Dark Shadows

Introduction: A Cult Television Show

Introduction A Cult Television Show 1 From June 1966 until April 1971, ABC-TV aired a daily thirty-minute soap opera titled Dark Shadows. The serial was unique in its subject matter, for Dark Shadows showcased a panoply of outright fantastic events enacted by supernatural characters such as vampires, werewolves, warlocks, and witches. Nonetheless, even within this eerie netherworld, many common soap opera narratives (alcoholism, jealousy, tangled love triangles) were also pressed into service. And like many other soap operas then and now, the show was clearly a family romance first and foremost: Dark Shadows tells the story of the extended Collins family of Collinsport, Maine, as it endures various supernatural tribulations throughout several centuries . Most of the show’s multiple story lines were adapted (or cribbed outright) from famous gothic literary sources, including Dracula, Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, The Lottery, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Cthulhu Mythos, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights. Science fiction tropes such as time travel and parallel universes were also pressed into service, and even popular horror films of the late 1960s like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) were incorporated into Dark Shadows story lines. From its conception and execution then, 2 Introduction Dark Shadows was a unique generic hybrid, a television show that has often been touted as the world’s first gothic soap opera. Dark Shadows also differed from other soap operas of its day in terms of its reception, for the show was pitched to (and enjoyed by) children, teenagers, and young adults of both sexes as well as housewives, the thought-to-be-usual soap opera audience . Because Dark Shadows aired in the late afternoon, young people of the era often ran home from school or skipped college classes to watch it. Ostensibly these viewers were less interested in the show’s traditional soap opera moorings and were instead attracted to the show’s fantastic nature, an appeal that mirrored the era’s fascination with the occult, alternative religions, and “monster culture” in general. Recognizing this, the show’s producers capitalized on that appeal by heavily marketing Dark Shadows to its youthful audience with hit records, comic books, games, novels, and two feature films, House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971). Following its network demise in the early 1970s, Dark Shadows was subsequently syndicated in the United States and sold abroad in Spanish-language versions. Yet like the vampire Barnabas Collins , the show’s most iconic figure, Dark Shadows would not stay dead and buried. Individual fan clubs formed during the show’s initial run, and they have waxed and waned in strength throughout the following decades. The first Dark Shadows fan convention was held in 1977, and weekend-long gatherings of fans and original cast members became annual events in the 1980s, drawing participants from all over North America. The show’s fans were instrumental in bringing Dark Shadows reruns to public television in the 1980s, and when the cable television boom of the 1990s occurred, the Sci-Fi channel aired the show in daily strip syndication. Ongoing Dark Shadows fandoms were also instrumental in producer Dan Curtis’s decision to remake the series as a prime-time weekly television serial that aired on NBC-TV during the spring of 1991, as well as a more recent 3 A Cult Television Show (and aborted) adaptation for the WB network in 2004. There was even some talk of a Dark Shadows Broadway musical to be cowritten by Rupert Holmes, Tony-winning songsmith of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1988), author of the comedic mystery Where the Truth Lies, and creator of the cult television hit Remember WENN (AMC, 1996–98). In 2008, Dark Shadows fans began to hear rumors of a new feature film version said to be produced by (and possibly starring) Johnny Depp and directed by Tim Burton. Dark Shadows is also the only American soap opera available to view and study in its entirety: MPI Video has released every episode from the show’s five-year run on both home video and DVD, including one lost episode that had to be reconstructed from still photographs. While supernatural or fantastic events on daytime television have become fairly commonplace in recent decades (a possession story line on Days of Our Lives [CBS, 1965–], vampires on Port Charles [ABC, 1997–2003], the entire concept behind Passions [NBC...