Supernatural thrills just seemed right for the time
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- May 6, 2023
- 345
For those of a certain age, these words still cast a spell: “A séance has been held in the great house at Collinwood, a séance which has suspended time and space and sent one girl on a frightening and uncertain journey into the past, back to the year 1795.”
There was something deliciously scary lurking in the very marrow of that expository sentence, a backbone-tingling, hair-raising frisson of anticipatory dread that made “Dark Shadows” so special.
I was 11 years old when the so-called “Gothic soap opera” made its debut, old enough to have left Santa Claus behind but still not ready to dismiss the possibility of witches and vampires. Having grown up with movies featuring Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man, I was already steeped in the legend and lore of the undead and the supernatural, being a “Chiller Theater” devotee.
Those Friday nights spent in front of the family black-and-white television set, the Jiffy Pop and a bottle of Cotton Club grape pop at the ready, were the stuff of childhood’s haunted happiness, and I looked forward to them with all my heart and soul.
Having friends over to share the experience made it even better, and those sleepovers forged a bond that lasted for a long time. Then we moved from the capital city to a small town, and it was time to make new friends, which is how I got to know Ghoulardi.
Wearing his trademark lab coat, sporting a fright wig and Fu Manchu whiskers, he was a Friday night favorite long before I joined the faithful, but I was immediately amused by his catch phrases — “Ova Dey” and “Turn Blue” among them — and enjoyed his off-the-cuff riffing as he spoke stream-of-consciousness rants.
The movies he hosted weren’t really what you’d call classics of the horror genre, but that wasn’t the point. You tuned in for the vibe, the craziness, the chance he might say something scandalous.
But by the time “Dark Shadows” premiered, Ernie Anderson had left the stage, which meant young, impressionable imaginations were waiting for something new, something daring, something unlike anything that had ever aired on afternoon network TV.
It was the era of the Super Ball and Thing banks, Hot Wheels cars, and Sting Ray bikes, a time when music and movies and novels and, well, everything else was wired for unpredictable tomorrows.
And into that landscape of pop culture renaissance suddenly appeared a half-hour television show that, after a fitful start, exploded into a nationwide sensation, filling a void not many of us realized had been waiting for just that kind of thrill ride.
What happened, to give it a name, was Barnabas Collins.
It’s rather difficult to explain just how massive a star Jonathan Frid became once his misanthropic vampire had made his debut, but in a time when the Monkees were in the Top Forty and “Star Trek” was creating its own buzz, Barnabas took a back seat to no one.
But it wasn’t simply a one-vampire show. “Dark Shadows” featured the powerful Collins clan, a crazy-quilt assemblage of blueblood snobs, greedy in the worst sense of the word, a family bent on dominating every aspect of life in Collinsport. Having Barnabas suddenly show up with his rakish style and debonair ways — not to mention his penchant for biting people in the neck — created an unsettling dynamic in the mansion in the fog in the night.
Victoria Winters was the governess who had become unstuck in time, and it was through her adventures that most of the action progressed, but along with her we got to know Angelique, Josette, the Reverend Trask, Ben Stokes, Nathan Forbes, Peter Bradford and Willie Loomis, Barnabas’ faithful Igor-like right-hand man.
“Dark Shadows” quickly became must-see-TV long before such a phenomenon existed, but with its popularity, at least in the world of the Catholic grade school I attended, there came a vicious backlash.
Seemed as if all that manifestation of the dark arts — séances and witches and vampires and the like — created a collective outrage among the church elders, who quickly decided “Dark Shadows” could not be viewed by any child enrolled in the school.
This made it even more mandatory, truly appointment television.
The one thing you didn’t want to do was tell a lot of preteens something was bad for them and, even worse, banning it, labeling it sinful and filing it under the harsh category of “condemned.”
So, of course, we gathered every afternoon en masse at a house in the neighborhood with a very nice console color TV set, a home with an understanding mom and lots of room for us to spread out and enjoy the thrills of “Dark Shadows,” creating lots of memories.
In the years that have passed since the show’s demise, I’ve begun collecting VCR tapes dating from its inception, and naturally, being older and somewhat wiser, certain flaws have become apparent. Flubbed dialog abounds, overhead microphones appear suddenly, props fall over, offstage sounds intrude and, when you get right down to it, the supernatural happenings are a bit hokey.
And let’s not even begin examining the acting itself, which, because “Dark Shadows” means so much to me, I’ll charitably call well intentioned and more than serviceable for its time, though it’s still difficult to get past the awful Grayson Hall as Julia Hoffman.
My advice is to treasure the scary good times and the memories they evoke, even as Barnabas Collins butchers some of his lines.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page, where a séance has been held and time bends.