What A Tangled Web We Weave: A Series Overview
Dark Shadows reportedly began with a dream that creator Dan Curtis subsequently spun into a proposal for a daytime serial. These serials are better known as “soap operas”, daily helpings of half hour melodrama pitched to stay-at-home housewives and mothers whose primary reason for being was to sell, yes, soap. In the dream Curtis claimed to see a dark-haired young girl aboard a train that brought her inevitably to the front door of a forbidding mansion. Who was this girl? Why was she traveling to such a place?
Dark Shadows spent its first year answering these questions, albeit it very, very slowly. The dark haired girl became Victoria Winters (Alexandra Moltke), an orphan seeking her identity who accepted a position as governess for the mysterious Collins family, the squires of a small fishing village called Collinsport in a perpetually dark and stormy corner of Maine. Initially Vicki was concerned with the possibility that she herself might be a Collins; caring for disturbed nine-year old David Collins kept her busy, particularly when he did all the things one might expect of a child in a gothic drama. These included scaring her with stories of the ghosts he befriended and locking her in a room in an abandoned wing of the house where she encountered a real ghost.
The ratings foundered, despite the addition of the actual supernatural, and Curtis decided to go for broke. David’s absent mother Laura Collins (Diana Millay) was scheduled to shake up the household with her return. And this she did, particularly after Curtis declared that Laura had returned, not from Arizona, but from the dead to reclaim her son.
But it wasn’t until the introduction of the prototypical “reluctant vampire” that Dark Shadows became a horror show. Suddenly it wasn’t simply a gothic romance: it was a gothic romance with a vampire. (This formula didn’t prove quite as successful on the doomed soap Port Charles when Caleb the vampire was introduced; meanwhile, on NBC’s bizarre Passions every manner of witch, warlock, zombie, and a literal army of lesbians who saved the world kept it running for nearly a decade.)
Enter Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins, a two hundred year old vampire with a problem.
Frid never quite understood his success … or why housewives were suddenly sending him naked photos of themselves. A decade before Anne Rice took the trope of the long-suffering vampire who hates what he does but just can’t help it, and ran with it, there was Barnabas, who in one moment would beat man-servant Willie Loomis (John Karlen) with a cane, strangle Dr. Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall), and lock entranced Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) in a coffin, and in the next moment could be brought to tears by the vision of his ghostly ten year old sister Sarah (Sharon Smythe).
Barnabas’ reluctance appealed to his legion of fans, male as well as female. For gay men of the 1960s their homosexuality was still diagnosed as a disease; forty years later many queer people continue to seek rehabilitation, sanctuary from their perceived “monstrous” desires.
Originally scheduled to be staked at the conclusion of his storyline, Barnabas’ popularity prevented Curtis from killing him off. Instead, Victoria Winters, acting as the eyes and ears of the audience, would be magically transported via a Collinwood séance to the year 1795 so that Barnabas could be fleshed out, in a manner of speaking, and we could find out how he became a vampire in the first place.
It turned out that Barnabas was really a pretty good guy after all. A devoted son, loving brother, and madly in love with his gorgeous French fiancé Josette duPres (also Kathryn Leigh Scott), Barnabas makes the mistake of sleeping with Josette’s maid, the beautiful blonde and blue-eyed Angelique Bouchard (Lara Parker). The wedding party’s arrival at the Collinwood of 1795 coincides with Vicki’s sojourn to the past, and she is witness to the terrible events that unfold even as she is caught up in them herself.
Angelique’s powers of witchcraft allow her to manipulate the Collins family so that she may marry Barnabas instead of Josette. Her spells grow increasingly vicious: not content with magically forcing Josette to marry Barnabas’ uncle and best friend Jeremiah Collins (Anthony George), Angelique even threatens to kill Barnabas’ beloved sister Sarah if he reveals her secret. She secures Jeremiah’s death, raises him as a ghost to torment Barnabas, makes sure that Vicki is a victim of fanatical witch hunter Reverend Trask (Jerry Lacy), and engineers the curse to turn Barnabas into a vampire. Eventually, consumed with guilt and regret, she tries to undo the spell, only to end up as Barnabas’ first victim as a vampire.
