A Vampire Returns: Warner Bros. Animation Brings ‘Dark Shadows’ Back as an Adult Animated Series

Few television properties have proven as hard to kill as Dark Shadows, and now Warner Bros. Animation is making sure it stays undead for at least one more chapter. The studio has set an adult animated series based on the gothic franchise, handing showrunning duties to Lisa Holdsworth and promising to pick up the long, strange story of the Collins family right where generations of fans left it.

Holdsworth is an interesting choice to anchor the revival. She created the Channel 4 series Dreamers, wrote for the supernatural drama A Discovery of Witches at Sky, and spent time in the very different emotional register of the BBC’s Call the Midwife. That mix of the eerie and the deeply human suits a property that always lived in the space between horror and heartache. She will executive produce alongside Cathy Curtis, Tracy Curtis, Eric Homan, Kevin Kolde, and Fred Seibert.

For anyone who needs the backstory, Dark Shadows was never supposed to become a phenomenon. Created by Dan Curtis, it launched on ABC in 1966 as a daytime soap with a gothic flavor, then transformed into something far stranger once vampire Barnabas Collins entered the picture. Audiences were hooked. The series ran until 1971 and stretched past 1,200 episodes, an enormous body of work that gave its tangled family curse plenty of room to grow. Long after it went off the air, it held onto a fanbase loyal enough to keep the name alive across decades.

That loyalty has fueled repeated attempts to revive the property on the big screen, the best known being Tim Burton’s 2012 film with Johnny Depp under Barnabas Collins’s pale makeup and Michelle Pfeiffer playing opposite him. The animated version takes a different swing entirely, leaving live action behind and leaning into the creative latitude an adult animated series can offer. Warner Bros. Animation says the show will carry the saga forward while keeping faith with what made the original tick, describing a blend of gothic atmosphere, horror, and supernatural drama threaded through with the romantic intrigue that became the show’s signature.

The reveal came at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, where Warner Bros. Animation walked attendees through its adult animation lineup during a studio focus panel. Peter Girardi, the studio’s EVP of Alternative Programming, and Shaleen Desai, SVP of Adult Series, handled the presentation.

What remains unknown is timing. The series sits in development, and the studio has stayed quiet on when it might actually surface. For the Dark Shadows faithful, though, patience has never been in short supply, and the prospect of Barnabas Collins haunting a brand new format may be worth the wait.