Dark Shadows

From LoveToKnow Sci-Fi

Dark Shadows brought the paranormal to the soap opera.

Before There was Goth, There was Gothic

Gothic Romance was a staple of the romance genre for decades. Widely popular in the 1950s through the 1970s, the form has seen better days, but persists. You can tell a 'gothic romance' novel by its cover - a young woman, usually in filmy white, stands in the foreground. If at night, she holds a candlestick with a flickering candle. A sinister mansion looms in the background; sometimes the mansion is a castle. The plot features a young virginal woman newly arrived in an isolated location - usually a governess - who is menaced by unseen dangers. A brooding male presides over the household - is he a dangerous lunatic? an escaped convict? a ghost?

Jane Eyre was a proto-typical 'Gothic Romance', and the brooding lord of the manor was hiding a crazy wife; a fairly prosaic secret. Other gothics featured mad monks, real ghosts, curses, and supernatural elements of every description.

Enter Dan Curtis

In 1966, executive producer Dan Curtis launched a Gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows, which aired on ABC. The story started as a typical Gothic, with the young governess Victoria Winters arriving at Collinwood, ancestral home of the Collins family, who were the movers and shakers of the town of Collinsport. The heroine is vaguely threatened by spooky happenings in the labyrinthine mansion, but the menace never seems to be resolved.

The soap was relatively popular in its original form, but as the spookier story arcs gained in popularity, the writers went wild. Soon the unscrupulous caretaker unwittingly releases a vampire from his crypt, and the show hit the stratosphere.

Enter the Vampire

Because the vampire, Barnabas Collins (played by Jonathan Frid) was enormously popular with the housewives, college girls and even high school girls who watched Dark Shadows, making Frid an unlikely sex symbol and being neck-bitten a new turn-on for formerly staid middle American women.

Barnabas is passed off as a visiting relative, and a local doctor (secretly in love with him) works feverishly to discover a 'cure' for vampirism, while Barnabas searches for the reincarnation of his lost love.

Soon a ghost joined the cast, who had been a werewolf during his life. Soon there wasn't a supernatural stone left unturned, as Dark Shadows became a compendium of every myth, legend and plot device. Time travel was an excuse to get an attractive cast into historical garb and shred story continuity.

Dark Shadows aired from 1966 to 1971. Several feature films were produced to varied success in the seventies.

NBC briefly attempted a remade revival in 1991 that only ran for a few months. The franchise is long overdue for a remake.

Cheap Production, Fond Memory

With cheap sets and bad acting, Dark Shadows could have been a travesty. Instead, it became almost a self-parody. The appearance of the boom mike into the field of view, the actors forgetting their lines and having to (pardon the expression) vamp their way through a scene - we loved it as kids, and have fond memories of it now. And a case can be made that the cheesy soap opera paved the way for Anne Rice, for Buffy, for Charmed and all the rest. Well done, Dan. Well done.