Dark Shadows
Dark Shadows is a gothic soap opera that originally aired weekdays on the ABC television network, from June 27, 1966 to April 2, 1971. The show was created by Dan Curtis. The story bible, which was written by Art Wallace, does not mention any supernatural elements. It was unprecedented in daytime television when ghosts were introduced about six months after it began.
The series became hugely popular when vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) appeared a year into its run. Dark Shadows also featured werewolves, zombies, man-made monsters, witches, warlocks, time travel, and a parallel universe. A small company of actors each played many roles (as actors came and went, some characters were played by more than one actor). Major writers besides Art Wallace included Malcolm Marmorstein, Sam Hall, Gordon Russell, and Violet Welles.
Dark Shadows was distinguished in many manners: vividly melodramatic performances, atmospheric interiors, memorable storylines, numerous dramatic plot twists, an unusually adventurous music score, and an extremely broad and epic cosmos of characters and heroic adventures. Now regarded as somewhat of a camp classic, it continues to enjoy an intense cult following.
Directors Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino,[1] and pop icon Madonna have publicly stated they are fans of the series. As a child, Johnny Depp was so obsessed with Barnabas Collins that he wanted to be him. He is collaborating with Tim Burton on a theatrical film adaptation, in which he will play Barnabas.[2]
In 2004 and 2007, Dark Shadows was ranked #19 and #23 on TV Guide's Top Cult Shows Ever.[3][4]
[edit] History
Creator Dan Curtis had a dream in 1965 of a mysterious young woman who was on a train. The following day Curtis told his wife of the dream and pitched the idea as a TV show to ABC. Network officials greenlit production and Curtis began hiring crew members.
Art Wallace was hired to create a story from Curtis’s dream sequence. Wallace wrote the story bible Shadows on the Wall, the proposed title for the show, later changed to Dark Shadows. Robert Costello was added as a line producer, and Curtis took on the creator and executive producer roles. Lela Swift, John Sedgewick, and Henry Kaplan all agreed to be directors for the new series. Robert Cobert created the musical score and Sy Thomashoff designed the set.
Curtis then set out to find the actress to play the girl who was on the train. Alexandra Moltke, a young actress with little experience, was discovered and cast in the role of Victoria Winters, an orphan who ends up in the mysterious town of Collinsport, Maine to unravel the mysteries of her own past.
Movie star Joan Bennett was soon cast as Victoria’s employer Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, a woman who had not left her home in over eighteen years. Stage actor Louis Edmonds was cast as Elizabeth’s brother Roger Collins. Another stage actress Nancy Barrett was then cast as Elizabeth’s rebel daughter Carolyn Stoddard. Child actor David Henesy was cast as Roger’s troubled son David Collins.
Dark Shadows had a rocky beginning. Critics were quick to deem the show rather boring for its heavy use of unknown actress Alexandra Moltke and the slow progression of the legacy of the show. The earliest episodes consisted of introducing the troubled characters and did not show many of the supernatural elements that later made the show known.
As production on the series continued, the introduction of many new and mysterious characters and various unknown actors and actresses was prevalent on the set. Most actors also ended up playing multiple characters and their same characters that would often come back from the dead in the unprecedented use of parallel times and flashbacks.
[edit] TV and film locations
Both theatrical films, House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971) were shot primarily on location at the Lyndhurst estate in Tarrytown, New York. For the TV series, Essex, Connecticut was the locale used for the town of Collinsport. Among the locations located there are the Collinsport Wharf, Main Street and the Evans Cottage. The Griswold Inn in Essex was used for the Collinsport Inn and the town Post Office was used for the town Police Station. The Collinwood stand-in mansion used for the TV series is the Carey Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, until August 2009 used by Salve Regina University. The exteriors for the "Old House" (original Collinwood mansion) were filmed at Spratt Mansion which was also located on the Lyndhurst estate. This mansion was destroyed by fire in 1969. The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion in South Norwalk, Connecticut was also used for some scenes in House of Dark Shadows. Some outdoors shots for the series were filmed in the famous Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, not very far from the Lyndhurst Mansion.
[edit] Series production
[edit] Special effects
Working within the constraints of the live-to-tape format — with almost every scene done in one take — Dark Shadows displayed an unusually inventive use of costume, make-up and, in particular, special effects. Both time travel and ghosts allowed characters killed in earlier sequences to return, often in period clothing. Séances held in the old mansion were often visited by ghostly apparitions of quivering ectoplasm. Dream sequences included colorful psychedelic spectacles superimposed over ethereal, fog-filled fantasies. Individuals of normal appearance were transformed into hideous creatures of the netherworld. However, the special effects were limited by the technology of the time. When judged against today's special effects, they pale in comparison.
