Come Geek Out with me on Dark Shadows (the Original Series)

Cafe Society
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Some of my favorites (others may occur later on):

The one I mentioned above, when Angelique’s curse to make Barnabas a vampire again comes up against Dr. Lang’s Mad Science skills to cure him, and Mad Science triumphs.

Quentin’s takeover of Collinwood.

Little ghost-Sarah telling her big brother Barnabas to behave himself.

Just after the end of 1790s storyline, Barnabas is convinced that Vicky must know his secret and so he bites her. Normally, when he bites people–Willie, Maggie, Carolyn–they have no will of their own. But Vicky wants to go look at the Collins family vault in the cemetery and see if the hidden room she remembers from the past is really there. Barnabas doesn’t want her to do that and tries to use his mind control on her. “You don’t want to go to the cemetery, Vicky.” And Vicky brushes this off; they’re going to cemetery, and she’s driving. You don’t usually think of her as strong-willed, but it made me wonder what he’d be letting himself in for if he did succeed in making her a vampire as he intended.

Back in the 1840 storyline, when Julia Hoffman is compelled to reattach Judah Zachary’s head to his body and reanimate him with lightning in a makeshift lab, with a faux-Cockney music-hall singer as her assistant. I know they were doing Zachary’s evil bidding, but I loved it.

The stiff competition between Crazy Future Carolyn and Crazy Future Quentin when Barnabas and Julia briefly visit the ruined Collinwood of 1995.

In 1897, when Quentin’s brother Carl tries to tell him that Barnabas is a vampire. Quentin laughs at this at first – “Our cousin Barnabas…” then his whole expression changes as he realizes Carl is right, “who we never see in the day time.”

The similar fates of the Witchfinder Trask and his grandson, the Reverend Trask. If my last name were Trask, I’d stay far, far away from any Collinses who looked like they were planning to do a little masonry work. Also related to this, the Witchfinder’s ghost having his revenge and holding a trial for Barnabas with his victims as the jury.

Julia Hoffman braining her evil alt-reality self with a poker.

When Elizabeth is about to blackmailed into marrying Jason McGuire and instead of saying “I do,” says “I murdered my husband, and that man helped me.” And then we find out what’s really in that locked room in the basement.

When Barnabas stakes Tom the vampire, since it strikes me as funny that the first person to stake a vampire on this show should be Barnabas.


When Charity/Pansy actually stakes Barnabas. I certainly wasn’t expecting that.

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What an excellent discussion. I am among the cowering schoolchildren who were terrified by this show, but haven’t see one moment of it since — apart from a YouTube compilation of boom mikes and other gaffs.

I now I intend to look it up on Amazon. Reversal of Fortune is one of my favorite movies of all time and I’m thrilled at the prospect of seeing the actual Alexandra Isles. I didn’t understand from the movie that she was an actress.

Whoops — almost forgot to mention the disembodied hand. THAT is what caused my demands for a bright burning nightlight and, no doubt, my teenage love for every Stephen King novel.

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Louis Edmonds, who played Roger Collins, was an ‘out’ gay man at the time. I saw a photo taken of him and Jonathan Frid in swimsuits, at the beach…I wonder if they were a real-life couple??

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Here is an article with your picture.

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I knew Edmonds was gay, but had no idea about Frid. From carnivorous plant’s linked article, this is the the impression that Frid left me:

(Actually, I thought much the same about Edmonds, andI would’ve liked to have seen him act in other parts; as I understand it, he was mostly a soap opera actor-as such, that’s not much of an acting stretch from DS.)

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Joel Crothers, who played Joe Haskell/Lt. Nathan Forbes, was also gay and died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1986.

While Louis Edmonds looks OK, but average in the beach shot, Jonathan Frid looks like he’s in very good shape given the times (in the 1960s, very few people worked out or ate healthy). It never shows on the series since: A) he was under contract to not get a suntan while on the show, since he had to appear “ghoulish”, and B) Always had a mountain of clothes on. Full suits with capes, etc.

One performer on DS who I always suspected was gay was Humbert Allen Astredo (the warlock Nicholas Blair) who was openly “flamboyant” onscreen, including a few scenes where he touches Joe Haskell’s face rather affectionally. I guess, since he was the villain, he was allowed to camp it up a bit.

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Whee, I just watched the first couple of episodes this afternoon. So fun. So glacial. So sparse with the dialogue.

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I liked the Adam storyline.

I laughed when Buffy the Vampire Slayer had an Adam as well.

