more akin to the work of a traveling theater company. The Burton of today works with a recurring stable of actors (Johnny Depp; Helena Bonham Carter, who is also his partner) in a burnished, macabre style that makes his films seem utterly distinct and almost wholly indistinguishable. Remember that Tim Burton movie in which Johnny Depp had crazy hair and a wild hat? The one with the wrought-iron gates and spooky woods? A line of questioning can run this way for a long time without yielding results; like a troupe of players equipped with a box of funny costumes and a knack for whimsical invention, Burton and his team have been producing variations on a theme so long, it is hard to recall what the Gothic genre looked like before he arrived in town.

Burton’s latest effort is Dark Shadows, and the first thing to be said about this movie is that it is better than the title suggests. Based on an ultra-schlocky, Theremin-backed soap opera from the late sixties, Burton’s film opens in 1750, as a young Barnabas Collins and his parents leave Liverpool to make their lives in the New World. They build a manor, Collinwood, filled with outré gargoyle-ware and secret passageways; when Barnabas (Depp) begins an affair with one of the maids, Angelique (Eva Green), and later spurns her for a waifish woman he adores (Bella Heathcote), Burtonesque things begin to happen. Angelique is, it turns out, a witch, and a vindictive one besides: After killing off Barnabas’s parents, she drives his inamorata off a cliff and—as if that weren’t a bad enough start to the week—turns him into a vampire for all eternity. He is buried alive.

Fast-forward to a darker period still—1972—when Victoria Winters (Heathcote again), a Silent Majority–type ingenue, arrives at Collinwood to take a job as governess to the now-struggling Collins family. (Their fish cannery has taken a dive.) Under the thumb of a jaded matriarch (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her dissipated brother (Jonny Lee Miller), the manor has become a model of domestic dysfunction, thanks partly to a rebellious fourteen-year-old (Chloë Grace Moretz), a drunken interloper psychiatrist (Helena Bonham Carter), and an overworked caretaker (Jackie Earle Haley, also drunken). The youngest member of the family, David (Gully McGrath), believes he can see dead people, which, given the mood of the place, is fully possible; the witch Angelique, still around, runs the town’s rival fish-processing plant. (The spoils of sorcery, apparently, are not entirely what they were.)

When construction workers inadvertently unearth the undead Barnabas, he returns to Collinwood to meet his kin. The better part of Dark Shadows is an Austin Powers–style comedy of cultural rediscovery, with our fanged hero trying to learn about the artworks of the time (he reads Love Story), mass cuisine (he misidentifies the Golden Arches as the glowing sign of Mephistopheles), and musicians such as Alice Cooper (“Ugliest woman I’ve ever seen”). When he falls for Victoria Winters, the governess in his beloved’s image, he struggles to win her affections (“Where I am from,” he instructs a band of hippie stoners, “the love of a woman is won by giving money to her father. Or sheep”) and to right the fortunes of his struggling heirs.

It is not entirely clear to me when or how Johnny Depp transformed from a dramatic heartthrob into a wax-faced caricaturist, but the evolution (devolution?) is now more welcome than portents might once have suggested. Depp’s Barnabas, with his helmet of hair, pale complexion, and tendency toward bemused stares, evokes no one as much as Edmund Blackadder, the hapless aristocrat created by Rowan Atkinson. (In this, Depp is helped by Seth Grahame-Smith’s first-rate comic script.) Pfeiffer’s range has only deepened in middle age, meanwhile, and her wry, tired gravitas imbues the film with an emotional nuance otherwise lacking.

And yet Dark Shadows makes for deeply hedonistic viewing. Where another director might have decided that macramé jokes, haunted-house suspense, swinging-seventies sound tracks, delicious costuming, high-ordnance combat scenes, and (to a degree that even John Updike would have found excessive) crazy witch sex might be too much for one movie, Burton throws it all into the cauldron. It’s a testament to the skill of all involved that, up until an overdone finale, Dark Shadows is a captivating, funny, unremittingly delightful comedy—so much so, in fact, that it's the exception disproving the rule. The most enchanted bits of the film aren’t its ghoulish scenes but its portraits of seventies life. If Burton stuck to dreamy realism, one realizes, he would be an auteur of a different sort, a kind of Wes Anderson with half the self-consciousness—reason in itself to hope that, maybe one day, he will leave the costume box behind.