Johnny Depp Once Called out Modern Vampire Films like ‘Twilight’
Johnny Depp once noticed a pattern with contemporary vampire films like Twilight that he wasn’t particularly fond of. So much so that he wanted to salvage his vision of the vampire sub-genre with his own film.
Johnny Depp hoped to create a real vampire movie with ‘Dark Shadows’
Depp felt the direction vampire films were headed in contradicted what the creature features were originally supposed to be about. He wanted to pay homage to the less glamorous vampires he grew up seeing on screen. The 1960s television series Dark Shadows had exactly the type of grotesque blood-suckers that he hoped to modernize.
”I remember sprinting home from school to see it. I loved it, this soap opera with gothic vampires. Jonathan Frid, who originally played Barnabas, was such a striking presence – there’s a sliver of him in there,” Depp once told Total Film (via Contact Music).
Depp decided to reboot the TV series with his longtime collaborator Tim Burton.
”Over the years all these vampire movies have come out and nobody looks like a vampire anymore. I adored Dracula, from Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee, Max Shreck in Nosferatu – all these wonderful horror films. So this was an opportunity for me to sort of go into what doesn’t really exist so much anymore – that classic monster make-up,” Depp said.
He’d later joke about Robert Pattinson’s Twilight films, playfully warning the actor that there was a new head vampire in town.
“There’s room for two vampires on this block — as long as he remembers I am the Alpha Vampire,” Depp quipped to Us Weekly.
Johnny Depp and Tim Burton decided to do ‘Dark Shadows’ while doing ‘Sweeney Todd’
Depp and Burton came up with the idea to do Dark Shadows on a whim. They were already in the midst of shooting Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The topic of rebooting the Gothic series came up during a casual conversation.
“But, just as a fan of the show, our initial conversation about the thing was during Sweeney Todd, where I just blurted out, in mid-conversation, ‘God, we should do a vampire movie together, where you have a vampire that looks like a vampire.’ Dark Shadows was looming on the periphery, and then Tim and I started talking about it,” Depp once told Collider.
That small suggestion was all it took for Depp’s idea to become a reality.
“When we got together, Tim and I started figuring out how it should be shaped. And then, [screenwriter] Seth [Grahame-Smith] came on board and the three of us just riffed. One thing led to another, and it basically dictated to us what it wanted to be, in a sense, certainly with Tim at the forefront, leading the troops,” Depp recalled.
Robert Pattinson didn’t get the fascination with vampires in ‘Twilight’
Pattinson didn’t exactly understand the sudden obsession with vampires. His view of the mythical creatures wasn’t all that different from Depp’s, despite playing a more elegant version of the monsters.
“The annoying thing about [Edward Cullen] is the fan’s perception of him as the perfect guy. I wanted to play his flaws but then you have this subliminal idea coming from everywhere saying, ‘No he’s got to be perfect’,” he once said according to NZ Herald. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a vampire movie where I think the vampires are attractive. They end up looking worse than they do in their real-life with the pale make-up and the fangs. I have never understood fascination with vampires. People are obsessed and I don’t know why.”
Pattinson even hoped to mold his Twilight vampire into the type Depp might’ve enjoyed seeing.
“Edward’s constantly saying, ‘I’m a monster, I’m a monster, I’m a monster,’ and doesn’t end up being one,” Pattinson once told Rolling Stone. “We shot the final scene first, and I wanted the fight to not just be a fight, but to literally have him turn into that monster.”
