Dark Shadows

6. Cultural Context: Camp, Reception, and Secondary Texts

Chapter 6 Cultural Context Camp, Reception, and Secondary Texts 69 As its immense popularity suggests, Dark Shadows may have been just the right show at just the right cultural moment. In its first years or so on the air, it was considered by some to be reminiscent of the work of Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps because of its suspense and the presence of 1940s Hollywood mystery icon Joan Bennett. Soon however, it was being decoded by many viewers and commentators against the backdrop of the 1960s counterculture and especially via that era’s growing appreciation of dissident ideologies, psychedelic aesthetics, and campy irony. Although Dark Shadows deliberately ignored the actual day-to-day issues of that very volatile era (political assassinations , race and racism, the ongoing nuclear arms and space race, the war in Vietnam), it did tap into broader countercultural trends of the youth movement, including women’s liberation and the search for alternative spiritualities. In one of the few academic papers written on Dark Shadows in recent years, Rick Worland argues that the Jeb Hawkes/Leviathan sequence does contain a (conflicted, paranoid) commentary on the era’s youth movement, as Jeb literally grows from a demon seed a la Rosemary’s Baby into some sort of monstrous hippie out to topple his more staid elders at Collinwood (“Dark Shadows, 1970”). 70 Chapter 6 Just as some sectors of the counterculture were becoming interested in arcane spiritual subject matters like hypnosis, the occult, and the tarot, so too were those major thematic elements on Dark Shadows. Specifically, witchcraft as a form of female empowerment and/or resistance to patriarchal Christianity was easily thematized on Dark Shadows via the character of Angelique. This trope was common throughout the era and appears in popular texts as varied as the sitcom Bewitched, the children’s movie Pufnstuf (1970), and George A. Romero’s Season of the Witch (1972; a.k.a. Jack’s Wife a.k.a. Hungry Wives), his follow up to Night of the Living Dead (1968). Although actual hallucinogens or hallucinogenic drug trips were never spoken of at Collinwood, the bodies and souls of the Collins family were repeatedly affected by altered states of consciousness and visualized on-screen with swirling colorful special effects that “sometimes looked like small-screen LSD trips” (Hamrick, Barnabas, xvii). Perhaps most importantly, when Dark Shadows premiered in 1966, there was a thriving “monster culture” in the United States, a renaissance in horror movie production, popularity, and related ancillary texts (Skal, Monster Show, 229–85). This monster culture appealed to both children and young adults, baby boomer consumers who were redefining all aspects of American popular culture. This youthful monster culture arguably began in the mid- to late 1950s, when small film companies like American International Pictures (AIP) “discovered” the niche youth market and exploited it by making and/or distributing low-budget rock-and-roll films, science fiction/ horror films, and teenage monster movies. England’s Hammer Films contributed to the trend with lush color remakes of classic gothic stories such as Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Horror of Dracula (1958), Curse of the Werewolf (1961), and The Phantom of the Opera (1962). In the early 1960s, AIP stalwart Roger Corman switched from black-and-white science fiction films to color widescreen gothic extravaganzas (often starring 71 Cultural Context Vincent Price) such as House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Haunted Palace (1963), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). Many of those films centered on time-tripping or reincarnated spirits out for revenge, as did gothic horror melodramas from Europe such as Black Sunday (1960) and Nightmare Castle (1965). Even the Hollywood majors got into the game with haunted house stories such as Twentieth Century Fox’s The Innocents (1961) and MGM’s The Haunting (1963). As should be apparent, all of these films served in some way as templates for what Dark Shadows would try to do just a few years later: adapt classic gothic literature into audiovisual form for a new generation of media-savvy horror fans. As discussed previously, television too was not immune to horror and/or suspense during these years. Anthology series like The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–64), Thriller (NBC, 1960– 62), and The Outer Limits (ABC, 1963–65) presented science fiction, fantasy, and horror tales in more or less straightforward ways, but as the decade wore on, “fantastic family sit-coms” like Bewitched...