[edit] Errors
The difficulty of keeping up with the demanding schedule of a daily half-hour show manifested itself on screen. In addition to sets wobbling unintentionally, actors — especially Frid and Bennett — often struggled with their lines. Occasionally a stagehand could be spotted wandering onto the back of the set. Other times the microphone boom appeared in the frame (giving the show the unintentional nickname "Mic Shadows"), a TV camera would appear on screen, a fly hovered around the head of an actor, or window curtains fell down.
In retrospect, however, the actors — who effectively formed a repertory company as they played many different roles — created memorable characters, and overcame the challenge of daily scripts combined with brief and demanding rehearsals.
Of particular note is Robert Cobert's inspired music score, which broke new ground for a television program. The original soundtrack cracked the top 20 of Billboard's national album chart in 1969 and still ranks as one of the top-selling TV soundtracks ever. The spoken-word instrumental track "Quentin's Theme", for which Cobert earned a Grammy nomination, was recorded by the Charles Randolph Grean Sounde. The single peaked at number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (and number 3 on its Easy Listening chart) in summer 1969, when Dark Shadows was perhaps at the peak of its popularity.
[edit] Episode numbering
A total of 1,225 episodes were produced, but during the course of its run, the show was preempted 20 times. ABC would compensate for this by sometimes double numbering and, in one case, triple numbering episodes in order to keep a show ending in a 5 or 0 airing on Fridays. This is why the last episode produced has #1245 when in actuality it was only the 1,225th episode produced.
[edit] Preservation
Dark Shadows has the distinction of being one of the few classic television soap operas to have all of its episodes survive intact except one, although a handful of early episodes are available only in 16 mm kinescope format. For the one lost episode (#1219), only a home audio recording of the episode exists. The home video version and cable reruns of this episode were reconstructed from this soundtrack, the closing scene from the episode #1218, the opening scene from episode #1220, and from video still frames sourced from other episodes.
[edit] Broadcast history
Perhaps one of ABC's first truly popular daytime shows, Dark Shadows found its perfect demographic niche in teenagers coming home from school in time to watch the show at 4:00 PM Eastern / 3:00 PM Central, where it aired for almost all of its network run, the exception being a 15-month stretch between April 1967 and July 1968, when it aired a half hour earlier. With mothers (and, sometimes, grandmothers) usually away from the television set at that time of day in order to tend to household chores such as preparing the family's dinner, the young people got control of the family set and claimed the show as a badge of the then-burgeoning youth consciousness in the culture at large.
Whatever the cultural context or audience composition of Dark Shadows, it became one of ABC's first daytime shows to actually win its timeslot, leading to the demise of NBC's original Match Game and Art Linkletter's long-running House Party on CBS, both in 1969. Even the launch of Somerset, a much-ballyhooed spinoff of NBC's Another World, the following year did not hurt Dark Shadows. Originally, it started in black and white, but the show went into color starting with the August 14, 1967 telecast. (The previous Friday's episode was produced in color, but aired in black and white.[citation needed])
By early 1971, though, ABC was trying to cut costs in the face of harsh new economic realities including a national economic recession, a sharp dip in advertising revenue following the U.S. government's recent ban on cigarette commercials, and a record-high number of competing soap operas — which were more expensive to produce than game or talk shows — on the networks' daytime schedules. Thus the network began weeding out supposedly unproductive programming. Despite its relatively high station clearances for its timeslot and low production costs, Dark Shadows fell victim to the purge mainly because of its young audience, who usually did not make decisions about the purchasing of household goods and food products for the family, which were the two chief industries that bought airtime on daytime television in that era. Practically no other daytime show skewed so much under the 18–35 demographic threshold as Dark Shadows did. Furthermore, primetime shows and movies with horror or science fiction themes (e.g., Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) had been on the decline for some time, and, of course, the serial appealed heavily to fanciers of those genres, people who usually snubbed their noses at the often sentimental domestic or romantic themes that traditional soaps had relied on since their inception on radio in the 1930s. In addition and probably more decisively, the program experienced a precipitous drop in its ratings during its last two years on the air, falling from a peak of 8.4 in the 1968–1969 television season to a 5.3 in 1970–1971.[5]
So, despite many letters of protest from outraged fans, ABC cancelled the five-year-old show on April 2, 1971 and replaced it with a new version of the hit 1960s game show Password. Although some highly irate viewers threatened to vocally decry the cancellation[citation needed] by disrupting the taping of Password at ABC's Los Angeles studios, nothing ever came of those plans. The rather abrupt ending of the series left some plotlines (such as Victoria Winters' parentage, and the story of the Jennings family) unfinished, though most of the plot threads came to a happy conclusion, via a voiceover explaining future events in the final minute of the last episode.
