Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Years before Buffy, Angel and Anne Rice, this ultra-cheapo Gothic soap opera entranced a generation with soulful vampires, werewolves and lost love.
May 20, 2002 | Before Buffy, the vampire slayer, before Angel, the remorseful neck-biter with a soul, there was ABC's "Dark Shadows," an afternoon soap opera that bewitched a generation of viewers -- ask your mom -- with vampires, werewolves, ghosts, Gothic romance and the Cheez-Doodliest special effects this side of Ed Wood Jr.
"Dark Shadows" took the soap genre beyond hospitals and Peyton Places into the wiggy, more youth-friendly realm of the serial thriller. From 1966 to 1971, kids (well, girls, mostly) avoided after-school activities in order to be home by 4 p.m., when the spooky, Theremin-laced theme song would strike up and big, Gothic lettering spelling out "Dark Shadows" would float over footage of a storm-tossed surf. For 30 minutes, these future fans of Anne Rice, "Buffy" and "Angel" were held rapt by the continuing adventures of Barnabas Collins -- the original vampire with a soul -- and his occult-bedeviled descendants, the wealthy Collins family of Collinsport, Maine.
To watch "Dark Shadows" today (the Sci Fi Channel airs back-to-back episodes weekdays at 10 a.m.) is to feast on camp-a-licious flubbed lines, awkward silences, wandering boom mikes, misfiring props and special effects along the lines of dime-store vampire teeth and rubber bats on a string. But never mind that -- "Dark Shadows" addicts were (and still are) a forgiving bunch. What matters is that the show's crazed inventiveness compelled you to suspend disbelief, even as you giggled like mad.
The dense, spooky story lines of "Dark Shadows" time-traveled from the then-present (the 1960s and early '70s) to, among other periods, 1692, 1795, 1897 and 1949, with the heroic cast playing several incarnations of their characters. (Both twists were regular features of later sci-fi/fantasy series like "Angel" and "Xena: Warrior Princess.") The swift metamorphosis of "Dark Shadows" from TV cult to genuine pop cultural phenomenon was a premonition of the niche-marketed TV landscape to come, when off-network, off-hours and offbeat shows could still become household names. And "Dark Shadows" was TV's first supernatural daytime soap -- remember that the next time Tabitha and Timmy do their dark magic on "Passions."
Most of all, "Dark Shadows" broke the stereotype of the evil vampire, by making Barnabas Collins a spiritual descendant of the Brontë sisters' mysterious, savage antiheroes. The 175-year-old Barnabas was originally supposed to be the bad guy. But classically trained Canadian actor Jonathan Frid played him as a sad, cursed being who yearned to be human again. Frid often looked mournfully lost in thought -- in truth, he was struggling to read the cue cards without his glasses -- and his sensitive mien elicited fans' sympathy for the devil. The writers obliged the burgeoning Barnabas cult with a back story recasting Barnabas as a victim of a vengeful witch, making him a lonely soul carrying a torch for his long-lost love.
Frid's Master Thespian delivery and silent-movie horror get-up -- outré black cape, wolf's-head walking stick, hair plastered in spidery bangs over his brow, eyes rimmed in black eyeliner -- made him look like a male Norma Desmond waiting for his close-up. Nonetheless, Barnabas-mania took hold. Soon, Frid's fanged visage adorned lunchboxes, bubble-gum cards and, most improbably, given that Frid wasn't exactly in the bloom of youth, the swoony pages of teenage-girl tastemakers 16 Magazine and Tiger Beat. (The modern equivalent would be "Harry Potter" co-star Alan Rickman, in full Severus Snape Goth get-up, splashed on the cover of YM.)
"Dark Shadows" creator Dan Curtis has always insisted that the show came to him in a dream, with an image of a girl on a train reading a letter and a voice-over explaining that she was journeying to a seaside town to work as a governess. The show's head writer, Art Wallace, begged to differ; according to Wallace, the premise for "Dark Shadows" arose from a script he wrote for the TV anthology series "Studio One." In a compromise, the show's credits read "Series Created by Dan Curtis, Story Created and Developed by Art Wallace."
"Dark Shadows" premiered on ABC on June 27, 1966. Billed as a "Gothic soap opera," the show opened with a narration by actress Alexandra Moltke as the governess: "My name is Victoria Winters. I am going on a journey that will bring me to a strange dark house on the edge of the sea at Widow's Hill ... " (Fun fact: Moltke resurfaced several years later amid scandal as Alexandra Isles, a New York documentary filmmaker alleged to have been Claus von Bülow's mistress.)
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