The Bright Legacy of Dark Shadows

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your Memorial Day cookout you're listening to imaginary worlds a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief i'm eric malinsky along with my assistant producer stephanie billman hello so you came to me with this topic you said we should do an episode about

and I had heard of Dark Shadows I'd always heard that there was this daytime soap opera in the 60s which had a vampire in it which always seemed really weird to me and I also remember there was a Tim Burton movie of Dark Shadows like over 10 years ago, which bombed. And that's pretty much all I knew. So what was, what, what interested you about Dr. Well, I don't think you really knew this until we started talking about wanting to do this topic, but I've always been fascinated by it.

I since I was a little girl like the first time I read Bram Stoker's Dracula I was five at the most maybe six and that kind of like no pun intended sucked me into the world of vampires And for me, while I understand and I appreciate the scary vampire, the monster, the predator, what I've always been fascinated by are the emotionally complex portrayals of vampires. So those who are conflicted about the fact that they've basically lost their humanity, they have to feed on other humans.

Those who, you know, also have to like watch their people that they love die. So for me, those have always been the juicy vampire role. And one day a couple of months ago, I was sick. And as you know, when I get sick, I like to watch pop culture documents. And I came across one about dark shadows. And that's where I learned that Barnabas Collins, who was the vampire you're talking about in dark shadows, helped establish that particular vampire trope in the mainstream.

So I wanted to kind of explore how Dark Shadows came to bring in the supernatural and how it inadvertently created this trope that still exists to this day. Yeah, it's funny, because I have to admit, I was still kind of skeptical, even when you pitched it like that, because I feel like the way the zeitgeist is going right now, I feel like people want scary vampires again.

like Sinner is is a big hit and those vampires actually did scare me much to the disappointment of people I know who love the movie including my husband yeah so in the remake of Nosferatu from last year was was gruesome but it was excellent and I feel like the sort of emotionally conflicted brooding romantic vampires become kind of passe but then when I sort of dug into the research

I couldn't believe how important Dark Shadows was. And actually, my reaction was, how have we not done an episode about Dark Shadows? I know, exactly. So tell me about the guy who created Dark Shadows, Dan Curtis.

Dan Curtis, back then, was a known television producer and director. He was mostly known, though, for golf shows, of all things. He loved golf, so that kind of made sense, but he was looking to brand... And that's kind of where Dark Shadow is. So I talk with three experts who are steeped in the lore and history of Dark Shadows. First one is Danielle Galater. She's the host of the podcast Terror at Collinwood, which is about dark shadows. And she said it all started when...

Darren Curtis had a dream one night about a young girl on a train at night. and the train was going to a fog shrouded mansion in New England and the dream ended when she knocked on the door and the door was opening. And he couldn't shake this dream, and he told his wife about it, and Dan Curtis' wife said that sounds like a really good show. That sounds like a good TV show.

And he's like, no, no, no. And he just couldn't shake it. So he had a meeting with an ABC executive to pitch something else. And he brought up. This dream that he had, and he did pitch it as a show. He initially actually pitched it as a prime time.

series, but the person he pitched it to at ABC told him, I want to do this as a daytime show. And Dan Curtis said, no, no, it's a primetime show. But ultimately, it ended up being a daytime show. He had no intention of doing anything supernatural. He had no intent. show, the feel of it was not what we today would call horror. The feel was what we would have called gothic. That is Mark Drwidziak. He's a journalist and author who has written books about Dan Kirk.

launches this in June of 1966 on ABC and it's an immediate failure. The way I always like to put it is there was nothing scary about Dark Shadows during the first year of its existence except And then Dan Curtis has a flash of inspiration. The show is going down the tune. and Dan was watching the show at home with his daughters. Dan Curtis' kids said to him, Daddy, make it really scary.