[edit] Syndication and cable repeats
Dark Shadows was to be syndicated by ABC's distribution arm, ABC Films, as the series was ending in late 1970 and early 1971. However, delays kept the show from entering syndication, mainly because the FCC imposed fin-syn rules forcing the networks to sell off their syndication companies. Finally, in 1975, Worldvision Enterprises (spun off from ABC Films) released 130 episodes to syndication. Over the years, more episodes were released in varying quantities until the show finished its syndicated run in 1990. However, the first 209 shows and roughly the last years’ worth of shows were never seen in syndication. It is still important to note however that Dark Shadows was lucky to be in syndication at all while other daytime serials sat on the shelf collecting dust or have been lost forever.
For many years, the show was rerun on Syfy. Syfy, unlike previous networks, had the entire run of 1,225 episodes to show. The network stopped airing Dark Shadows in December 2003, only two weeks short of completing the series. All 1,225 episodes in the series were shown on Syfy at various times between 1992 and 2003.
The beginning of the show introduces Victoria Winters (Alexandra Moltke) and the members of the Collins family, who reside on top of Widows’ Hill in a house called Collinwood in Collinsport, Maine. Victoria was orphaned, and she came to Collinwood in order to find out more about her eerie past. David Collins (David Henesy) would constantly tell Victoria of the ghosts he saw. Victoria also encountered the ghost of Josette Collins (Kathryn Leigh Scott) when she was looking through the closed-off west wing of Collinwood.
Laura Collins (Diana Millay) returned to Collinwood and proceeded to wreak havoc on her family members, resorting to the use of magic. Laura ended up facing an early demise herself. Jason McGuire (Dennis Patrick) comes back to Collinsport to blackmail Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. When Willie Loomis (John Karlen) goes into the Collinwood mausoleum to search for the supposed family jewels, he unknowingly releases a vampire, Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid). Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) then came to Collinsport with the intent of destroying the vampire once and for all, but in an unexpected twist, she falls in love with him instead.
Barnabas first mistakes Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) for Josette and kidnaps her. After Maggie escapes, she is sent to Windcliff because she had lost her memory. When Julia arrives in Collinsport, she reports that Maggie is dead to protect her. Maggie eventually escapes Windcliff with the help of Sarah Collins (Sharon Smyth) and returns to the Blue Whale. After seeing her old friends, she collapses, remembering fragments of her past.
During a séance at Collinwood, Victoria is transported back into 1795 and meets not only Barnabas before he turned into a vampire, but also the people she knew in their past lives. Victoria also meets Angelique Bouchard (Lara Parker), Barnabas’s former lover, Josette, his fiancée, and his sister Sarah.
Angelique, tormented by Barnabas’s betrayal and love for Josette, curses Barnabas into becoming a vampire, and tortures Josette until she unwittingly throws herself off Widows’ Hill so she will not become the horrifying vision that Angelique has created. Victoria falls in love with a man named Peter Bradford (Roger Davis) after being imprisoned for practicing witchcraft. Eventually, Victoria is condemned and hanged, but before she dies, she is sent back to 1968 and Angelique follows.
Back in the 1968 timeline, Barnabas fears that Victoria has discovered his secret vampirism and he tricks her into agreeing to marriage. After they left Collinwood, a car accident brought a man with a resemblance to Peter to Victoria. The man claims his name is Jeff and has no recollection of Victoria. Her persistence leads him to regaining his memory, but he is mysteriously driven back to the past. Victoria manages to find him and they spend their lives in the past.
In 1969, Quentin Collins (David Selby) haunts Collinwood, so Barnabas travels back into 1897. Barnabas first finds himself chained to his coffin but is able to escape due to the help of Sandor (Thayer David) and Magda Rakosi (Grayson Hall). Andreas Petofi (Thayer David) paints a portrait of Quentin in this time, making him immortal so that his ghost does not haunt Collinwood in the present. Barnabas encounters Kitty Soames (Kathryn Leigh Scott), who is the reincarnation of Josette. When Kitty puts on Josette’s wedding dress, she steps into Josette’s portrait and is transported back to 1795.
