I never really watched this show while it was on in my youth and I just caught about 10 minutes of it in a re-run on the Scifi Channel where some guy with calloused hands and blue spectacles is sucking the soul of the the guy dressed like Sherlock Holmes (presumably Barnabas) while some blond in a victorian outfit is beating her breast in the background (because of the sucking). I should mention she has a companion/boyfriend? (also blonde) with her during this time. A guy in black busts into to the room shouting about “carrying out the sentence”, starts beating blond boyfriend with a length of chain, blond boyfriend runs away, chain beater guy then handcuffs blue spectacles soul sucking man, and then after allowing Barnabas and Vic. girl to escape, burns spectacles and himself alive after sprinkling the room with lamp oil. Victorian girl has a psychic vision as a painting in the room starts burning and what looks like a fully grown version of Howdy Doody begins emerging from the painting while it burns. She begins screaming. Fade to black.
My goodness what a poorly acted, badly produced POC and special effects that make the old black and white Dr. Who effects look like Industrial Light and Magic by comparison. Why did this glorp have such a following? Do you have to watch 100 shows to get the feel of it. Wassup with dark Shadows? It can’t be as bad as it looks… or can it?
Was it the drugs of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Is this where the Goth movement began, because if it is then that would explain where all the poorly dressed and sullen, drama queeny little goths we know and love today come from, and that would explain the Hot Topic clothing chain, and how Robert Smith of The Cure makes his living, and that would explain… well not much else really.
“Why did this glorp have such a following? . . . It can’t be as bad as it looks… or can it?”
You just answered your own question—it was “so bad it’s good” teevee. I used to rush home from school to catch it when I was in my early teens, during its first-run, and we’d all laugh our heads off about it the next day. I still remember one actor saying, “This is the tomb of my incestors. Did I say ‘incestors?’ Of course, I meant ‘ancestors.’” And they never did a retake!
Vampire fangs falling out . . . Flies landing on actors during monologues . . . Hilariously flubbed lines . . . Bits of sets falling off . . . Propmen scurrying around on-camera . . . How can you beat it?
I tried watching this when SciFi first got the rights to it a few years ago. I had pleasant memories of racing home from school to watch it as a child. Apparently, I was much more easily entertained in those days. I watched it for two weeks and NOT ONE BLESSED THING HAPPENED. The plot was not advanced one iota. This makes it no different from any other soap opera, of course, and a soap opera is all “Dark Shadows” ever really was.
I used to run home from Grade school to watch it.
We all loved Willie, you then went on the be on some show I forget which ones, if any Dopers can help me out here.
Give it time. Dark Shadows is inexplicably charming, if only for the overwrought and under-rehearsed dialog. I loved it as a teenager, and if you can put up with the lethargic pace of events, it’s not bad in darkly gothic, make-it-up-as-we-go-along way.
I think the Dr. Who analogy is spot on – the microscopic production budget is part of the charm.
We had a very nice writing-type person who came to talk to our fiction writing class at Uni first about his new book, and then about being a fiction writer in general.
He had, of course, already made the mistake of telling us that he had entered writing by working on a number of soap operas in the 60s. Some were forgettable.
But one was Dark Shadows. So we got the two serious questions out of the way (So, what was being in residence at Yaddo really like) and then moved on to such things as flies on Barnabas’ face. He said the best part was still getting the royalty checks.
I “discovered” this running on a local station out her in SoCal in the mid-eighties. I had heard about it for years but decided I’d take a flyer on it. They started, as with most syndication packages do, with Willy (John Karlen) discovering a coffin in a hidden room. He opens it up, expecting to find gold and jewels, but is horrified when a hand shoots up and grabs him by the throat. The next episode ends when a well-dressed man, who looks a lot like the portrait hanging in the Collinwood foyer, introduces himself as a “cousin from England.” Nobody seems to notice that he only visits at night…
I was hooked from the start. The cheesiness of the production values was leavened by the inventiveness of the writing. Just when you think it can’t get any more outrageous, they throw in some new twist. Time travel, parallel worlds, Cthuluian elder gods, werewolves, artificial beings, possession… About the only things they did not throw in were Bigfoot and Atlantis. And if they had not have gotten cancelled in 1971, who knows?
