Regarding the secret room of the mausoleum, my theory is the building was built against a hill… Eagle Hill. That’s why nobody questioned the size.
Just as a side note, TCM were airing the movie version of “Peyton Place” tonight (it’s Lana Turner month on TCM). I had never seen it, so I thought I’d give it a looksee. The theme movie played over several scenic shots of New England as the credits flashed onscreen. When the movie properly began, it starts with a shot of the town and a voiceover narration by the ingenue heroine of the series. What are the first words she speaks???
“My name is Allison Mackenzie…”
I burst out laughing. While "Dark Shadows’ was never exactly subtle about the stuff it’s stolen from previous movies, I had never known about THIS. It was way too on the nose to just be a coincidence. Dan Curtis saw this movie and thought “Yeah! That’s how I’ll have every episode of my series start…with an introduction just like that!”
Hey, if you’re gonna rip something off you might as well be masterful at it! 
I haven’t been able to watch much so far this week, I am at the part where Angelique has shown up in a dark wig as Cassandra.
Hey, that’s a good one! I think I’ll go with that.
Barnabas really isn’t thinking ahead in his kidnapping/brainwashing plan. Once Maggie or Victoria were to become Josette, then what?
He never does seem very good at long-range planning. Note how often he jumps to the impulsive, bitey solution to a problem, how often Julia Hoffman tries to talk him out of it, and how often he does it when she isn’t there to talk him down and his actions leads to an even more complicated problem.
I guess when you are a vampire every solution seems to involve a neck.
I just stumbled across this.
The Dark Shadows Every Day blog
It is a very isolated world, isn’t it? You can’t imagine the characters running out of milk and having to run to the local 7-11 at midnight. In the (then) modern-day episodes, there is no mention of any of the political or world crises going on at the time (not that many other soaps of the era did). In the Dark Shadows universe, the Vietnam war was not going on at the same time. Even in the “future” episodes I remember, there is no sense of an outside world or technology advancing. It’s like a pocket universe where you can’t leave the confines of the sites you mentioned.
I was in grade school when it originally ran. My sister and I would happily watch all summer, and then when a plotline was getting really good, school would start. We would have to alternate faking being sick to follow the plot on important days and fill each other in on what happened in those pre-VCR days.
So I am up Episode 546, Cassandra has just tried to Kill Adam with an ax.
So the Adam thing…yep, lifted straight from Frankenstein movie, right down to his wardrobe and the bit where he goes to see blind Sam Evans who is kind to him because he can’t see him, just like the classic film. Too good!
And I truly enjoyed the Dream Curse! It was great fun to see who was going to be at the door and what the next bit would be. I think that was a very clever bit of writing!
But overall, I am not really digging the whole Adam deal itself. I like how he and Barnabas are linked, and how it took for freaking ever for someone to hear Dr. Lang’s message on the gol-danged tape player, haha!!! How many times did they play that message? About 47 it feels like! But I can totally see how Barnabas was the star of the show, when he is gone, I miss him!
Oh, and Nickolas Blair is kinda cool because he snatches at Cassandra’s wig and pulls her off her high horse. I guess he is one of Satan’s minions? I don’t think he is supposed to be Satan himself. The scene where he turned Cassandra’s hand all to bone was fan-freaking tastic!
So sad to lose Sam Evans! And one little nitpick about him…when he appeared in his section of the Dream Curse, why did they have him wearing his blind man glasses? He was already dead at that time, so I think it would have been a much better call to have him appear as he was when he was healthy. He wouldn’t be blind if he was dead.
Nicholas, although debonairly evil, is not the Devil. You’ll be meeting their boss in Hell soon enough.
That he was still wearing his Blind Man while he was in a coma in the hospital amused me. That he continued to wear them during the Dream Curse, when he could obviously see what he was dreaming, cracked me up.
This stretch of the story is actually my favorite part of the show, though. I love Mad Science, so all the stuff with the creation of Adam and Eve was wonderful to me. Plus, the iterations of the Dream Curse–what repeatedly stayed behind the doors no matter who opened them, and what was shown only once or twice. (By the way, keep an eye on that skeleton dressed as a bride; it’s got a distinctive jaw, and you’ll notice it showing up later whenever they need a skeleton prop for any scene.)
