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Post by JoannaL on Aug 3, 2020 15:46:37 GMT -5
Dark Shadows from a 21st Century PerspectiveWhat if I told you there was a perfect television show, and that it’s a low-budget late-1960s soap opera about a vampire slinking around a town in Maine that appears to consist of nothing more than a 40-room mansion, a cannery, a graveyard, an inn, an old house and a little bar called the Blue Whale (above)?
I started Dark Shadows as a joke, sort of. Having burned out on vampires sometime in the early 2000s, after spending entirely too much of high school reading every paranormal romance series available – this was before the Twilight boom, thanks very much – I’m finally interested again. Surely, these fields have lain fallow long enough that it’s time for a revival. I realized that I’d never actually seen this particular minor classic of the genre, which is less discussed than the Hammer films, but equally important in fostering a taste for bloodsuckers among Americans in the latter half of the 20th century.
Dark Shadows ran on ABC from June 1966 to April 1971. Thanks to decades of syndication and cult fandom, it’s been subsumed into the canon of mid-century spookiness, a motley crew that ranges from The Twilight Zone to The Munsters. But its original home was alongside General Hospital and As The World Turns. Dark Shadows was launched as a straight-up classic soap opera, riffing on a highly popular genre of the time: the Gothic romance. The show began with an orphan named Victoria Winters journeying to Collinsport, Maine, to take a job as governess – a plot that will be immediately recognizable to anyone who ever had a Victoria Holt phase.
But while Gothic romances were among the most popular pulp fiction genres of the era, Dark Shadows couldn’t get any traction, that is, until producer Dan Curtis introduced the character Barnabas Collins, a somewhat repentant, self-loathing vampire, who slunk about Collinsport in idiosyncratic tailoring. Originally, actor Jonathan Frid was booked for a brief run, but the character quickly proved popular and catapulted the show from vaguely eerie to outright horror, or at least as much as was possible on network television in 1967. The show found its ideal constituency in teenagers and children returning from school around the time it was airing, and housewives looking for something a little offbeat – making it, yes, essentially the Riverdale of its day. Thus, Dark Shadows is an important, visible link between two pop cultural traditions, Gothic romance and vampire romance, which are clearly thematically linked.
The show ran for 1,225 episodes total and it is the only mid-20th century soap opera available in its entirety (on Amazon Prime), with the exception of one missing episode, thanks to an early syndication deal. So, the best way to watch it is by picking the story arcs that interest you; hence, I skipped to the arrival of Barnabas, all the way in Episode 210. The entire series is also available on DVD.
Objectively, Dark Shadows is a disaster. The production schedule was brutal and the budget low, so when actors flubbed their lines, filming continued without interruption. The shows are therefore frequently punctuated by funny little hiccups such as flies on the set. It’s also not unusual to see sound or camera equipment drifting into the shot, and the special effects are hilarious, e.g., toy bats on poles. In the beginning, each episode started with a voiceover by Victoria Winters: “My name is Victoria Winters ....” Then comes an atmospheric weather report on the ongoing story, such as “Sunset at Collinwood, and the coldness of night settles in. This is a coldness that comes not from the air, but from a place that is still, and deep.” It makes you wonder why Victoria doesn’t speak the hell up if she knows so much about what’s happening around this extremely weird town. The show also relies heavily on the eerie sounds of the theremin, so much so that on occasion it ceases being eerie and tips over into comedy.
At one point, the defiant daughter of the Collins family matriarch takes up with a biker to spite her mother. His name is Buzz and he wears a chain like a Miss America pageant sash. And I haven’t even gotten into the Blue Whale, the town’s waterside watering hole, which always seems to be playing light Bossa nova despite the fact it’s supposed to be a regular sketchy fisherman’s bar.
At the most basic level, the introduction of Barnabas Collins makes no sense. Newly freed from his crypt by Willie Loomis, a petty criminal henchman who went looking for the Collins family jewels and got more than he bargained for, Collins just turns up at Collinwood – the big house – and introduces himself as a Collins cousin from the English branch of the family. His evidence that he’s related? The portrait of himself hanging in the hall which he claims is that of his ancestor. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard – she married and took her husband’s name, but many, many episodes later, one learns she’s being blackmailed into a second marriage by an unscrupulous Irishman who knows she killed Paul Stoddard – simply welcomes Barnabas into the family. When he comes back and asks to move into the crumbling old Collins family home, the “Old House” (above), from the 18th century, which is of course the home that Barnabas inhabited, she says sure. After all, he’s a Collins.