They didn't say supernatural. They said, well, gee, Dad, you're going to get canceled anyway. Why not make it scary? So he goes into the... And he says, let's put a ghost into this. We'll resolve this storyline by having a ghost emerge from the painting in the old house. And the ghost will save the Victoria Winters. That's the character he first dreamed about, the young woman taking a train to a spooky old mansion. They all kind of understand one thing. They're crossing a...

There had never been anything supernatural in daytime storytelling. Daytime television, up to that point, soap operas, if you will. The primary audience was women at home during the day. My grandmother watched as the world turns. She used to do her iron.

We would come for visits. She would, every afternoon, set up the ironing board in our living room and turn on the television set and announce to the world that she was about to watch her story. She never called it As the World Turned. She never called it a soap. She called it my story. And it was. And she could have it because it was the most boring thing I'd ever seen in my life. I didn't know why anybody would want to watch a soap opera when I was...

So what happens when they introduce a ghost into Dark Shadows? There's a noticeable blip in the viewership. Not big, not major. But Dan Serta starts to think, well, maybe we're on... So now they have another character who's coming back from Phoenix, Arizona. So one of the writers says, well, the ghost worked. She's coming from Phoenix, Arizona. Let's make... It's like, what, what, what, what?

a mythological fire creature. And the phoenix bends the fire with its wings! Hurry David, hurry! Before it's too light! Now, they're using special effects on a soap opera. It's not sophisticated by today's standards, but they do have overlapping images of fire on top of the actress playing the phoenix. And the ghost was actually quite well done. But, Danielle said.

The show was still in danger of cancellation, even though the ratings had gone up a bit with the ghosts and the Laura the Phoenix storyline. So Dan Curtis thinks to himself, What's the scariest thing I can put in this show? The scariest thing for him as a kid was Lugosi's Dracula. I bid you welcome. He said it scared the hell out of him when he was a kid. And that was the scariest thing you could think of was a vampire. So he said, well, I'm going to put a vampire on the show.

A vampire named Barnabus Collins. Yes? I'd like to see Mrs. Stoddard, if you'd be so kind. Mrs. Stoddard. This is Colin Wood, isn't it? Yes. Then perhaps you do be the courtesy to inform Mrs. Stoddard that her cousin is calling and wishes to pay his respects. Her cousin? Yes, her cousin from England. When the character of Barnabas appeared in April of 1967, he mesmerized not just the housekeeper, but everyone watching. And no one was prepared for what would happen next.

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Prescription products require an online consultation with a health care provider who will determine if a prescription is appropriate. Restrictions apply. See website for full details and important safety information. Daniel Galater and Mark Dwidziak told me until Barnabas Collins came along. The archetype of the vampire hadn't changed much since 1897 when Dracula was published.

From 1897 to 1967, a distance of 70 years, there is no major advance on the vampire character. The vampire is predator. And there's things we centralize in. We humanize him a bit. We have to do that because we've got to clean him up. By the time you get to Lugosi, he's been cleaned up enough that he can enter an English drawing room and not draw. But he's still Predator. He still always reverts to his primary jo- They hire a Shakespearean actor named...

Who was a classically trained Shakespearean actor who had gone to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He'd gone to Yale Drama School. And the only problem was, Jonathan didn't know how to play a vampire. So Jonathan did what a trained actor does. He created an interior life for this character because he's got to play it. He's got to find a way. Jeff Thompson has also written books about Dan Curtis, and he's written a lot for Dark Shadows fanzines and web...

Jonathan himself said, I didn't play the vampire. I did not play the bite. I played a guy with a hang-up, like an alcoholic, somebody who has to hide and lie. He is posing as a cousin from England, but he is, in truth, one of their ancestors. So he is infiltrating his own family. It's uncanny. What is? That portrait over there, have you seen it?

Yes. It's extraordinary, isn't it? Well, if it weren't for the clothes, forgive me for staring, but for the moment it seems as though I'd seen it. Ghost. The likeness is remarkable. The Collins blood always had a certain persistent strength. He said that to me the scariest monster is alive. Somebody who has to lie and then has to tell another lie to cover up that lie and then another lie and another lie until finally he becomes desperate, frantic, and even violent.