Yes, it was fun to see which Dream Curse scenarios stayed and which ones didn’t. The first time I saw Mrs. Johnson’s bats, I was thinking, what the Hell is that? At first I couldn’t tell what the freak it was! The “Flaming Head” behind door #1 was always there, and that Corpse Bride. The guillotine was there most of the time, and had me wondering if the rationale was, “We built this prop just for this, and dammit we are going to USE it!”
And about the skeletons, yes I have noticed they are fairly jacked up, and also the skulls are all cut across the top so you can open it and look inside, so that gives it away they are skeletons for educational purposes.
And poor Elizabeth, is all secreted away at the Crazy House right now. I’ll be glad when she is back, too.
I know you said the mid-1800s time travel sequence coming up was good, so I am looking forward to that.
She’s a hoot when she first comes back and is still death-obsessed. “Whose coffin is that? Is it mine?” You can tell Joan Bennett was having some fun with the role for a change.
It’s another of my favorite stretches. It’s where Quentin’s story really gets going and the story line goes off in a number of highly derivative but entertaining directions.
I didn’t care for Quentin much when he first appears as an evil ghost in a Turn of the Screw pastiche. I could see that David Selby was handsome under the enormous muttonchop sideburns, and I liked the actor as an older man when I saw his interviews on the DVDs, but he really didn’t do it for me at first. Even in the beginning of the 1897 story, when we meet him as a living man, he’s a womanizing asshole and it’s no wonder he’s got at least 3 women who want to kill him. But then he got cursed and woke up one morning in Collinwood’s front hall after a werewolfy night out, with his shirt all ripped up, and I thought “Hmm…” 
“My name is Barry Allen…”
I haven’t seen the Justice League movie (yet), but I’ve heard it’s more than a little derivative.
As for “Dark Shadows”, I am lagging behind everybody else. I took a break from binge-watching it to binge-watch the new “Black Mirror” episodes. Where I’m at with DS, Barnabas still has Maggie imprisoned at the Old House and decked out as Josette. Elizabeth is being blackmailed by Jason. The blog that Rick Kitchen linked to is helpful to skip over the non-Barnabas DS episodes that consist mainly of Carolyn and Burke just looking at each other from across the Blue Whale and refusing to speak to one another. (Boring!)
Something that occurred to me after reading some history books: Maine in 1795/6 was not yet a separate state of the union. It was still officially part of Massachusetts until 1820. I wonder if that fact ever happened to be mentioned in any of the DS episodes set at the time? Perhaps during Victoria’s trial for witchcraft? I have this silly image in my head of Victoria telling her pupils Daniel and Sarah about “future history” of the U.S.
Another thing that struck me is that Maine had a very sizable Native American population at that time (although the Penobscot tribes were being pushed out of their lands, there would still have been a lot of them around), but you never see a hint of it at all. Given that this is TV from 1967, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, but I do find it kind of interesting.
I believe this did come up during the 1795 storyline.
Yes, it does come up during Vicky’s trial for witchcraft, something about “the Province of Maine”, I think.
Also, was watching today and Angelique is an old wizzened hag, begging Barnabas to forgive her so she can live (Nickolas told her he wouldn’t destroy her if she could secure forgiveness from Barnabas) and she is pleading with him and apologizing, and Barnabas says, “But you have caused everyone I love to die, you are responsible for the deaths of Josette and my mother Naomi…” and Angelique says, “Oh, can’t you just forget about that?” :rolleyes::eek: I laughed myself off the chair, that was so funny to me! That, and also Angelique’s old woman makeup had her looking like she has a serious case of fluid retention. Lara Parker wasn’t afraid to let them ugly her up, that’s for sure!
And I am having a hard time keeping up with all these extra houses the Collins’ own. There was that Seaside cottage Vicky wanted to live in and Devlin tried to buy and couldn’t because of a clause in a will, and now there is another house that Nickolas Blair is moving into, the interior of which looks just like the Master Bedroom of the Old House in 1795, and the lawyer’s office (played by that same guy who played Reverend Trask) in 1968.
Yes, in the DS Universe, many things don’t exist.