The curse requires that Barnabas kill for blood, and in his new life he becomes the mysterious “Collinsport Strangler.” After his secret is revealed to his hard-hearted father Joshua Collins (Louis Edmonds) the men seek a cure together. Unfortunately the not-quite-dead Angelique is now vengefully determined that her curse will never be lifted.
Angelique is just as determined that Vicki be hanged as a witch in her stead. Vicki continues to struggle to save the Collins family even as Angelique tries to destroy them. But Vicki’s loyalty and noble heart isn’t enough to save her, and she is hanged on the day that Joshua chains Barnabas into his coffin, where he will lie for the next two hundred years. But our plucky little governess is spared the noose when another temporal flare-up sends her back to the séance, where no time has passed since her disappearance into the past.
Now that the doorway had been opened Curtis and his tight group of writers and directors felt no compunction about turning Dark Shadows into a daily horror hit parade. As the series began its third year mad Dr. Lang (Addison Powell) is introduced, having constructed a man from dead body parts as a cure for Barnabas. The creature Adam (Robert Rodan) lives, having somehow drained Barnabas of his “affliction.” Angelique returns in the person of Cassandra Collins, new wife to Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds). She immediately begins casting a series of spells on nearly every member of the family. Eventually Cassandra’s “brother,” the devilish Nicholas Blair (Humbert Allen Astredo), would come to Collinwood to secure the world for Satan. Soon there were a number of vampires, ghosts, and werewolves prowling the great estate.
At this point the focus of the series shifted, from Victoria Winters’ quest for identity to Barnabas and Julia’s fight against the darker supernatural forces that sought to crush them. Barnabas would switch back and forth from vampire to human and back again, but from that point on he would struggle against all the evil elements plaguing the Collins family in order to save them.
The arrival of the ghost of Quentin Collins (David Selby), a brooding spirit determined to claim little David Collins for himself while ousting the family from their ancestral home, heralded the series’ second flashback. This time Barnabas would travel back into the past to uncover Quentin’s origin, to the year 1897, where he found himself a vampire again. Collinwood at the turn of the century is as besieged as its 1960s counterpart: Quentin becomes a zombie and a werewolf, Laura the Phoenix returns, Angelique is summoned from hell, and another cruel Reverend Trask seeks to take Collinwood for his own. Trask finds stiff competition in the other vampires menacing the family, the various ghosts and gypsies, and the arrival of Count Petofi (Thayer David).
Petofi initially seeks to re-attach his magical hand, severed long ago by the gypsies that plague him. After possessing various members of the household, Petofi decides to steal the comely body of Quentin Collins for himself, with the intention of taking it to the future. Barnabas and Angelique team up for the first time and, with the efforts of a time-travelling Julia Hoffman, are successful in saving Quentin and destroying Petofi.
The 1897 storyline gave Dark Shadows its highest ratings. The show was now mostly popular with children who would literally “run home from school” to watch it. This popularity was draining on the show’s creative team, and after reaching the heights of the previous storyline they attempted to keep the train on the tracks by dipping into Dan Curtis’ endless horror lexicon. This time they would attempt to adapt the terrifying world of elder gods and indescribable monsters created by author H.P. Lovecraft and fit it into the Collinwood setting. Lovecraft’s C’thulu mythos would translate into Dark Shadows’ Leviathan storyline. The Leviathans were an ancient shapeshifting race of beings devoted to world domination and removal of the human race from this plane of reality. And a brainwashed Barnabas would help them.
The Leviathan storyline is perhaps the queerest of all the storylines Dark Shadows attempted before, and it is this “queerness” that offers one potential explanation for the reasons it faltered. (Other explanations include the state of the series’ creators, exhausted after attempting to keep up with the hectic pace of day-to-day to fantasy, who found that the complex narrative they had constructed was in danger of collapsing around them; the changing tastes of the nation after several years of programs like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Munsters, and The Addams Family, which facilitated shows grounded in reality such as Norman Lear’s All in the Family; and the decision to make Barnabas a villain again, at least temporarily.)