Jonathan didn't know how to play a vampire. But he did know one thing. He knew how long he... Because he had a three-month contract. And he also knew something else. He knew how it was going to end after 90 days. of lumber sticking out of his chest because that's what Dan intended. Barnabas was brought on to be nothing more vampire threat, he would wreak havoc for several weeks, be discovered, hunted down, and have a stay.

That was it. Well, what happens is that the fans start to respond to what Jonathan's doing. I was 10 years old. I start to hear there's a vampire. Now again, remember, as I said, I did... But I had to check out the fact that there was... So I started watching Dark Shadows, and I got hooked. I was in the third grade, and I was homesick from school. And so I was turning the channels. As I was turning the channels, I came upon a scene.

And in this scene, I saw two children, a boy and a girl my age, going down into a creepy cellar where there was a coffin. the coffin lid opened and out sprang the vampire bar. So from that moment on, I naturally was hooked. The time slot moved a couple of times, and at one point, I was not able to run home from school in time to see. But during those times, my mother, who was a soap opera fan, was interested in the show, and so she would tell me what...

And now Dan's got a problem, which is you can't kill off the most popular character on the show. What do you do? They come up with the idea, and I say they because it's the writers, it's Dan, and it's Jonathan. Everybody gets some crap. They decided to give Barnabas something that no vampire had ever had. Didn't need it. Not required because it's not in his job description. They gave him a conscience. Now, what the hell does a vampire...

giving a conscience to a tiger. But they decided, well, let's give this guy a conscience. Let's have him question his own nature. Let's have him battle. Let's give him guilt! Guilt for cr- And so they decided, well, let's take the show back in time and show Barnabas as a human before he became a vampire. and then with the addition of Laura Parker as the vengeful witch Angelique. Angelique cursed Barnabas with vampirism because he would not love her. That is my curse!

And you will live with it through all eternity! I'm gonna wait a minute. a bat puppet on a string. Typically, the power of the vampire comes from the fact that they've been alive for decades or centuries. In that time, they've honed their skills, acquired wealth and other types of power. But Barnabas doesn't have any... Barnabas did not see and experience everything that all of the other immortal vampires did as they lived through the ages.

became a vampire in 1795-96, but he was not free and living in the world all of that time. He missed the 1800s completely in the first half. because he was in a chained coffin. He was an 18th century man who suddenly was thrust into the modern era of electricity and telephones, both of which he eschewed. As a man out of time, he has an aspect of vulnerability to him, even before his conscience kicks in.

They came up with this wonderful moment, which really defined him as a character. It was the turning point of the character. And it was that Barnabas is going down this trail of really preying on the current day. and and he feels like he's entitled to it because he has been he's been cursed locked in a coffin for 200 years, he comes out with a vengeance. And vengeance is the key word.

The only person who can touch him is, and it's the ghost of his sister, Sarah, a little girl who died in the 1790s. Everybody sees Sarah. Sarah comes and she saves different people from barn. And finally she comes to him. I missed you so terribly, Sarah. Why didn't you come to me sooner? You knew how much I wanted to see you, didn't you? And she reminds him of things that he told her as a little girl about being a good person. She says to him that she won't ever come.

What have I done? Hurt people. Only when it was necessary. Nope. That's not true. I know that's not true. So do you. All right, Sarah, that's all over and done with. Everything is going to be fine from now on as long as you're... not through doing bad things. And heat just dissolves. He just absolutely collapses. I forbid you to leave! I beg you to stay, Sam. It's an amazingly active moment. It's an amazingly, you know, and everything you need to know about Barnard.

in that one moment and at that moment he attempts to reclaim his humanity he attempts to turn the corner They also added a werewolf character named Quentin who could talk to Barnabas about his addiction.

Do you think I wanted to do that? Now you're Chris' friend. One moment you help him the next minute. Quentin, please! Now don't make me hate myself any more than I do. I don't care how you feel now. You've got to control yourself. Danielle says, this is when the modern vampire was born.

