10 Horror Musicals You Need To See
4. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street
Both the full-blooded, extravagantly designed and well-cast movie version that the Broadway musical demanded and the kind of film that horrorphiles always wanted from Tim Burton, Sweeney Todd is grim, bloody and epic. It’s one of Burton’s best films.
The perfect blending of theatrical melodrama and cinematic style, the movie gallops where Joel Schumacher's Phantom Of The Opera crawled, telling its tale with pace, wit and engaging characters played by a cast that includes Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman and Sacha Baron Cohen. A good story deserves a decent telling, and it’s hard to grumble with a movie that delivers its tale of revenge, tragedy and mayhem with this much verve.
As Leonard Maltin points out, the textual changes will pain Broadway purists but you can’t deny that it works as a film, especially when Dante Ferretti’s art design won an Academy Award. Burton made Alice In Wonderland and Dark Shadows next, so enough said.