House of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis, 1970)

Welcome to Collinsport.  You'll never leave.

Where to begin?  My Gothic love affair with Dan Curtis' Dark Shadows - a five-days-a-week (theoretically, barring pre-empting by live sporting events, political resignations, etc) soap opera that began as a monochrome melodrama only to transform under the light of the moon into a full-blooded and full colour monster fest replete with vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, zombies, time travel and parallel dimensions - began when I was quite young.  Even though it was never shown on terrestrial British television, my grandmother had somehow accumulated amidst the mass of paperbacks that cluttered her house a number of the 1970s Marilyn Ross-penned (well actually Dan Ross-penned, utilising his wife's name as a pseudonym) tie-in books; I remember Barnabas, Quentin and the Mummy's Curse and Barnabas, Quentin and Dr Jekyll's Son were definitely two of them but the identity of the other (for there were three of course, everything comes in threes) is lost in the mists of time.  I don't know if she'd mistaken them for Mills & Boon romance novels or something, or if she'd actually read the back blurbs and decided that stories about a vampire and a werewolf teaming up to take on a mummy, the scion of Stevenson's schizophrenic scientist and sundry other super creeps seemed like a great idea.  Hard to tell with her, as her reading went from the aforesaid M&B romps (Harlequin romance for overseas readers) to the likes of Catherine Cookson and Barbara Cartland to the novelisations of films such as Dawn of the Dead and Blue Sunshine.  You helped warp my young mind, Nanna, and I miss you.  Thank you for the time you were babysitting me and let me stay up to watch Taste the Blood of Dracula.

Anyway, these books intrigued little me of course.  I was always mad for vampires and werewolves especially, so having the two main protagonists being an undead coffin-dwelling bloodsucker and a lycanthrope with carnivorous lunar proclivities respectively was right up my darkened moonlit fog-wreathed alley; the photographic covers and statement that these novels were based on the ABC-TV series blew my little mind entirely.  Books were one thing, but there was an actual programme on the telly with these sort of Universal / Hammer famous monsters of filmland having adventures?  Every weekday?  Satin-lined, velvet draped luxury!  It would, sadly, be decades and the acquiring of a multi-region DVD player and an Amazon account before I actually got to see the show (and soon after came the revelation that the discs were multi-region, so I could have actually got hold of them slightly earlier but nevermind), but those thin paperbacks and the idea of the show that they built up in my young mind - of the vampiric but heroic Barnabas Collins, his roguish and conflicted wolfman cousin Quentin and all the other benighted residents of the haunted halls of the Collinwood estate - lived long and lingered in the memory.

Created by producer Dan Curtis who had until 1966 worked primarily in sporting broadcasts such as golf until he saw what he deemed "stuff that would fly in from the coast on its own it was so bad... talk about turkeys!", and buoyed up by the idea that "if I couldn't do better than these dumb bastards I'd give up the business" pitched an idea that - lie Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson among others - had come to him in a dream: a young woman on a train heading towards a strange and dark destiny.  From this Bronte-esque nascence sprang a daily gourmet feast of horror, as Gothic melodrama gave way to bloodsucking revenants and carnivorous lunar activities across sundry timelines and dimensions; meanwhile back in the U.K. our idea of a soap opera remained steadfastly dull and stuck in the mud of day to day 'realism' - no ghouls or time travel ever bothered the cobbles of Coronation Street alas.

By the end of the '60s Curtis had moved from a pretty hands-off approach to the show - having left the drafting of the series Bible (then titled Shadows on the Wall) to Art Wallace, and the day-to-day scripting and directing duties to a regular roster of writers (such as Wallace, Ron Sproat, Malcolm Marmorstein and Sam Hall) and directors (series stalwart Lela Swift who helmed the first and last episodes and many in between, John Sedwick, Sean Dhu Sullivan and many others) - to a much more active role in the series, taking the directors' chair for twenty one episodes of Dark Shadows between March 1968 and August 1969.  Feeling sufficiently proficient directing the material by this point, when the opportunity came to transfer the series from the flickering set in people's living rooms to the silver screen Curtis himself would be in the driving seat.  Taking full advantage of the series' early 1970 Parallel Time plotline in which many of the major players were either absent or in diminished roles, Curtis and his core cast decamped to Tarrytown NY some twenty five miles north of their usual studio setting where the Lyndhurst estate would be playing the cinematic Collinwood (the television equivalent having been the Carey Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island) to work some macabre movie magick.

