

The spookiness in “Silent House”, based on a thriller from Uruguay titled “La Casa Muda” that made a splash at the Festival de Cannes last year, is altogether more serious. Directed by Chris Kentis and Laua Lau, the English-language remake uses the same premise of a young woman trapped in a house full of unknown terror with the events shown in 85-minutes of real time.

Elizabeth Olsen, who gained wide attention for her debut appearance in “Martha Marcy May Marlene”, plays the young woman in peril in a house by a secluded lake.

The husband-and-wife filmmakers made a thriller in 2004 titled “Open Water” about two scuba divers stranded in a shark-infested ocean. Like that film, the new picture derives from a real-life incident and like the Uruguayan original “Silent House” is filmed in one continuous take. That meant a tight script, difficult blocking of scenes and very complex cinematography, and the crew went through the house to act out the parts to see how everything should be timed.

Lau says, however, the key was to get the characters right. She tells the Bloody Disgusting website: “It was important to us that if the story was going to matter, if the audience was going to be frightened, if it was going to mean anything, that we took time to develop characters so that you could be invested in them.”