I am very well aware there were plenty of Indentured Servants, and it is true they were treated as social inferiors 99% of the time, but I think if this story was more rooted in real history Ben Stokes and Angelique both would have been black. That’s also why it was odd to me that Angelique just pranced around and came in and out of the Front Door of the Old House most of the time, which would never have happened. She would not have been speaking so freely to the members of the Collins family either. They did finally construct a servant’s entrance set to somewhat remedy that.
BUT, I did very much enjoy that once they came back to present day, Professor Stokes was in a position to have power over Angelique since she made his ancestor’s life in 1795 so miserable. Too bad it was short-lived.
That’s Jerry Lacy. In addition to lawyer Tony Peterson and multiple Trasks on this show, he also played Humphrey Bogart in the Woody Allen movie, Play It Again, Sam.
In the part you were just watching, there was an episode with a seance scene where he played both Tony and the ghost of the Witchfinder Trask. Same episode, or the next one, Joel Crothers appeared as both Joe Haskell and Nathan Forbes. It makes me happy when the actors double up on their characters like that. Much later on, there’s a seance where the ghost of Joshua Collins shows up to give a dire warning, and seconds after he vanishes, Roger comes into the room–it’s like a quick-change trick.
As an aside, just out of curiosity, this weekend I decided to watch the 1991 prime-time revival series. I watched the pilot episode and the first two regular episodes.
Wow! Was that bad! Like, really, really, really bad. REALLY bad! I am actually a little stunned by just HOW bad on every single level: the dialogue, the acting, the direction. And while a joke can be made that “It wouldn’t be Dark Shadows if it was any good”, this wasn’t bad in the charming, witty, fascinating way that the original series was bad, this was a tepid, subpar '-style prime time soap opera. When it attempts to be scary, it just made me cringe at what I was watching.
Dan Curtis directed it. I think it may have been a condition he placed on the network before allowing them to adapt it. But he is remarkably inept as a director. Episodes are static, with a whole bunch of characters standing around in the background for scene after scene. He runs through just about every cliche in the book in the first hour. One scene is supposed to be set at 4:00 AM, but it is clearly a day-for-night scene in the cheapest sense (it is obviously daytime when they shot it.) A funeral takes place in a rainstorm because no funeral in a vampire story can take place unless it’s raining. But it isn’t raining - the cast are huddled quite close together around the coffin because apparently they couldn’t afford to buy too many sprinkler hoses to simulate rain.
A new character is created - Carolyn’s older sister Daphne - to become an early casualty of Barnabas’s. She becomes a vampire and immediately gets an Endora dress and hugely teased 80’s hair, as if Elizabeth got a drag queen to make up her corpse before they interred her. It really doesn’t help that she is consistently backlit so that she looks like Bonnie Tyler in the “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video. The scene of her getting staked is quite possibly one of the worst things I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen “the Room.”)
The actors playing Barnabas and Victoria are both godawful, wooden and arch in the worst “Dynasty” way, and have zero chemistry. At one point when “Julia” (Barbara Steele) is being introduced to the family, she walks away from them by practically muttering “Excuse me.” Someone sniffs “Intense!” Whu- wha? More like “sedated.” The actor playing Willie can’t seem to decide if he wants to play the part as comic relief or as retarded (he can’t do either convincingly). Meanwhile, great actors such as Jean Smart (Elizabeth) and Roy Thinnes (Roger) just stand around doing nothing. In fact, pretty much everyone on the show is remarkably low-key given that there’s a SUPERNATURAL BLOODSUCKER running around. (One bright spot: eight-year old Joseph Gordon-Levitt as David. He acts rings around everyone else in the cast, and it’s clear that he was going to go on to better things, even as a little kid.)
I can’t remember them saying if this is actually supposed to be Maine in the new series. (Both Victoria and Julia arrive from NYC by train.) But Collinwood Manor is very clearly a California estate. The architecture, the woods surrounding it – all of it looks like the suburbs of Los Angeles. And while Collinwood is supposed to be an ornate, sprawling estate, the Old House was supposed to be a colonial-era house. It would never have been as vast and enormous as it is portrayed (complete with metalwork stairway railings and plastered walls that would NOT have existed in a colonial homestead).
The producers were clearly going for a “Dynasty/Dallas” camp-fest rather than trying to be scary. But, incredibly for a story about vampires, witches, and time travel, it simply isn’t over-the-top enough. It’s just tepid and dull. Do yourself a favor and skip it.