 Willie Loomis, Barnabas and Dr. Hoffman
There is, nevertheless, something absolutely mesmerizing about Dark Shadows. It is a cult classic for very, very good reasons. Why would I watch the feuding monsters on Succession when I could instead watch a zonked-out, beguiled young woman wandering about a graveyard in her nightgown, looking like I feel after reading any news about the media industry? When I could watch Jonathan Frid try to smile menacingly around his fake fangs? Also, the plot’s sheer incoherence makes it incredibly rewarding when a character says something that actually suggests some common sense, like, “Vicky, you were hired as a governess, not a psychoanalyst.”
But it’s not just the silliness that appeals. The weirdly time-distorting pacing of the soap opera is particularly effective in a show about the paranormal. The episodes are only 20 minutes long, so they whizz by, but the plot advances at a glacial pace, and there are generally two going at any given time. So it’s simultaneously undemanding and riveting. I would find myself sitting down to fold laundry and then suddenly realized I’d raced through five or six episodes. An ailing character might still be stuck languishing dramatically in bed despite the rapid resolution of an entirely separate plot. The effect is psychically soupy, lulling you into forgetting about the low-budget goofiness. I found myself sinking into the experience.
At one point, a young woman named Maggie Evans – whom Barnabas wants to make his vampire bride by brainwashing her into believing she’s Josette Collins, his 19th century fiancée who jumped off a cliff when she realized what becoming a vampire would actually mean – goes out wandering through the misty woods around Collinsport, making her way to a graveyard and the waiting Barnabas. She was clearly wandering through a soundstage, to the point that it looked like she was filming an Instagram story at Sleep No More. But somehow, the sheer fakery of it all ultimately contributes to the atmosphere, even as you watch Frid bat a fake branch off his shoulder while he advances upon Maggie. And all those introductory voiceovers take place while one sees fuzzy, shimmering images of the Collins family mansion, which means each episode commences with what looks like spectral footage.
This program must have been so creepy to watch on a staticky, boxy old television set. Imagine coming across this show in the middle of the night in syndication, without the ability to immediately pull up a Wikipedia page explaining everything. Divorced from its original context as part of a soap opera lineup, there’s something faintly eerie, almost otherworldly, about the show’s very existence. From where does this show even beam into your home? On what mysterious Amazon server does it live? What’s that moving in those dark shadows? Where’s that theremin music coming from? Are the hairs on the back of your neck stirring? Who’s behind you? My name is Victoria Winters ....Sources: Kelly Faircloth, Jezebel, October 31, 2019, and The Dark Shadows Almanac: 30th Anniversary Tribute by Kathryn Leigh Scott.
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Post by pat on Aug 3, 2020 16:07:17 GMT -5
Everyone I know who has started watching "Dark Shadows" gets hooked on it. Right now, it's being shown on Decades at midnight and I know some teenagers who stay up just to see what happens next.
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Post by Sam on Aug 4, 2020 18:09:15 GMT -5
Everyone I know who has started watching "Dark Shadows" gets hooked on it. Right now, it's being shown on Decades at midnight and I know some teenagers who stay up just to see what happens next. People at work watch it on Decades every night and unless I'm out on a call, I always watch it. Right now Barnabas has been turned into a vampire by Angelique. But now he's killed her and Ben Buried her in the woods. I guess though that since she's a witch, she'll probably come back. |
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Post by kitty on Aug 19, 2020 17:40:57 GMT -5
I've been trying to watch Dark Shadows on Decades when I don't fall asleep before midnight and I've noticed some mistakes. It's now 1795 (I think?), but the women wear nightgowns and robes like that do in the 20th century and last night, when Josette turned down her bed, you could see the blue sheets. I don't think there were blue sheets at that time. Also, the furniture looks more Victorian than 18th century.
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Post by JoannaL on Aug 19, 2020 21:53:53 GMT -5
I've been trying to watch Dark Shadows on Decades when I don't fall asleep before midnight and I've noticed some mistakes. It's now 1795 (I think?), but the women wear nightgowns and robes like that do in the 20th century and last night, when Josette turned down her bed, you could see the blue sheets. I don't think there were blue sheets at that time. Also, the furniture looks more Victorian than 18th century. |
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Post by jane on Aug 21, 2020 18:54:18 GMT -5
I've been trying to watch Dark Shadows on Decades when I don't fall asleep before midnight and I've noticed some mistakes. It's now 1795 (I think?), but the women wear nightgowns and robes like that do in the 20th century and last night, when Josette turned down her bed, you could see the blue sheets. I don't think there were blue sheets at that time. Also, the furniture looks more Victorian than 18th century.
I noticed the blue sheets when they put Josette to bed and the bed definitely isn't from the 18th century. |
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Post by kitty on Aug 23, 2020 14:20:18 GMT -5
I happened to see Dark Shadows last night. Barnabas strangled the woman who was pretending to be the soldier's sister, but was really his wife, and Josette had the marks of a vampire on her neck. They said she was supposed to die the next day, which should be tonight. I'm going to try to remember to watch to see what happens. I thought she had jumped off the cliff at what they call Widow's Hill rather than become a vampire, but it didn't seem like that from what I saw last night.
