Director Robert Rodriguez has found his dame that someone is bound to kill for as production on the long-in-development Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is now fully underway. Despite early reports that had both Angelina Jolie and Rachel Weisz both in contention for the role of Ava Lord, described by co-director/Sin City creator Frank Miller as “every man’s most glorious dreams come true, she’s also every man’s darkest nightmares,” French actress Eva Green has won the coveted part.

The casting of Green does come as an unexpected surprise – as the best surprises usually tend to be – but she has always been a talented and alluring actress adept at portraying multi-dimensional characters both beautiful and haunted in films such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, Ridley Scott’s underrated 2005 Crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven, and especially in Casino Royale, where she played Vesper Lynd to Daniel Craig in his first (and best until Skyfall was released) time playing James Bond. Recently Green appeared in Tim Burton’s film version of the 1960s Gothic horror soap opera Dark Shadows and is set to appear later this summer in 300: Rise of an Empire. She also played the devious Morgan on the short-lived Starz series Camelot.

Dark Shadows
Directed By: Tim Burton
Written By: Seth Grahame-Smith
Starring: Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Michelle Pfeiffer, Chloë Moretz, Helena Bonham Carter, Jonny Lee Miller, Jackie Earle Haley, Bella Heathcote, Christopher Lee and Alice Cooper
Distributed By: Warner Bros. Pictures
Rated: PG-13
Release Date: May 11, 2012

“His name was Barnabas Collins, and he was the finest man this family ever knew.”

With its unique blend of gothic intrigue, romance, and melodrama, Dark Shadows staked the soap opera status quo in the heart in the late 1960s. The series, which ran from 1966-1971, was unprecedented in daytime television for its supernatural stories filled with vampires, ghosts, witches, werewolves, and the occasional zombie or warlock. My mother would race home from high school to watch Dark Shadows, hypnotized into submission by Barnabus Collins (Jonathan Frid), 18th-century vampire and master of Collinwood Manor. With its blood-and-thunder performances and atmospheric interiors, Dark Shadows became a pop culture phenomena with 1,225 television episodes and numerous films, novels, comics, and audio dramas dedicated to the Collins family.

For those dying to revisit the creaky, cobwebbed halls of Collinwood Manor, director Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood) has resurrected Dark Shadows as a 113-minute gothic comedy, written by New York Times best-selling novelist Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter).

Yesterday saw the first tiny bit of footage from Tim Burton’s upcoming big-screen adaptation Dark Shadows.

Now, the full theatrical trailer has been released, and you can watch it here below.

Dark Shadows stars Johnny Depp as the centuries’ old vampire Barnabas Collins, who’s returned from the grave in the year 1972 to take over his family’s estate in Maine. The film also stars Helena Bonham-Carter, Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley, and Chloe Moretz.

Perfect Sense
DIRECTOR: David Mackenzie
WRITER: Kim Fupz Aakeson
STARRING: Eva Green, Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Stephen Dillane, Connie Nielsen
IFC Films
RELEASE DATE: US: February 3, 2012 (limited); UK: DVD Pre-Order; Also available on VOD services now

When it comes to difficult decisions, choosing which of the best-known apocalyptic scenarios—post-nuclear, zombie, viral, alien invasion, natural disasters, the rise of the machines, and so on—you’d rather deal with is probably about as difficult as they come. None of those sound very fun at all. Unless of course you’ve seen too many movies or played too many video games and think that you could flourish in such an environment, in which case I wish you the very best of luck, Mad Max.

One of the scarier of these scenarios is of course the viral apocalypse because, along with post-nuclear, it seems like it’s something that could actually happen some day, if we’re a very, very unlucky species. Numerous movies have been made on such an apocalypse—some looking at it as a sickness quickly spreading, while others fuse it together with the basic idea behind zombie apocalypses and unleash the fury of them both. But none of them (at least that I know of anyway) has a love story at its core. Which brings us to Perfect Sense.

A couple of official images of star Johnny Depp as the vampire Barnabas Collins in Tim Burton‘s adaptation of Dark Shadows, the horror fantasy TV series that ran from the late ’60s to the early ’70s.

The first was released not too long ago and can be seen above (also featuring Michelle Pfeiffer), while the other is new and can be found lurking at the bottom of this post!