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The glacial nature of soap operas is one of the reasons the show works so well. The plodding day to day of real life… with vampires, werewolves and spooks added into the mix.

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Astredo also played Quentin’s friend and the 1897 Collins family lawyer, Evan Hanley. When the show takes us back in time to meet Quentin before he became an evil ghost, he has an interesting conversation with his lawyer-friend about destroying his grandmother’s will and substituting a forgery leaving everything to himself. Evan speaks of the delicacy of his position, and Quentin replies that he’s seen Evan in many positions. Uh-huh.

It turns out that they dabble in occult ceremonies together–but that’s not the first thing that occurs to the viewer when you hear that, is it? Sex or Twister. :slight_smile:

Some good Nicholas Blair moments:

When he punishes Angelique for trying to destroy Adam, when he has other plans for him. He revokes her powers and makes her look her age–pushing 200 in 1968, and tells her she’s about to die. Then Very Old Lady Angelique ends up running back and forth between Collinwood and the Old House until she finally drops.

When he faces his own diabolical master after Angelique turns on him.

When Megan, who has been the surrogate mother to Leviathan Jeb Hawkes all through his rapid growth from baby to Cousin Oliver to brattier-than-David teenager, finally reaches his adult stage and she’s attracted to him even though he’s meant for Carolyn. She kisses him–and this act of of symbolic incest causes thunder and lightning, and the door bursts open and Nicholas appears to tell them to knock it off. He’s in charge of the Leviathan project now.

Also from the Leviathan story, when Leviathan cult member Sky Rumson introduces Nicholas to his lovely wife… and she’s someone Nicholas and the viewers have known a lot longer than Sky has. (It’s Angelique, back again, and the look on Nicholas’s face is priceless.)

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Correct me if I’m wrong, I may have missed a stretch of episodes or forgotten them, but wasn’t the Adam storyline literally just dropped on a dime? I remember Eve was destroyed and Nicholas was ‘punished’ by his dark master, but they never actually wrote Adam out. In one episode, Prof. Stokes tells him to hide in his closet when someone else comes to the door…and that’s it. The character was never seen nor referenced again. His terrorizing Collinwood, kidnapping Vicky, threatening to kill the whole Collins family if he didn’t get his bride, his life-force being linked to Barnabas – all just dropped without a word!

I have to wonder about what happened to Adam when Barnabas went through his several time warps and jump to an alternate timeline…

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Yes, that’s it exactly. Stokes sends him to hide in the back room, and he’s never heard from or even mentioned again.

I wondered what became of Adam when Barnabas became a vampire again after that, since Adam’s very existence was designed to prevent that from happening.

According to the show’s writer, Sam Hall, Adam went away and got his scars fixed. He met up with Carolyn again years later and still wanted to marry her, but she wasn’t interested. (Hope he didn’t throw another Kill Everybody tantrum when she turned him down.) But none of that’s cannon and I don’t know if Mr. Hall or anyone else even wrote it as a scene or referenced it in post-show stories.

As far as we know, Adam’s still hiding at the professor’s house.

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Huh. I didn’t know that about Crothers. Carolyn (character) always referred to him as “Good ol’ Joe Haskell.” I thought Crothers was good looking in that soap opera way, and so thought he’d be more of a love interest than just “Good ol’ Joe Haskell.” Still, the actor was around quite a bit in several of the storylines. Good for him.

As for Humbert, I really liked the way he played his characters. Had he been that campy on a regular TV show, as opposed to a soap opera, I wouldn’t like it. But he had a good look too, for the character he played.

It’s been mentioned in this thread how seriously the cast and crew took the show, but you could tell also they had fun with it, and a lot of chemistry between the actors. That goes a long way for it’s 50+ year success.

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I was in grade school when I watched it. I thought that the roles the same actors played was supposed to connect them. The Tha Chi guy that sent them back in time was also the witch hunter, so I thought that the Tha Chi guy was evil.

Watching Dark Shadows on the Sci Fi channel, my step daughter was watching with me as Adam was being created. I thought it might be too disturbing. She pointed at the headless body under a sheet. “Is that thing supposed to be breathing?”

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Found this on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dFnnBAVkOJ8

It’s a little feature that’s on one of the last discs of the big, coffin-box set, about Sam Hall’s projected futures for the Dark Shadows characters. I found it more emotionally satisfying than the actual end of the series, and it was nice of him to give us some closure on people who just disappeared from the show, like Adam and Chris the Werewolf.

ETA: Oh, and Carolyn working as a psychic researcher is a spin-off I would like to see.