In 1970, Collinwood is destroyed. Julia travels back in time to 1840 using the Stairway into Time created by Quentin. She released Barnabas from his coffin, and eventually the Barnabas from 1970 was able to regain control of the counterpart’s body. Barnabas has Judah Zachary (Michael McGuire) to remove Angelique’s power. Angelique then creates an alliance with Barnabas and they destroy Judah.
During the 1841 parallel time, Catherine Harridge (Lara Parker) is to marry Morgan Collins (Keith Prentice). Daphne Harridge (Kate Jackson) suspects that Catherine is still in love with Bramwell Collins (Jonathan Frid). When Bramwell returns to Collinwood, he is upset by the marriage and demands that he and Catherine be together.
Bramwell kidnaps Catherine and she professes her love to him, but still wants to marry Morgan. Morgan tells Catherine of the Collins family secret. During the wedding, Bramwell interrupts, and he and Morgan duel. Bramwell ends up wounded, but Daphne cares for him, and the two end up getting married themselves. Melanie Collins (Nancy Barrett) was found in the woods with strange bite marks on her neck, which turn out to be from an animal rather than a vampire.
[edit] Ratings
[edit] 1965–1966 season
[edit] 1966–1967 season
[edit] 1967–1968 season
[edit] 1968–1969 season
-
1. As the World Turns (13.8)
-
11. Dark Shadows (8.4)
-
14. Hidden Faces (3.3)
[edit] 1969–1970 season
[edit] 1970–1971 season
-
1. As the World Turns (12.4)
-
16. Dark Shadows (5.3)
-
18. A World Apart (3.4)
[edit] Revivals
In 1991, a short-lived primetime remake was produced by MGM Television and aired on NBC from January 13 to March 22. The revival was a lavish, big budget weekly serial combining gothic romance and stylistic horror. Although it was a huge hit at introduction (watched by almost 1 in 4 households according to official ratings during that time period), the onset of the Gulf War caused NBC to continually preempt or reschedule the episodes resulting in declining ratings. It was canceled after the first season.
The final episode ended with a cliffhanger: Victoria Winters (Joanna Going) learning that Barnabas Collins (Ben Cross) was a 200-year old vampire. It has been reported[who?] that the opening episode for a proposed second season would have had Victoria collapsing, after seeing Barnabas, and losing her memory of his terrible secret.[citation needed]
It also starred veterans Jean Simmons as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and Roy Thinnes as Roger Collins, British character actress Lysette Anthony as Angelique Collins, Barbara Steele as Julia Hoffman, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as David Collins.
Plans for another revival series (or film) have been discussed off and on since the 1991 series' demise, including a TV miniseries to wrap up the plotlines of the canceled NBC series and a feature film, co-written by Dan Curtis and Barbara Steele, utilizing the 1991 cast. In 2004, a pilot for a new WB network Dark Shadows series starring Marley Shelton as Victoria Winters and Alec Newman as Barnabas Collins was written and shot, but never picked up. The pilot has been screened at the Dark Shadows Festival conventions with Dan Curtis Productions' blessing, but has yet to surface elsewhere. This pilot was produced by Warner Bros. Television.
Warner Bros. is producing a film adaptation of the soap opera. Tim Burton is directing the film, and Johnny Depp stars as Barnabas Collins.
[edit] Home video
MPI Home Video currently holds the home video rights to the series. All episodes were issued on VHS from 1989 through 1995. Episodes 210–1245 (Barnabas' arrival through to the end of the series) have been released on DVD in 26 Collections from 2002 through 2006. Episodes 1–209 were released in 2007 under the title of Dark Shadows: The Beginning.
MGM released a feature film entitled House of Dark Shadows in 1970. Dan Curtis directed it, and Sam Hall and Gordon Russell wrote the screenplay. Many cast members from the soap opera reprised their roles. These included Jonathan Frid, Grayson Hall, Roger Davis, and Kathryn Leigh Scott, among others. 1971 saw the release of Night of Dark Shadows, also directed by Dan Curtis. In addition, Curtis and Sam Hall wrote it. Actors included David Selby, Grayson Hall, Kate Jackson, and Lara Parker, among others.
There have been two series of Dark Shadows novels. The first, released during the show's original run, were all penned by romance writer Marilyn Ross, a pseudonym for author Dan Ross. The second consists of two novels by Lara Parker, Angelique's Descent and The Salem Branch, and Dreams of the Dark by horror authors Elizabeth Massie and Stephen Mark Rainey.
There also have been several books about Dark Shadows, including The Dark Shadows Almanac and The Dark Shadows Companion.
