Twilight fans, you might think that no one has ever loved vampires like you do, that there's no way your parents could understand the passion you have for sweet, tortured Edward Cullen.  That's because you probably haven't head of Dark Shadows. 

Decades before Stephenie Meyer put pen to paper, the 1960s gothic soap opera was entertaining daytime TV fans with tales of witches, werewolves, and, yes, blood-sucking fiends of the night.  There have been many attempts to remake the series since its original airing, but with the recent vampire craze comes a new stab at the Dark Shadows world - and this one stands a real shot of happening because Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are partnering to remake it.

The reasons for their involvement are simple: Burton was an old-school fan of the series, and as a boy Depp was obsessed with the central character, vampire Barnabas Collins, originally played by Jonathan Frid, who made the pulses of young ladies race even as he failed to resist his darker urges.  Production on the film begins soon, with the film destined for a 2011 release. While initially skeptical about the film, we've started getting excited.  And here are four big reasons why:

1. Barnabas Collins = the original vampire in love.  The original Dark Shadows struggled to find an audience in its first year, but the appeal of a hot, tortured vampire is apparently cross-generational. 

When Barnabas was introduced to the show in 1967, he was initially portrayed as a properly evil creature of the night. But when he became romantically infatuated with a waitress who bore a striking resemblance to his long-lost love (yeah, The Vampire Diaries didn't call dibs on that storyline). The writers and producers of the show sought to strike a balance between his true vampire nature (Barnabas, even at his most virtuous, was no vegetarian) and his new passion, and thus television's first creature of the night who longed for love was born. Young women around the world would never be the same again. We've seen a thousand different takes on it since, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Underworld, and while it never gets old, maybe it's time for the O.G. version to get another stab at fame.

2. Johnny Depp as a vampire = weird-hot genius. Depp has a talent for capturing the humanity in even the strangest character (Edward Scissorhands, if you please), but there's a thin line between weird-hot and just plain weird, and sometimes he crosses it. Captain Jack Sparrow?  Weird-hot.  Sweeney Todd?  Weird.  Ichabod Crane?  Weird-hot.  Willy Wonka?  Weird.  The defining aspect of the weird-hot roles is that Depp's character is not necessarily the strangest thing about the world he inhabits, which should pay off in Dark Shadows' favor, given the fact that it's a fictional universe full of supernatural elements.  And more weird-hot roles for Depp are good news, especially when you consider how flat-out weird his Mad Hatter is going to be.

3. Dark Shadows = one trippy show. While the series might have started off fairly normally in 1968, by its third season there were vengeful ghosts, lustful succubi, Frankenstein-esque monsters...and did we mention time travel?  We gotta mention time travel.  Because in 1968, the show's young female protagonist, Victoria Winters, was sent back in time to the year 1795 thanks to a seance gone wrong. In the past, she encountered a then-human Barnabas as well as other Collins ancestors, and made the mistake of talking too much about the future, leading to her being hung as a witch - which ended up sending her back to the present.

It's hard to see how that insane storyline would exactly fit into a Barnabas-heavy film, but who's to say Tim Burton won't at least pay homage to it or some of the series's other eclectic elements?

 4. Who needs all that melodrama? Sure, Dark Shadows had plenty of gothic atmosphere and spooky music, but it was directed with a light touch, and the characters were often allowed a certain amount of playfulness with each other - as an example, check out this sparring scene between Barnabas and his rival in love, Burke Devlin. Between Bella throwing herself off cliffs to get Edward's attention in New Moon and Bill and Sookie's extreme emotional shifts on True Blood, this genre could use a walk on the slightly more cheerful side.

All in all, there's enough going for this project to make a little bit of anticipation worth your while. And while we wait for 2011, there's always the original series on DVD or the 1991 version on Hulu. Take a look and ask yourself - in these crowded times, is there room for a Team Barnabas?