Pre-Barnabas, the vampire was typically portrayed as a straight up pre- That is not to say there were never sympathetic vampires before Barnabas, but Barnabas was the first to make a meteoric impact, a game-changing impact. There was something else going on in the 1960s which made Barnabas so fascinating to people. I taught a course at Kent State University on vampires on film and television. Each decade, we showed how the vampire reflected.

the culture and the history at the time. Well, first off, the 1960s. To get to the 1960s, you've got to go to the 1950s. And the 1950s is a moment of conform, conform, conform. Everything is being turned upside down and inside. and everybody's questioning their place in the 90s.

So how does Barnabas fit that? He's perfect. He's absolutely perfect. Here's a vampire questioning his own nature and saying, During the 60s where you had this kind of counterculture movement happening, kids felt like outsiders, you know? Kids just went bananas for Dark Shadows. There were tons of merchandise, games, model kits, bubblegum cards, comic books. Puzzles, masks, trading cards, records. paperback books, comic books.

There's Barnabas and Quentin and the witch, like in Dark Shadows on TV. They make great decorations for your room. They're so soft and cuddly. Now the world of dark shadows adjoins, and a strange view gained by Milton Brattle, the one of his columns dark shadows dead.

The teen magazines caught on to it as well. Like the teeny boppers even reading 16 magazine. Dark Shadows was always in 16 magazine. Right there with, you know, the teen heartthrobs like David Cassidy and, you know, and people like that. When Jonathan Frid appeared on the game show What's My Line, one of the blindfolded panelists said, I never heard such a happy audience. And it sounded like a lot of young voices. Are you particularly appealing to the young? Yes.

Many adults found him appealing too. The sexual revolution was happening, and vampirism has often been seen as a metaphor for sexuality. Jonathan Frid used to talk about how he'd get letters in the mail from, you know... from people who wanted to be bitten by Barnabas, and there were very kind of racy letters that he would get. I mean, he'd get thousands of letters every week, and many of them were...

He used to have kids, you know, parties, kids help him open his fan mail and he would tell them don't read it, don't read the fan mail because some of that stuff was inappropriate. At the peak of its popularity, Dark Shadows had 20 million viewers Dan Curtis wanted to go even bigger. In 1970 he made a movie called House of Dark Shadows, a theatrical movie. But rather than cementing dark shadows in the public imagination, the movie ended up making the TV series crumble apart.

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The 1970 movie House of Dark Shadows takes place in its own self-contained universe. So Dan Curtis got to tell the story he originally wanted. Barnabas shows up, he pretends to be a distant relative, and eventually they discover he's a monster. Come back to Collinwood, that house of dark shadows where life and death go on as usual. Mark says it was a real horror movie.

it ends up killing everybody. It was a real shock to a Dark Shadows fan who went to see it and had really fallen in love with all these characters. And then you go see this movie and, you know, it's a blood... so different from in tone than the series.

However, that's not really what hurt the series because those were two separate universes. You could, even as a Dark Shadows fan, you could go... that was a one-off that was a movie what really hurt was the fact that it took him so damn long to film They didn't film in their usual sets. They filmed in historic mansions and other locations outside of New York City. At the same time, the TV show was being filmed back in the city with different cast members.

They had a lot of bad weather, a lot of delays, and it kept the major cast out of the main soap opera for a long time. People kept saying, when's Barnabas coming back? Barnabas is up shooting a movie right now. Jonathan Frid, he didn't like the movie. He didn't like it. It was gory. Because it was gory and Barnabas was more of the predator vampire that Dan Curtis initially envisioned him as. He was not as nuanced. so jonathan And Dan Curtis was... So he fired Jonathan Frick.

at that point. I mean, he fired the star of his show. He fired Barnabas Collins, a pop culture icon. He's the one on the board game, you know, so he fired Barnabas, which he couldn't do because Jonathan's people got back to him and said, Jonathan still has three months left on his contract before the option to renew. Dan said, well, if you're not going to play Barnabas in the movie...

you're not going to play him on the show either. And he created a different character for Jonathan Fred Bramwell Collins in a parallel universe who was Barnabas' son in that parallel universe. This was another problem with Dark... Today, it's common for a sci-fi fantasy show to have a deep lore and mythology, but not a soap opera. You see, the idea of a soap opera has always been that the story moves very, very...

