House of Dark Shadows is packed with the same melodrama and maintains most of the same characters and actors from the show. With the film, Curtis was able to use a more traditional vampire story instead of painting Barnabas as a tragic figure, and he had a much bigger budget at his disposal. There was more to see here since blood and gore weren’t allowed on television for fear of supposedly scarring the minds of the after-school bunch. Fueled by the show’s success, Curtis would go on to direct a film based on the soap, House of Dark Shadows, in 1970. The addition of Barnabas Collins, a tragic and reluctant vampire played by Canadian actor Jonathan Frid, boosted the show’s ratings sky-high and also sparked a massive fandom. The show initially didn’t do well until the introduction of a supernatural theme. Gothic stories like Jane Eyre inspired him, and ABC picked up the treatment for daytime TV, specifically the 3:30 pm slot, which surprised him at first, thinking it would be better for night viewing. In the documentary Master of Dark Shadows (2019), we learn that Curtis came up with the concept from a dream he had of a young woman on a nighttime train ride. There are many mysteries in Collinsport, but it’s not until the second season onwards that the supernatural, parallel timelines, time travel, and reincarnations would steal the hearts of fans everywhere. It’s here that we meet several family members and their various eccentricities. She is hired by Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard (Joan Bennett), the matriarch of the Collins family, to look after her troubled nephew David (David Henesy). The saga begins when governess Victoria Winters (Alexandra Isles) arrives at the remote town of Collinsport, Maine. My late mother, Patricia, was such a huge fan that she named me after one of the show’s characters, Carolyn Stoddard, daughter of the Dark Shadows matriarch.
The half-hour show that first aired in 1966 and ended in 1971 would become a television phenomenon and one that endures to this day. Writer, director, and producer Dan Curtis (1927-2006) pioneered genre TV shows like The Night Stalker and classic horror remakes, but one of his first creations, the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, is related to me in a fangirl way.
The House of Dark Shadows and the Legacy of Daytime Gothic SeptemBy
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