[edit] Magazines
During its original run, Dark Shadows was featured in many magazines, including Afternoon TV, Daytime TV, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and Castle of Frankenstein. In 2003, a two-part article entitled "Collecting Dark Shadows: Return to Collinwood," appeared in Autograph Collector magazine. It was the first major article to chronicle the show in years. In 2005, Scary Monsters magazine #55 devoted an entire issue to Dark Shadows. Included were full-length interviews with cast members Marie Wallace, David Selby, and Kathryn Leigh-Scott, as well as "Don't Open That Coffin! A Baby Boomer's Adventures in the Land of Dark Shadows!" Both the Autograph Collector and Scary Monsters articles were penned by freelance writer Rod Labbe, who once ran a fan club for Dennis Patrick (Jason McGuire, Paul Stoddard). Labbe also contributes to Fangoria magazine and will be doing a series of full-length interviews with surviving original cast members, leading up to the release of Burton's film. Labbe's interview with Jerry Lacy, who played the nefarious Reverend Trask, appeared in issue #296. His second, with Chris Pennock (Jebez Hawkes, aka "The Leviathan") will be in issue #304. He's already interviewed Kathryn Leigh Scott for Fangoria, and a more lengthy version of the interview can be found on her website.
[edit] Comics
Detail from Dark Shadows newspaper comic strip. Art by Ken Bald.
From March 14, 1971 to March 11, 1972, the Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicated a Dark Shadows comic strip by illustrator Kenneth Bruce Bald (credited as "K. Bruce" because of contractual obligations) to dozens of newspapers across the country.[6]
Gold Key Comics released 35 issues of a regular Dark Shadows comic book, which ran for years after the cancellation of the series on ABC. 1969–1976; and in 1991, Innovation Publishing released a short-lived comic book series based on the NBC-TV revival show. Hermes Press will release a multi-volume archive reprint series of the Gold Key series beginning in 2010.
[edit] Other media
There have also been two board games, a few coloring books, a jigsaw puzzle and a View-Master reel.
[edit] Audio drama
Based on a stage play performed at a Dark Shadows convention, Return to Collinwood is an audio drama written by Jamison Selby and Jim Pierson, and starring David Selby, Kathryn Leigh Scott, John Karlen, Nancy Barrett, Lara Parker, Roger Davis, Marie Wallace, Christopher Pennock, Donna Wandrey, James Storm, and Terry Crawford. The show is available on CD.
[edit] Big Finish Productions
In 2006, Big Finish Productions continued the Dark Shadows saga with an original series of audio dramas, starring the original cast. The first season featured David Selby (Quentin Collins), Lara Parker (Angelique), Kathryn Leigh Scott (Maggie Evans), and John Karlen (Willie Loomis). Robert Rodan, who played Adam in the original series, also appears in the fourth story, playing a new character. A second series was released in 2010. In addition to the cast returning from Series One, Kingdom of the Dead also featured Lysette Anthony, Alec Newman, Lizzie Hopley, Jerry Lacy, and David Warner.[7][8][9]
[edit] Dramatic readings
Big Finish has also released a number of dramatic readings (a series of plays, usually featuring two actors). The first of these, released in August 2007, are based on Lara Parker's original novel, Angelique's Descent.
[edit] Legacy
Dark Shadows pioneered the concept of a soap opera with a supernatural theme. An occult-styled Canadian-made serial Strange Paradise soon followed, which was broadcast on CBC Television and in the United States in syndication from October 20, 1969 to July 22, 1970. (U.S. airdates varied; 195 half-hour episodes were produced.) In later years the prime-time satire Soap would introduce an Exorcist-inspired storyline. In 1986, "Dark Mansions," a made-for-TV movie intended to be a pilot for a weekly supernatural serial, was produced by Aaron Spelling. Days of Our Lives featured a plot in which its leading female character, Marlena Evans (Deidre Hall), was possessed by Satan. Coming full circle, the soap operas Port Charles and Passions emerged in the 1990s, both largely driven by supernatural-based plots involving vampires, witches, and werewolves. The popular Joss Whedon series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, with their continuing serial plotlines, could be described as treading a path first laid by Dark Shadows. The popular gay and lesbian here! network has produced its own supernatural soap operas Dante's Cove and The Lair which both contain witchcraft and vampire storylines. Dark Shadows is also widely credited with introducing the concept of the "compassionate vampire", the mostly "good" vampire tortured by his affliction and looking for a cure. This concept has continued to be used in many vampire television series and films.
[edit] References
| Author: | Bling King |
| Published: | Sep 24th 2011 |
| Modified: | Dec 31st 2011 |