And the whole idea of a soap opera is if you missed a week, you didn't miss anything. You missed a week of Dark Shadows. Forget about it. And then, Danielle says, the executives at ABC told Dan Curtis he had to bring the production cost down. They had a meeting. They came out of that meeting with Dark Shadows being... It sounds to me like Dan Curtis was done. He was kind of ready to move on.

For a while, Dark Shadows was on a similar trajectory to Star Trek. Both shows debuted in 1966. They were groundbreaking in terms of their genres. The fans felt like the shows got canceled too soon. And both shows found a new audience in syndication. That's how Danielle first discovered Dark Shadows. Like Maxwell Smart, when I came around, I missed it by that much. I was born in the early 70s, so I missed the original run of the show.

And they ran Dark Shadows at the same 4 o'clock in the afternoon every weekday. And it was just like in the old days. And I used to get off the bus and just go to my grandmother's house, grandparents' house, and watch Dark Shadows. Then it came out on VHS and eventually DVD. There were fanzines and festivals. There were Dark Shadows novels and audio dramas featuring actors from the original cast.

Dark Shadows also became part of the conversation among horror fans and writers. Some people thought the idea of a morally conflicted vampire was a big improvement. Other people felt the opposite. Mark says, you can see the first response to Dark Shadows in a show called Kolchak the Night Stalker. It began with a made-for-TV movie and became a series in 1974. The show was about an investigative reporter named Kolchak, who came across a range of supernatural characters, including a vampire.

And this response to the response, if you will, gives you a vampire who is so animalistic and so predatory that he's not even allowed to talk. He only communicates. And the amazing thing is, who gives us the Night Stalker? Who's the producer behind the Night Stalker? Dan Curtis. Same guy who gives us the response to the traditional vampire in 67, then turns around and gives us the response.

Also, around this time, there are two books, two vampire novels on the bestseller list at the same time. The first one is Salem's Lot by Stephen King. That gives us really... because Stephen King believes Van... monstrous figures with teeth, and they ought to use them. And then in 1976, Anne Rice's book, Interview of the Vampire, was published. She was a Dark Shadows fan. Anne Rice took all of the questions of Dark Shadows and gives them to her immortals. And her immortals take...

in every sorts of direction. And from Anne Rice, we're gonna go and get Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we're gonna get Tru- And all of those kind of human... The influence of dark shadows goes beyond vamp- On the show, the actors played multiple characters in different time periods and timelines. Danielle says that approach of being a repertory company was one of the inspirations behind the show American Horror Story.

American Horror Story, the creator of that show, Ryan Murphy, was a huge Dark Shadows fan too. His grandmother used to make him watch Dark Shadows to toughen him up as a kid. yeah and he got he became a fan of it and he used to say dark shadow american horror story was his dark shadows so he did something similar in that he took his company of actors and would use them every season in different roles

So, but do you feel like, I wonder if it's been strip-mined too much, like too many of the things that were unusual about it have been done in other characters, that it would almost, if it came back, it would almost seem derivative of the things that were derivative of it. and isn't that frustrating because because those things were exactly i mean that's they it set the template and then all these things came along and imitated it or took ideas from it and then

where you bring back the original flavor, the original recipe, and it's like, oh, oh, this is copying this. It's ridiculous. But you might be right about that. And now other people have expressed that as well. Yeah. Mark disagrees. When Jonathan started to become, to his own amazement, a star, people started to really pay attention to the Barnabas Collins character. They started to call it the Vampire's Hamlet. And if Barnabas is sort of like the Hamlet character,

of vampire lore and literature, then he is open to interpretation. And the reason Dark Shadows worked was because they came up with a... The big lost opportunity was in 1991. NBC greenlit a reboot of Dark Shadows, produced by Dan Curtis. It was a primetime drama, not a daytime soap. An actor named Ben Cross was cast as Barnabas. He did a great job capturing the way Jonathan Frid played the character.