Where else are you going to see “… blond boyfriend runs away, chain beater guy then handcuffs blue spectacles soul sucking man, and then after allowing Barnabas and Vic. girl to escape, burns spectacles and himself alive after sprinkling the room with lamp oil. Victorian girl has a psychic vision as a painting in the room starts burning and what looks like a fully grown version of Howdy Doody begins emerging from the painting while it burns.”
There just aren’t a lot of shows like this! It’s vampires, ghosts, time travel, and alternate universes all rolled into one.
As you mention, the special effects are bad. But some of us don’t care about that. Even good special effects become bad over time. The original Star Trek was known for it’s terrific special effects. Star Wars was revolutionary in terms of special effects, but a lot of those effects don’t look that impressive any more.
As for the acting “style,” the flimsy sets, and the flubbed lines, this adds to the charm of the show. Also, this is something common in most soap operas. Just a month ago I saw a “solid” wall on One Life To Live shudder when someone bumped it. This is on a modern show with a large budget. Because soaps film so many episodes a week, things like that get left in.
I was an avid fan of the short-lived remake in the late 80’s or early 90’s. Cool, creepy gothic soap opera, what a concept! It wasn’t till later that I caught a few episodes of the original on Scifi. Kinda like watching the original Star Trek if you’ve only seen TNG. Once I got over the laughable production values, I got pulled in by the creepy stories. Someday I’ll buy or rent the whole series and watch it end-to-end.
I remember it as being just about the only thing on the tube at 4 in the afternoon. I didn’t care that much about it cause I was usually playing ball about that time of day but some people followed it religiously like any soap. And it was supposed to be scary. wooooooooOOOOOOOOOO!!! I always thought it strange that somebody didn’t kill the damn vampire.
This was definitely one of my favorite shows when I was in HS. I would hurry home from school to be able to catch it from the beginning. I’ve seen segments from time to time on SciFi channel; they just had so many bizarro plot lines, I’d forgotten just how bizarre they were until I saw The Hand! Anyone remember The Hand, and how it would wriggle around once it got out of the box, then kill folks?! I was also quite entranced by Quentin, the werewolf (David Selby); Kate Jackson also started out on Dark Shadows, btw. And the girl who played Vickie Winters was Alexandra Moltke, who later became (in)famous as … the mistress of Claus von Brulow… I think. LOL Okay, I’m not sure what part she played in the von Brulow saga, but she was definitely in there, real life.
Eve, help me out here on Alexandra Moltke, I bet you know!
In an attempt to explain the popularity of “Dark Shadows” (which bored me the few times I attempted to watch it on the Sci-Fi Channel), it helps to remember daytime television of the late 1960’s. “Dark Shadows” contrasted greatly with the shows around it. It also probably helps, to explain why the cult hit big in the 1980’s, that a large part of the audience in the late 1960’s were children, who grew attached to it, similarly to the teenagers who watched “Star Trek” at around the same time.
I would hurry home from school to be able to catch it from the beginning. I’ve seen segments from time to time on SciFi channel; they just had so many bizarro plot lines, I’d forgotten just how bizarre they were until I saw The Hand! Anyone remember The Hand, and how it would wriggle around once it got out of the box, then kill folks?! I was also quite entranced by Quentin, the werewolf (David Selby); Kate Jackson also started out on Dark Shadows, btw. And the girl who played Vickie Winters was Alexandra Moltke, who later became (in)famous as … the mistress of Claus von Brulow… I think. LOL Okay, I’m not sure what part she played in the von Brulow saga, but she was definitely in there, real life.