Dark Shadows, a long-gestating Johnny Depp–Tim Burton collaboration based on late-sixties, gothic TV soap opera, will begin filming in April. Depp will star as — what else? — the vampire Barnabas Collins in a script by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ Seth Grahame-Smith. If anyone could conceivably, at such a late, saturated stage in the vampire game, make a bloodsucker film worth seeing, it’d be Burton and Depp. Unfortunately, to play said vampire, Depp had to turn down a part in Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker follow-up Triple Frontier, about organized crime in South America, which sounds a lot more interesting. Oh well, we’ll have to be content with Depp showing RPattz how it’s done. [Deadline]