I noticed the blue sheets when they put Josette to bed and the bed definitely isn't from the 18th century. |
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Post by kitty on Aug 28, 2020 23:46:50 GMT -5
Tonight on Dark Shadows, Barnabas figured out that now that he has supernatural powers, he could call Josette back from the grave. He was waiting for her in Josette's room in the old house and when she came in, she was wearing what I guess was her wedding dress and veil, but when she raised her veil, her face was all bruised and mutilated like it was when she hit the rocks when she jumped from Widow's Hill.
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Post by kitty on Sept 7, 2020 20:41:24 GMT -5
It's still 1795 on Dark Shadows and Victoria Winters is being tried for witchcraft. Ben, the servant, testified and said that Angelique was the witch, but then Angelique suddenly appeared in the court room and testified herself, even though Barnabas killed her and Ben buried her in the woods.
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Post by JoannaL on Sept 8, 2020 9:01:48 GMT -5
 Roger Collins and Elizabeth Stoddard
It was also, much to my mother’s alarm, the day her beloved soap opera – the supernatural drama Dark Shadows – aired its final episode on ABC. As she tells it, she demanded I be delivered in the morning because she sure as Hades wasn’t going to miss Dark Shadows that afternoon. She got her wish.
I think about devotion these pandemic nights as I stay up late to watch the original Dark Shadows on the streaming service Tubi. When the series debuted on June 27, 1966, it was unlike anything before or, I would say, since. ABC described it as “daytime television’s first continuing suspense drama,” which is like saying Freddy Krueger is a grumpy guy in a cute sweater.
Created by Dan Curtis, Dark Shadows was a macabre and bonkers upside-down of Peyton Place, a more conventional soap opera popular in its time.
The story arcs on Dark Shadows traversed the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and centered on the old-money Collins family at the Collinwood estate in small-town Collinsport, Maine. Wallace McBride, the curator of the Collinsport Historical Society, a Dark Shadows fan site, called the series “Star Trek for introverts. If Star Trek was about going new places and meeting new people, Dark Shadows is about staying inside,” McBride said in an interview last month. “Characters travel to other dimensions without leaving the family house. It’s very personal and inward focused.”
Dark Shadows was horror to the bone. Poor Collinsport was terrorized by witchcraft, killer ghosts, lycanthropy and I don’t know how many other evil doings. (Full disclosure: I’m not yet halfway through its 1,225 episodes.) In Episode 211, the show introduced the vampire Barnabas Collins, played by the Shakespearean actor Jonathan Frid. Barnabas became a global phenomenon and unlikely sex symbol who helped make the series one of the most popular soap operas of the era.
“It took you to another realm,” Kathryn Leigh Scott said of the show. “Almost everything was about an outsider.”
With so many episodes, watching Dark Shadows is a herculean binge. Already the series’s weird coolness has drawn me in like the undead to the living. Why do I and so many horror fans have a connection with a Gothic melodrama that’s so old it was pre-empted by the moon landing?
I called Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played the kindly waitress Maggie Evans, to get her take. (Like many of the cast members, she also played many other roles in this time-hopping series – it’s complicated.)
“The reason young kids used to run home from school to watch the show was that it was pure escapism,” Scott explained. “No matter how much kids picked on you in class, at least you weren’t bitten by a vampire. It took you to another realm. Almost everything was about an outsider.”
Ah. As a kid, I was what you’d call a triple-threat outsider. I grew up in the 80s as a gay teenager who didn’t know what gay was. I was a geek. I was chubby. On summer afternoons as other kids played something called sports, I was alone, devouring All My Children, One Life to Live, General Hospital and sometimes The Edge of Night if the TV in my room picked up the Akron station.
It’s now decades later, and I’m still kind of an outsider. I can’t possibly be gayer. I’ve become a horror geek and I’m still a little chubby. And I still love watching old soap operas, especially Dark Shadows. Here’s why. Like a darker Groundhog Day, the fate of Laura Collins (played by Diana Millay) was to go up in flames every so often and then be reborn.
It’s Old-School Scary. My love of horror has one source: my grandmother Blanca, my mother’s mother, who kick-started my affection with classic Universal monster movies like Dracula and Frankenstein. The influence of these canonical films pervades Dark Shadows. It’s in the contour of a mysterious figure backlit by frenzied lighting strikes. It’s in the ghostly theme song, composed by Bob Cobert (and released on a best-selling Dark Shadows soundtrack). It’s in the show’s chilly mausoleums and creaky coffins. As I watch, it’s as if the pioneering horror directors James Whale and Tod Browning were off-camera, beaming. Best of all, it’s as if my grandmother were, too.