The Leviathan period is set in the series’ present; that is, 1969-1970. It features all the series popular characters: Barnabas as a human and as a reluctant vampire, aided as always by Julia Hoffman; Quentin, now an immortal being with a hideous portrait that keeps him young, not unlike Wilde’s Dorian Gray; the return of Angelique as a witch married to a mortal, having forsaken her powers a la Samantha Stephens; Chris Jennings (Don Briscoe), suffering the curse of the werewolf and seeking a variety of cures; and the return of Nicholas Blair, revealed to have planned the Leviathan take over during his last imprisonment in hell. The story speeds along at an insane pace designed to prevent the audience from boredom. Unfortunately this pace proved to be its biggest flaw, as the series lost the thread of its continuity several times while the writers scrambled to revise and re-revise storyline expectations. But the ratings began to plummet.
Despite its flaws, the Leviathan storyline has several fun elements that echo Dark Shadows at its most popular. The series’ queerness at this point is most inherent in its embrace of late 1960s fashion trends, including brightly colored mini-skirts and big big hair; its reliance on shirtless beefcake (Don Briscoe, David Selby, and Jeb Hawkes, the Leviathan leader, played by new-comer Chris Pennock, were all photographed in various stages of undress for the teen magazine pin-up spreads); and the continuing importance of the trope of the reluctant monster and its struggle with identity, now embodied by Barnabas, Quentin, Angelique, and even once-soulless Jeb, as the writers struggled to find reasons to humanize him. The series flirted with camp on several occasions during this period, and it is this storyline that features the queerest of all Dark Shadows episodes: Barnabas, the former vampire, is brow-beaten by Angelique, trying to maintain her humanity and still looking fabulous, while Barnabas subsequently struggles to save Chris the werewolf after he fails to devour an enormous lavender flower with obviously plastic petals that would have cured him of his lycanthropy, as Chris’ girlfriend weeps and wails under the weight of a huge white fright wig, while scenery-chewing Jeb Hawkes cowers in fear from the distant howls of the werewolf who wants to devour him. It doesn’t get much more complicated, campier, or queerer than that.
As the writers struggled to wrap up the Leviathan episodes, they decided to move the series sideways in time instead of the traditional backwards. Parallel Time 1970, as it has come to known to the series still-devoted legion of fans, returned to the series’ gothic roots, and therefore “borrowed” heavily from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, memorably filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940, and starring queer icons Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and George Sanders. Rebecca also famously features the wicked Mrs. Danvers character, devoted to (and in love with) her dead mistress, and who falls squarely into the familiar “dead/murderous” lesbian trope. Grayson Hall portrays Hoffman in the Parallel Time storyline, no longer a doctor but instead the Mrs. Danvers-esque housekeeper in love with the dead Angelique, who ruled this twisted Collinwood before her mysterious death. Fully embodying the monster queer threatening the heteronormative patriarchal society, Hoffman is a nightmarish character gleefully attempting to drive Quentin’s new bride Maggie Collins (Kathryn Leigh Scott) to insanity.
In its final months Dark Shadows found itself trapped by the conditions that facilitated so many other series’ proverbial “jumping of the shark”, i.e. the point when a television series, out of fresh ideas and unable to summon the sparks of creativity that made it popular in the first place, begins to decline. The introduction of a new love interest for Barnabas (Roxanne Drew, portrayed by the nymphish Donna Wandrey) and a new “cute kid” playmate for David (Hallie Stokes, played by the comely Kathy Cody) heralded this decline. And despite the casting of a pair of sexy ghosts (James Storm and pre-Charlie’s Angels Kate Jackson), the series began to repeat itself when it re-recreated The Turn of the Screw, which it had done barely two years earlier when Quentin’s ghost threatened the household. Even jumping back to 1840 for another stab at the old “Barnabas and Julia must go back in time to save the Collins family” riff failed to raise ratings. As Barnabas declared that a dying Angelique was his “one true love”, the death knell could be heard. The series wrapped up by jumping to another band of Parallel Time, this time set in 1841, where Jonathan Frid and Lara Parker were granted the opportunity to portray star-crossed lovers who were neither vampire nor witch.
And then it was over. Five years and over 1,200 episodes later, Dark Shadows gave up the ghost (and the vampire, and the werewolf, and the witch), and the doors to Collinwood were closed.
But not forever.
Those were the days !
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