Not the greatest movie, but the opening credits make up for it.

John August still has his name listed as one of the writers along with Seth Grahame Smith. You could make the very reasonable argument that the opening sequence, which is VERY different from the rest of the movie, was the only fragment which was included from John August's original script. Seth Grahame Smith's script was awful. What do you expect from the hack who penned "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" and "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?" If you take out the opening sequence of Dark Shadows, what you have left is a snarky, puerile, sophomoric one-joke premise which runs for almost two hours. If this was the kind of crap that Burton and Depp wanted to make then make a stand-alone movie. This movie should not have even been named "Dark Shadows." It would have been more accurate to call this $hit-pile of a movie "Count Chocula Meets the Partridge Family."