Yes. Good evening. Is Mrs. Collins at home? Who may I say is calling? You may tell her it is her cousin, Barnard. According to Jeff, fans of the original show liked the new interpretation, and it could have been a great opportunity to gain new fans, and the network was excited at first. The 1991 Dark Shadows was considered dynasty. That's how the NBC network thought of it. But the timing couldn't have been worse. Tonight, America at war. Reporting from Saudi Arabia, Tom Brokaw.

Unfortunately, the Persian Gulf War broke out. There was even a preemption on the West Coast and a news bulletin interrupting on the... The Persian Gulf War was a ratings phenomenon. And then... The leadership at NBC changed at about that time, and the new executives did not really care about... although later admitted that cancelling the show was... And then, of course, the 2012 Johnny Depp movie is quite divisive among fans because much of it is just far too silly.

The Tim Burton, Johnny Depp movie really played up the idea of Barnabas being a man out of time. Welcome home Barnabas Collins. How soon can the horses be ready? We don't have horses. We have a Chevy. Again, here's Mark. They told everybody they were going to do it seriously and then it turned out to be a farce. So there's been nothing really to re-energize the fans. long time. I mean I can't put a pretty picture on this. The fandom is getting smaller. The Phantom is getting older.

And that's because there has been nothing in the last 25 years. to rejuvenate the frame It's so interesting because of all the things that people complain about modern fandom, you know, oh, the Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, whatever. It wasn't like it was back when I was into it. These new people, they like it for the wrong reasons. I don't like any of the new stuff, blah, blah, blah.

But this is what you get in the opposite, you know, is like, well, if none of that happens, this, you know, I mean, I must be very frustrating to be a fan of Dark Shadows and to watch this, you know, to watch it kind of fade.

It is. I mean, I think it's always going to hold on a little bit. I think it's one great advantage is that it is cherished in the horror realm. And horror fans are the one group of fans. tend to look back. Somebody can say, I'm a comedy fan, and not know who the Marx Brothers are. Not know who Buster Keaton is. Your knowledge of comedy could start...

And you could say you're a comedy fan, and nobody would question it. In other realms, you could even look at Broadway and say that. There are people who say, oh, I love the theater. And their knowledge of theater starts around cats and... But horror fans, they can look back. They can be persuaded to look back. And you can say to a horror fan, like, you know, have you ever seen the 1950s?

No, no, no. Oh, you've never seen it? And all of a sudden, there's a crowd of people shaming. Oh, you've got to see it. How could you not? And then they see it, and they go, oh, it's amazing. I can't believe it. seen the thing and so i i think dark shadows will always kind of be there from that standpoint that's not a mass audience but it's something it is something which i think will at least keep And who knows, maybe somebody will finally find the right way to reboot.

and somebody could do it. If it ended up in the right hands, done correctly, I would not rule out it being able to work in any number of forms, television or film. Who knows? vampires are very hard to wipe out. They're very hard to eradicate. Even though Barnabas has come to represent a newer kind of vampire, he's not really at either end of the pendulum. You can't categorize him as a hero, or a monster, or an antihero.

He can be all of them, which, strangely enough, makes him feel more human and relatable. I'd like to see the character get another chance, but for the time being, he's still locked in a coffin. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Daniel Galater, Mark Dawidziak, and Jeff Thompson. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.

we have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that is only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. Last week, I talked with Aidan Sugano and Denis Jose Francois, who both worked on the animated film Nimona. We talked about the incredible effort it took to get this film made, and all the subtle things they put into the animation.

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