It’s Queer. Dark Shadows is a soap opera. Everybody has secrets. But a sexual vampire in Stonewall-era America is a queer secret. Barnabas was a cursed man with forbidden attractions, which sounds a lot like what queer people at the time were told their sad lives were about. Yet for many people, especially young fans in the closet, Barnabas was as familiar as he was frightening.
There are many queer delights in Dark Shadows, but two performances stand out. The actor Louis Edmonds, who came out later in life, gave a delicious performance as the irritable priss Roger Collins (above), who wears cravats and turtlenecks and uses words like “preposterous.” (You know the type.) And I swear the old New York City gay club Splash used to play clips of Grayson Hall’s camptastic performance as Dr. Julia Hoffman.
It’s Butterfingered. Dark Shadows was taped live. As with theater, anything could and did go wrong. That means the series is occasionally a Schadenfreude parade of microphone shadows, flubbed lines and my favorite: exposed stagehands. (The invaluable Dark Shadows wiki keeps track of bloopers and continuity errors.) It’s fascinating to see how the TV sausage was made when there was no stopping and no CGI (computer-generated imagery) to clean up a mess.
Many cast members came from theater, so they were used to recovering after flubbing their lines. But my God, there’s nothing more thrilling than seeing the great Joan Bennett, a treasure from Hollywood’s Golden Age, look at another actor with eyes that whisper: I have no idea what to say next.
Sometimes Dark Shadows is messy and unpolished. That’s human, and that’s a comfort.
Watch it on Tubi or Amazon Prime Video. If you want to see the dark beginnings, that is, the pre-Barnabas episodes, they are designated online as Dark Shadows: The Beginning.
Source: Erik Piepenburg, The New York Times, September 4, 2020. |
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Post by Kate on Sept 11, 2020 22:12:27 GMT -5
Last night on "Dark Shadows," Barnabas choked a woman, who I think was a prostitute, but he didn't bite her neck, so I don't understand his reason for trying to kill her. Lt. Forbes, who is played by Joel Crothers, came on the scene, so he didn't kill her, but he dropped his cane. Forbes now doubts that Barnabas left for England like everybody has been told. |
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Post by kitty on Sept 15, 2020 10:08:19 GMT -5
I had an awful time trying to log in this morning. Last week on Dark Shadows, Barnabas killed Maude, the prostitute, and left the body in Reverend Trask's bed. Forbes came to Trask's room and saw her on the bed and agreed to help him if he would deliver a letter to Millicent Collins, who is Carolyn Stoddard in present time. He delivered it, but Naomi Collins ripped it up and as the show ended last night, Millicent was trying to put the pieces together so she could read it. Last night Millicent was reading the Tarot cards. Madame DuPres was always reading Tarot cards, too, but she hasn't been on the show lately. She may have gone back to Martinique.
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Post by steve on Sept 17, 2020 19:44:58 GMT -5
I've started watching Dark Shadows on Decades every night at midnight and I have a question. Last night was tame, mostly just talking, but last week, they showed this dead woman, Maude, lying across Trask's bed with her head hanging off the bed and her eyes open, which you don't usually see on TV. Then Barnabas walled Trask up alive in his basement and it showed it from the inside when Barnabas put in the very last brick leaving him in the complete dark. Now from what I know about the show, which was waaaay before my time, it was shown in the afternoon, because I've read about kids hurrying home from school to watch it. How did they get by with showing things like that in the daytime? Was there no censorship in those days? Were people less "sensitive" about what kids watched back then?
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Post by julia on Sept 19, 2020 7:46:50 GMT -5
I've started watching Dark Shadows on Decades every night at midnight and I have a question. Last night was tame, mostly just talking, but last week, they showed this dead woman, Maude, lying across Trask's bed with her head hanging off the bed and her eyes open, which you don't usually see on TV. Then Barnabas walled Trask up alive in his basement and it showed it from the inside when Barnabas put in the very last brick leaving him in the complete dark. Now from what I know about the show, which was waaaay before my time, it was shown in the afternoon, because I've read about kids hurrying home from school to watch it. How did they get by with showing things like that in the daytime? Was there no censorship in those days? Were people less "sensitive" about what kids watched back then? |
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Post by steve on Nov 2, 2020 2:12:51 GMT -5
I've been watching the Dark Shadows binge on Decades this weekend. I had been watching it when it came on at midnight, but it was changed to 5 a.m. I was still trying to wake up in time to see it and it got to the point where Vickie was hanged and returned to the present time, but after a few shows in the present time, it suddenly went back to Willie opening the tomb and releasing the vampire.
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