Dark Shadows (1991)

 

Creator: Dan Curtis

Directors: Dan Curtis, Rob Bowman, Paul Lynch, Armand Mastroianni, Mark Sobel and Matthew Hall

Screenplay: Dan Curtis, Steve Feke, Jon Boorstin, Linda Campanelli, Matthew Hall, M.M. Shelly Moore, William Gray, Hall Powell, Bill Taub, Sam Hall, Art Wallace and Bill Tomb      

Cast: Ben Cross as Barnabas Collins; Barbara Blackburn as Carolyn Stoddard; Jim Fyfe as Willie Loomis; Joanna Going as  Victoria Winters; Joseph Gordon-Levitt as David Collins; Veronica Lauren as Sarah Collins; Ely Pouget as  Maggie Evans; Barbara Steele as  Dr. Julia Hoffman; Roy Thinnes as Roger Collins; Jean Simmons as  Elizabeth Collins Stoddard; Julianna McCarthy as  Mrs. Johnson; Michael T. Weiss as Joe Haskell; Michael Cavanaugh as  Sheriff George Patterson; Stefan Gierasch as Joshua Collins; Lysette Anthony as Angelíque

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

It's only a car. It's not going to hurt you.

In 1966, a daily soap opera began for the ABC television network called Dark Shadows, lasting until 1971. Created by Dan Curtis, known for directing Trilogy of Terror (1975) and producing The Night Stalker (1972), a TV film which began the cult Kolchak the Night Stalker franchise, for a first season alone, Dark Shadows was a gothic melodrama. With the show suffering in the ratings, Curtis brought in an explicitly supernatural aspect, introducing Barnabas Collins, a vampire¹. Barnabas Collins became the iconic figure for the series, representing it when Tim Burton re-imagined the franchise as the 2012 film, a more broadly toned theatrical take.

Beforehand however, Dan Curtis was convinced to reboot the franchise as a prime time television series for NBC, a horror melodrama set in Maine and involving the Collins family, a family of a long lineage since the 18th century, but unfortunately cursed from that time onwards. Set up in a feature length pilot, a young government named Victoria Winters (Joanna Going) comes to the Collins' home to be the teacher to David, a baby Joseph Gordon-Levitt, long before his adult career, who is morbid, scaring people with dead rats in welcome boxes or threatening to leave Terry the big spider on beds, and talking to dead ghost girls. Far more a concern however is how Willie (Jim Fyfe), an alcoholic son of the cook, tried to uncover family jewels in the family crypt, making the dumb mistake of opening a casket inside that is chained up, bringing Barnabas Collins (Ben Cross) to the 20th century.

Inevitable theories on vampires, or men who believe they are vampires, have to be considered by the police when a woman is attacked and drained of her blood, followed by more. Barnabas Collins is introduced initially as a villain, ironic when the franchise turned him into its figurehead, becoming a more morally complicated figure and a tragic one as this one season work continued, cursed into becoming immortal in his back story, his beliefs and actions as corrupted by this as they are still at times undefendable. Willie, his first bite victim, turns from a belligerent drunk to one of the most sympathetic characters of the show as Barnabas' inherent manservant, Jim Fyfe providing a really good performance as a put upon and constantly stressed Igor figure throughout.   

This is a traditional vampire story with the tropes fully there - sun harming vampires etc. - but this, without irony or post-modernist awareness, avoids prolonging the narrative with casts not accepting something is amiss. Not long into the pilot, the inexplicable circumstances of the murders make it difficult to not think of anything unnatural. By Episode 2, the police have giant silver crosses with them as things escalate, though how they will explain helping something stake even the undead is an issue the show never gets into. This helps the show so much as, a traditional vampire narrative over twelve existing episodes, it helps the show avoids the one cliché of scepticism about vampires that would have been frustrating to watch. That not everyone knows Barnabas is a vampire is far more interesting because of the emotional shock of discovering this is true, and how he reacts to this.

This attitude is as much because Dark Shadows is gothic melodrama, and the real tragedy of Season 1, the only season of this version of the franchise, is that whilst of a full narrative being told, it is entirely a prologue, setting up the back story and the moral conflicts of what should have gone further than this into another series. The earliest episodes deal with complicating Barnabas Collins, someone who is still a vampire who kills or turns people into the undead, but was a mortal man. Falling for Victoria, she is identical to Josette Du Prés, the woman he loved in his own era, and by episode six, when a séance accidentally switches her with a woman from the past in time travel, she and we the viewers will end up in 1790. Dark Shadows becoming a gothic period drama as a result of this, also fully introducing Angelique (Lysette Anthony) at that point, the antagonist whose love Barnabas is so toxic that, if she cannot have him, she will curse him and kill everything he loved instead.

Even before then, you have a possible vampire cure as a plot point, one which does not go any further, but is fascinating as a tangent to see as if the idea of the vampire being able to be physically cured can happen. It also puts Doctor Julia Hoffman front and centre of the cast, brought in by a vampire expert in episode one and becoming a key character throughout, as played by Barbara Steele. Someone with a cult reputation in horror, famous for Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960), seeing Steele in a TV drama is an inspired casting choice, especially as she is good in the show. Touches like this, alongside the inherent pleasure of just a soap opera but within a horror structure, make this 1991 revival appealing, which was meant to try to take a hundred plus episode daily soap opera and distil it down into a more cohesive production.

Dark Shadows the TV revival is well made, feeling its budget even as a TV series, in the first episode at least, as a special production, which would have had to watch its budget if it managed a season two. The show finds with its time travel jump to 1790, and the cast playing two sets of characters in two different time periods, a huge advantage for itself as a melodrama which can fully embraced that term. Costume and period detail enrich it, even the cast pulling out French accents like Barbara Steele that, whether good or not, adding to the mood. The plot escalates completely at this second half, alongside the horror itself. Family tragedies begin to transpire, bullets are magical inserted into pistols mid-duels, and the dead are resurrected in a really macabre sequence. There is even a witch finder general figure, with insanely fluffy eyebrows, placing Victoria into danger as even the clothes she came along with, with their zippers and satanic machine wash labels, get the more dogmatic members of the Collins' household a fluster about evil witchcraft being involved. There is even the strange moment, never mentioned again, that Victoria introduces Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz (1939), centuries before being composed by Harold Arlen with lyrics by Yip Harburg, to 18th century Maine.

That this is merely the back story to a narrative, of how tragedy brought us Barnabas Collins, is a disappointment if not forgetting what is here in the 1991 Dark Shadows revival is good. Sadly, it did not do well in the ratings, and a lot of television is cancelled and never succeeds, even those which got cult success afterwards. Dark Shadows had the Tim Burton remake, based on nostalgia for the original soap opera, and it still exists in some form. In a perfect world, just to see where this revival had gone, even if dropping the ball, I would have wished we got at least a second series from the joy I had with this.

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1) DARK SHADOWS Remembered: 6 Surprising Facts About TV’s Classic Supernatural Soap Opera, by Ed Gross and published for Soaps In Depth on October 24th 2019.