A world of dark shadows

A young woman alights from the train onto the cobblestone walk, carpet-bag in hand. A low mist swirls in nebulous shapes, half obscuring the shadowed backdrop whose sphere is dark foreboding. The scene is eloquent with mysterious, mournful and yet delightful music of unknown instrumentation. The dark-haired woman stands for a moment, unsure, as if in contemplation whether she is headed in the right direction. Then, setting her delicate chin resolutely, she clutches her bag tight and strides into the mist. We now see beyond the shrouding fog a house, a sprawling estate just visible in the twilight whose many windows are dark, save one whose bright illumination filters through tracery like an uncertain beacon, and we know this is where the woman is going and whatever awaits her there will be something of great importance, mystery. Danger. Her name, is Victoria Winters. . .

Thus was the vision that young producer, Dan Curtis, dreamed, compelling him to create the hit daytime series Dark Shadows, arguably one of the most innovatively entertaining "soap opera" to grace daytime TV. It was the first daytime serial that attracted a much younger audience, and the only daytime drama to spawn two theatrical motion pictures, House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows, and a series of novels written by "Marilyn Ross," one of over twenty pseudonyms used by Canadian author Dan Ross ("Marilyn," is Dan Curtis' wife's name).

The show ran from June 27, 1966, to April 2, 1971, and ended while still enjoying a respectable popularity. Fans decried the shows end and Dark Shadows experienced a resurrection into syndication in 1975 on local and PBS broadcasts. In 1990, the Sci-Fi Channel purchased exclusive rights to the show and runs Dark Shadows in back-to-back daily episodes. Dark Shadows airs Monday through Friday, at 10:00 a.m. EST.

Dark Shadows is as bewitching as ever, even now that it can be viewed with something of mature appreciation for what Clifton Fadiman called "milk's leap toward immortality," caseus; cheese. In this purest sense, the show has reached that state of video-taped deathlessness that a dedicated and near obsessive following clearly illustrates that Gothic Romance is indeed appreciated, admired and desired.

I witnessed my first Dark Shadows episode in 1968. The show had been airing for two years and the supernatural elements were in full, vivid bloom. I was in second grade, home with the flu, flipping through the mundane and sundry daytime TV fare of noon-time news (Vietnam was in full schwing), daytime soap operas that I hated as much as the news, and early afternoon fifties war movies when I happened across a darkened screen with this crescendo of three discordant sounds that can only be described as "something bad is happening here" descending like the apocalypse; "duh, DUH duhhhhh!" Cut to a commercial.

Frothing with terrible doom and imagining what this was that was so. . .so. . .what? I sat through what were the longest Johnson-and-Johnson and Colgate commercials ever. And from the next entrancing ten minutes of my first Dark Shadows experience, I was hopelessly lost in this otherworld. I found a good many reasons to come home from school for lunch and summer days revolved around the eleventh hour when Dark Shadows aired. To this day, any foggy evening, violent nighttime thunderstorm, or trip through Big Sur in June will conjure uninvited, certainly not unwelcome, the opening theme to the show written by Robert Cobert.

Admittedly, what once struck awe, some thirty years ago was by today's standards predictable, melodramatic, shallow and desultory writing, but unquestionably the best of its kind -even if the only of its kind, and there's no denying it's fun. Dark Shadows' chief writer, Art Wallace, whose previous works included the original teleplay This House (NBC's Goodyear TV Playhouse, 1957), was approached by Curtis to write and develop the story outline for the proposed series, which was to originally be named Shadows On The Wall. Wallace drew heavily from This House in the beginning development of Dark Shadows, and with all due respect, what initially began as a gothic romantic serial that couldn't quite grow wings, the turn to elements of horror and suspense was genius. The show's rating jumped exponentially after actor John Karlen as the hoodlum Willie Loomis releases the vampire, Barnabas Collins, from his chained coffin and began the show's descent into horrific melodrama and enduring success.

The actors and actresses of Dark Shadows were a hard working lot; Mitchell Ryan, David Selby, Jerry Lacy, Donna McKechnie, Louis Edmonds and Virginia Vestoff occasionally worked double schedules, taping the show during the day and performing onstage in New York theater productions in the evening. Throughout the shows run, several went weeks and months without being seen on the show, usually because an actor wanted time off to do stage work or another project. Roger Davis appeared in several Hollywood television and film productions in between his Dark Shadows roles and Joan Bennett took time out each year to do theater work, as did Louis Edmonds.

In an interview for Sci-Fi Channel with Dan Curtis (who would later gain critical acclaim with the monumental television mini-series The Winds Of War and War and Remembrance) he mentioned that the end of the series was marked by the fact that the writer's had run the gamut of gothic horror. They'd done vampires, werewolves, everything Poe, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Turn Of The Screw, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Body Snatchers (Robert Louis Stevenson's idea of the tale) and just about every other popular tale of the Gothic literary era of the last two centuries. Although often given to fatuous drama, the ambience, costumes, the Gothic nature and especially the imperishable music are the things that give Dark Shadows its timeless exigency. Its cult following -I don't usually but will here admit that I am a Dark Shadows cult member in good (evil?) standing, catching every show when possible-allows us a gleeful shirk of mostly pointless subplots and overdrama in the name of gothic romping.

"Our shows should be historical as well as hysterical," Curtis quipped.

In what I think was supposed to be a "final" episode, number 1198 of 1222 with 1122 airing total (the rest were pre-empted), Barnabas, Julia Hoffman and Professor Stokes (Jonathan Frid, Grayson Hall and Thayer David respectively) escape back to 1971 through a staircase built by Quentin bridging past and present to find a peaceful Collinwood, Elizabeth in the famous drawing room ready to go to Collinsport for a concert. All should be well that ends well, but that was not Dark Shadows' intent.

Shakespearean actor Jonathan Frid, during and after Dark Shadows, was offered numerous vampire roles, including remaking old Bela Lugosi horror films, all of which he declined. Not wanting to be typecast as a vampire provoked him to refuse to renew his Dark Shadows contract unless he could play a different role, Bramwell Collins in the last episodes. In the final episode, Morgan Collins (Keith Prentice) shoots Bramwell, and takes Catherine Harridge (Lara Parker) hostage. Bramwell and Kendrick Young (John Karlen) go after Morgan. They fight and Morgan is pushed from the roof of Collinwood and dies. Kendrick moves to Boston with Melanie Collins (Nancy Barrett); Bramwell is invited to be the new master of Collinwood, he and Catherine are married and they live happily. . .you know the rest.

Dark Shadows slithered back to life briefly in 1991 with a completely new cast and writers who arrogated plot elements from the original series. It ran a short time, from January 13 to March 22, 1991, on NBC before its cancellation. The new show featured Ben Cross as the immortal Barnabas, Lysette Anthony as the irrepressible Angelique, Jean Simmons as the matriarch Elizabeth, Barbara Steele (!) as the ever-willing and able Dr. Julia Hoffman, and Barbara Blackburn as the tragic Carolyn performing a teleplay written by a team of writers under Curtis' direction. Evidently, the new show could not acquire the wings of its parent.

There are rumors of "new" Dark Shadows projects in development, one a purported Dark Shadows musical (heavy groaning please), and Sci-Fi Channel promises to air the show perpetually so that we Dark Shadows junkies will never be long without our gothic cheese fix. I am one of those who long for those halcyon days of horror television; Thriller, Night Gallery, Dark Shadows among them and Saturday matinee genre masterpieces such as The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Necromancy, and impatiently await the resurrection and return of the undead of the Gothic Romance.

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