Shedding light on ‘Dark Shadows,’ fun escapism
By Mike Haynes
It’s four
days ’til Halloween, so I’m writing about something really scary.
“Dark
Shadows.”
Did some of
you baby-boomers run home from school every day to see the gothic soap opera
that offered ghosts and werewolves instead of soaps’ ho-hum romantic triangles
and declarations of “We need to talk”?
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The opening title of “Dark Shadows,” which ran on ABC
from
1966 to 1971, originally was in black and white.
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OK, the
Collins family and their friends did have plenty of serious talks in the
wood-paneled drawing room of Collinwood, the Maine coastal mansion filled with
mystery, darkness and secrets. But the topics tended to be unearthly ones such
as why Maggie had two puncture wounds on her neck or what did it mean that
women with the same name kept burning up once every 100 years.
“There must
be a logical explanation,” was the usual response when someone had seen the
ghost of Josette Collins. Or, “It must have been your imagination.”
A few weeks
ago, I wouldn’t have imagined that my wife, Kathy, and I would be
binge-watching “Dark Shadows.” We’re already past the first 294 black-and-white
episodes and into the color era of the 1,225 total shows that aired on ABC from
1966 to 1971.
The reason? When Kathy and her best
friend, Sallyann, were about 10 years old, they bonded together watching
characters such as vampire Barnabas Collins and warlock Count Petofi. In
another town, I also rushed to my grandmother’s house after school to follow
the eerie storylines.
Kathy says she and Sallyann got
seriously scared by the witch Angelique and the vampire bat flying (on a
string) into someone’s window. Now, we laugh at the awful special effects and
the actors staring into space not for dramatic effect but because they forgot
their lines.
When we noticed that Amazon Prime
offers the entire series, we thought we’d watch the first few episodes. For
Kathy, it was in part out of nostalgia for her relationship with Sallyann, who
died of cancer in 2017. Now, as silly as it seems, we’re hooked. We watch a
couple of episodes before going to sleep most nights. It was a 30-minute show;
but with no commercials, each one takes just 21 minutes to get to the next
cliffhanger.
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Jonathan Frid played Barnabas Collins in the original TV
series “Dark Shadows.”
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Most of the characters are either
quirky, obnoxious, shadowy, creepy or just walk around wringing their hands.
Some, though, seem normal and represent the viewers’ perception of the weird
things going on around them. In fact, the whole story began when producer Dan
Curtis had a dream about a young woman on a train. She evolved into former
orphanage resident Victoria Winters, who arrives at Collinwood to be a tutor for
young David Collins. She and a couple of others serve as likable characters.
Apparently in a storyline we
haven’t reached yet, there’s a Rev. Trask, a witch-hunter from Salem,
Massachusetts. Not wanting to skip ahead, I don’t know whether Rev. Trask’s
character portrays preachers in a positive or negative light, but everything I
know about the series is that it’s all fanciful entertainment, nothing that
should worry parents or raise fears of an ungodly influence.
“Dark Shadows” did attract some
protests from Christians in the ’60s because of its plots that included the
occult. And I believe that if there can be good supernatural phenomena (which
the Bible is all about), there can be bad supernatural phenomena that we
shouldn’t fool around with.
But like “Harry Potter” more
recently, this TV show was – and is – so far-fetched that it would be a stretch
for anyone to take it seriously. It was wildly popular in its first run and has
spawned three movies – one with Johnny Depp as Barnabas in a more campy version
than the original – and two attempts at recreating the series. In the sitcom, “King of
Queens,” nerdish Spence dresses as a vampire on his way to a “Dark Shadows”
convention. Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played multiple characters, has written
books on the making of “Dark Shadows,” and fellow actress Lara Parker has
authored novels that keep the story going.
And now it’s been reported that The
CW and Warner Bros. Television are doing a new pilot called “Dark Shadows:
Reincarnation” that will stay close to the mythology of the original.
I’m not sure “Dark Shadows” could
be the basis of a series of Sunday school lessons as “The Andy Griffith Show”
was. But it’s fun escapism. It’s one more thing that brings my wife and me
together.
Episode 1
begins with narration: “My name is Victoria Winters. My journey is beginning…”
So did ours.
