LOS ANGELES—So what do vampires look like? Johnny Depp—who cornered the market on oddball characters long before TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, or the hit film series Twilight came along—knows what they don’t look like.

When Depp and director Tim Burton and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith were trying to define the character of Barnabas Collins for the film Dark Shadows, which is based on a 1960s U.S. daytime soap opera of the same name, they felt their vampire should look like a vampire.

“It was a rebellion against vampires that looked like underwear models,” Depp says. “Even in the early days [of development], we wanted to explore the possibilities of the character. If you tried to veer away from the character as played by [the recently deceased] Jonathan Frid in the series, it wouldn’t work. We decided, instead, to root it in that character because it was such a classic monster right out of Fangoria Magazine. What Jonathan had when he was playing him was rigidity, a pull of the back, that was always there, and when we talked early on, we thought [the film version of] Barnabas should look like a vampire.”

The movie stars Depp as Barnabas, a man who is turned into a vampire in 1772 by Angelique, the witch who loves him (Eva Green). She avenges his love for another woman (Bella Heathcote) by killing her, turning Barnabas into a vampire, and locking him in a gravesite near the Collins estate. When he is dug up two centuries later, in 1972, he discovers that Angelique has managed to destroy his family business and build one of her own. There are distant relatives living in the now-dilapidated estate, and, of course, they are unprepared for the return of cousin Barnabas, the vampire. Although he vows not to hurt anyone living in the house, he can’t avoid the less savoury aspects of the curse. (The movie opens Friday [May 11].)

Depp and Burton began their collaboration on the film several years ago, during the making of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. They had both been children in the 1960s and were young fans of the soap opera, which ran from 1966 to 1971. Having played an assortment of unusual characters in his lengthy working relationship with Burton, the idea of playing a vampire seemed to make sense to Depp.

“I blurted it out during mid-conversation that maybe we should do a vampire movie together where you have a vampire who looks like a vampire. We started talking about Dark Shadows, and then later on the three of us [Burton, Depp, and Grahame-Smith] tried to figure out how it should be shaped. It basically dictated to us what it wanted to be, in a sense, with Tim in the forefront leading the troops. It’s a strange thing, because I had a fascination with vampires and monsters, as did Tim, and whatever there is about this darkness and intrigue that happens as you get older, you also recognize the erotic nature of the vampire and the undead. What was most interesting in terms of Barnabas, and the challenge for me and Tim, was making him clearly a vampire and to fit him into this odd society and this dysfunctional family. I think Tim did it seamlessly.”

It was seamless but not simple. Like so many of the characters he has played in movies, from Edward Scissorhands to Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow and Capt. Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, becoming Barnabas Collins required a lot of work in the makeup room. Depp says that even the dead can be brought to life through makeup.

“Generally when I do a movie, there is some degree of makeup involved, especially when you are playing a vampire and you are all white and kind of dead. But [makeup artist] Colleen Atwood has a real magic. As soon as you don that makeup, that armour she has created, the character comes alive from the outside in.”

For Depp, who was born in 1963, exploring the formative years of his life was also part of the attraction. He says that taking a staid American gentleman of the 1700s and bringing him back to life in the early 1970s was a key to making the movie interesting.

“I liked the idea of this very elegant, upper-echelon, well-schooled kind of gentleman who was cursed in the 18th century and was brought back to the most surreal era of our time and how he would react to things and how radically different things were. And it was not just the technology but also items of enjoyment, like pet rocks and fake flowers and troll dolls and lava lamps and lime-green leisure suits and macramé owls—weird things that didn’t make sense then and still don’t.”

Watch the trailer for Dark Shadows.