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If there is it’s really obscure. Not only did Thayer David play the insane guy who terrorizes Victoria, he plays the loyal butler Ben Stokes, the evil Count Petofi and the doctor?/ psychiatrist? who advises the family. Although I believe “Mad Ben” was Ben Stokes descendant.

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Has anyone heard the DS audio dramas? I’ve not, so I have no idea how they are, but they do feature some of the original cast, and they look to be pretty affordable.

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I’ve reviewed a couple of them on my blog and just bought a couple more that I’ve only listened to once each. They had to get another actor to do Barnabas, since Jonathan Frid has passed on, but otherwise they’re done with the original cast members: David Selby, Lara Parker, John Karlen, Kathryn Leigh Scott.

When Quentin returns to Collinwood after his world travels, he finds the house empty; the rest of the family is mysteriously missing. He and Angelique and Barnabas are supposed to find out what happened to them, but in the meantime they (and Maggie and Willie) face down a variety of menacing ghosts and other evil beings. Those confrontations don’t usually go on beyond one audio-play each, but the overarching story about the missing Collinses hasn’t shown any sign of resolving yet.

I do like what I’ve heard so far. The writing for the characters’ dialog is pretty snappy, and the general atmosphere is a bit darker than the old show but not too grim. I’m sure the missing Collinses will turn up eventually.

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OK, so because of this thread, I was inspired to hulu this series again for the first time in about 15 years. Hulu begins at episode 210, which is when Willie breaks into the Collins family crypt and unleashes Barnabas. I don’t mind starting there at all, since the Billy Malloy murder mystery (even with his ghostly appearance) and the Laura the Phoenix storylines didn’t interest me that much.

I watched about a week’s worth of episodes so far. A few observations:

  1. That secret room in the Collins family crypt is HUGE! It’s got to be bigger than the ‘official’ room where Joshua, Naomi, and Sarah are buried. I guess that makes sense from a staging standpoint, since it’s where the more dramatic events take place. On the other hand, in-universe, how the hell does anybody not know that "secret room’ is there??? I realize nobody’s been in there too often, but did nobody in its history ever happened to walk around the perimeter of it and think “Why is this structure large enough to contain two whole rooms when it only has the one??”

  2. Conversely, the coffins for the other 1795 Collins family members are tiny! There’s no way anybody the same height of either Roger or Elizabeth (whom Joshua and Naomi are dead ringers for) could be interred there – not unless their corpses were cut up into pieces and simply jumbled into those pygmy tombs.

  3. The crypt keeper makes a comment about the third tomb containing “the little girl Sarah Collins…” which is a nice bit of foreshadowing. Evidently there were planning ahead for her ghostly appearance. But just as obviously, the writers were not planning too far ahead, as the birth/death dates for Joshua and Naomi can’t possibly be correct. Naomi’s date of death is 1821, which spoilers! is way off the mark. Similarly, in the next episode, Barnabas remarks to Elizabeth that the Old House is “where Jeremiah and Josette Collins” lived…Which, as we’ll see, wasn’t the case.

  4. Just prior to Willie breaking into the crypt, there’s a scene of Elizabeth and Victoria looking at the portrait of Barnabas. Right next to the portrait is a mirror, which Elizabeth and Victoria are reflected in. That makes for a great shot, but I couldn’t help wondering where that mirror went in the 24 hours between Willie unearthing Barnabas and his arrival at Collinwood. For staging reasons, the mirror had to go – because no doubt somebody in the next few episodes who would be gawking at the portrait and then at Barnabas would have to have caught a glimpse of the mirror and seen that Barnnabas did not have a reflection!

  5. Where did Barnabas happen to get a totally mod, tailored suit to wear? It’s perfectly in keeping with the mid 60s time period, but he only just got out of a 200 year imprisonment 24 hours earlier. And that suit is TOTALLY custom tailored to his frame. It’s not like he could just steal a suit from some random Collinsport resident unless he just happened to find a guy who took his exact same measurements. (and I doubt too many people in Collinsport wear Savile Row threads anyway.)

  6. And lest you think I’m dumping too hard on the series, I will say for the record that Willie is a suitably sinister creep, Barnabas does project a oily, menacing, but charming personality. And even minor villain Jason (who was written out very quickly after Barnabas arrives) is an entertaining scoundrel. He’s too ordinary a character to have ‘saved’ the show, as Barnabas did. But I can imagine an alternate time line in which Willie didn’t free Barnabas and Jason was the central villain.

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Willie had great motivation to steal the correct size.