Posted Mar 27, 09 01:23 PM
The Joy of Wire Bats
The old blue pull-down turntable record player – the one with the built-in spectrum side lights – spun “Haunted House,” a square LP cut from the back of a Honeycombs cereal box.
Above, basement drapes disguised the early afternoon sun. Stuffed animals on nooses dangled from ceiling panels. Along the shallow-carpeted floor, inverted dining chairs roofed with clothes-pinned bedsheets formed a formidable tunnel of foreboding to greet the first victim down the steps.
Just then, the upstairs door opened. Mom came halfway down, glanced around and said, “Nice, but I’m doing the wash.”
What, no time for wire bats?
Ha. THAT was an acquired taste I’d notch a few years later after high school tennis practice. Late evening meals happily coincided with re-runs of Dark Shadows, ABC-TV’s long-running (1966-71) Gothic daytime melodrama whose forays into the paranormal became… well, heh heh, decreasingly the foray, increasingly the normal. And – due to the shoot-fast demands of daytime programming -- exponentially a few sandwiches short of seamless production standards.
Oh, sure. Hovering microphones tended to make more in-frame appearances than most guest stars (Kate Jackson, Harvey Keitel). And attempts to funnel the series’ supernatural elements into a never-mastered technical trickery appear to have resulted in a resounding, “You know – the hell with it!” But it’s that close-up of Jonathan Frid (as vampire Barnabas Collins) that I’m not going to forget. Focused… Completely… Suddenly, off camera, as if the grips dropped an entire set wall on the soundstage floor, everyone hears a colossal
WHAM!!!
Frid whips his head towards the sound. And the camera keeps rolling.
Who cares about summer vacations spent at home? This was all the camp I’d ever need.
But, for the uninitiated, let’s inch back. Dark Shadows chronicles lonely governess Victoria Winters tracing her murky past to the strange goings-on around the Collinwood estate in Maine. Wouldn’t you know Collinwood is one of those spooky-looking mansions right on the edge of a cliff, where it’s perpetually night and the ocean waves crash on the rocks a suicide-leap below. Hey, if the Collins family doesn’t mind…
So after a fledgling debut season, insert major network detour. Brit cousin Barnabas shows up. Like Victoria, he’s also lonely. That’s good. But he’s also in the throes of a vampire curse. Not so good. Soon the Collins family tree starts sprouting ghosts, freaky paintings, lotsa time travel, frequent visits to the mausoleum and one especially firecracker of a witch named Angelique.
Naturally, all this unfolds – then unheard of -- in the constructs of a soap opera format. Remember when Deidre Hall got an exorcism on Days of Our Lives? Exactly what show do you think her writers were channeling?
As matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Joan Bennett famously veteran-anchored an Emmy-nominated career turn. (Genre purists take note. This would pave the way for her bloodless school marm role in Italian ultra-violent horror director Dario Argento’s minor masterpiece, Suspiria.) Night of the Iguana’s Grayson Hall was an indelibly empathetic Dr. Julia Hoffman, and – pre-Falcon Crest – David Selby as shape-shifting Quentin Collins grounded the staginess with a theater-polished command. As viewers zeroed on actors delivering remarkable conviction to the proceedings, viewers were far less likely to be distracted by, say, Styrofoam coffin lids.
Never the complete illusion yet somehow the complete spell, Dark Shadows was a deservedly addictive sensation that launched two theatrical sequels: House of Dark Shadows and the disastrously-cut Night of Dark Shadows. On-a-roll series creator Dan Curtis even landed A-list Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Bette Davis, Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart for his haunted house fav, Burnt Offerings.
So why remake Dark Shadows? In 1991, NBC did just that in the form of a 12-episode“revival” – airing in a Chiller marathon on Sunday March 29th.
This time, they’ve got a budget.
Skeptics, I hear ya. But you’ll be enticed to know that the new gussied-up incarnation of your beloved Dark Shadows – is it just me, or am I the only one who finds that title really, really funny? – won the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror’s Saturn Award for Best TV Series, Genre. It also racked a couple of Emmy noms, winning one.
Chariots of Fire’s Ben Cross wears Barnabas’s teeth nicely, amping up the sexuality (here, with Joanna Going) reminiscent of Frank Langella in the stage version of Dracula. Roy Thinnes. Jean Simmons. Character actor Eddie Jones. Good cast – really good sign. Personally, I was startled to see an extremely young and, even then, aggressively assured Joseph (Third Rock from the Sun) Gordon-Levitt as grandson David Collins.
But, like an old friend, the signature Dark Shadows theme I was not startled to hear. I was relieved. Strangely floating. Vaguely vibrating. Crescendo-ing like the sea between decades and time. It’s a genre comfort blanket, bringing back memories of fog-choked New England manors, restless tides on rocks, and stately centuries-old mysteries – the best kind.
To think that composer Bob Cobert also scored The $100,000 Pyramid.
Posted by Mike Kalvoda at 01:23 PM