With House of Dark Shadows, Curtis and writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell decided to make the film's story a compressed, condensed and streamlined adaptation of the introductory storyline of the vampire Barnabas Collins, which originally ran from episode 210 to around 290 of the Monday to Friday show.  The original plan of introducing an explicitly supernatural character into what until that point had been a Gothic wherein the ghosts of Collinwood were as much the haunted pasts and concealed misdeeds of the characters as actual phantasms had been to bring in a blood-drinking villain to menace the show for around thirteen weeks, at which point he would be duly dispatched with the obligatory stake through the heart and the show would move on to another storyline.  However, the sheer amount of adoring fan mail that poured in for the character - as well as actor Jonathan Frid - prompted a quick rethink and change of plans that ended up with the genteel vampire becoming the central character of the series.  One wonders what Frid, a reserved gay man, made of the mail sacks full of hot 'n' horny housewives' fantasies that would arrive at the studio each week.  Anyway, they decided to write a screenplay that hew closer to the original vision before Barnabas became the dashing televisual hero defeating daemonic forces daily and protecting the town of Collinsport against heartbroken witches, hairy werewolves and headless warlocks - one where he remained the villain he was originally envisaged in a motion picture freed from the constraints of daytime television and more like the Kensington Gore-strewn antics of Hammer horror or nearest American equivalent.  Something along the lines of the same year's Count Yorga, Vampire from American International Pictures (memo to self: must rewatch the Yorga duology at some point, maybe for Halloween).

The film opens with the customary roar from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Leo the lion before Bob Cobert's eerie, ethereal theme from the series heralds the supernatural storm coming toward the house of Collinwood, where the never more camp and flustered Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds, or 'Big Lou' to his friends) is searching for his errant son David (David Henesy).  The youth, always a bit of a bad seed - especially in the early episodes of the TV series, wherein he engaged in such japes as extending wires across the staircase to trip his father into plummeting to his doom, and removing the bleeder valve from his car's brake cylinder to, again, send him plummeting to his doom - has on this day crossed the line; worse even than attempted patricide he has wronged his lovely nanny / governess Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott, known by Dark Shadows fandom as The Lovely And Talented Kathryn Leigh Scott).  As Roger scours the grounds to locate his spawn he comes across itinerant handyman and ne'er do well Willy Loomis (John Karlen, who will always be more than a decade older and heavier and rocking a 'stache with "as Harvey" captioned under him as he adjusts his tie as Tyne Daly's hubby in the title sequence of Cagney and Lacey) who is mooching about - a great skill to have, I honed it to fine art whilst at 'working' the Inland Revenue - and informs him that his unsatisfactory conduct means that his employment is at an end.  The now free Willy is a man with a plan, however, and is following the clues hidden in an old riddle that purportedly lead to the lost Collins family treasure.  Heading to the Collins crypt in the nearby Eagle Hill cemetery, Loomis locates a secret room within the tomb and pries open the chained-up coffin that resides within.  Never a good idea, as the hand that looms toward his throat teaches him.

Now liberated from his tomb with a view / home sweet prison after approximately 173 years, Mr Barnabas Collins (Frid) swiftly shrugs off the funk of the ages to  make a house call on his own descendants but not before attacking and feasting upon family secretary Daphne Budd (Lisa Richards, who played Sabrina Stuart in the show; Sabrina's main timeline boyfriend was werewolf Chris Jennings, whilst her alternate reality equivalent's beau was the Shadowsverse's equivalent of Jekyll and Hyde: Chris Pennock's Dr Cyrus Longworth / Mr John Yaeger.  I guess she just really digs guys with hirsute alter egos).  Presenting himself to the 1970s-vintage Collinses - the aforementioned Roger and David, Roger's sister the family matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (legend of old Hollywood Joan Bennett, also reprising her usual TV role), her daughter Carolyn (Nancy Barrett), Carolyn's fiance Todd Blake (Don Briscoe, who played the aforementioned lycanthropy-stricken Chris Jennings in the show and whose life seemed similarly cursed: he was forced to drop out of the show, disappearing suddenly during the 1970 Parallel Time storyline due to personal problems [probably exacerbated by "a little too much L.D.S.", as Admiral Kirk said to Gillian]), live-in physician Dr Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall), Professor Timothy Elliott Stokes (Thayer David, who would go on to menace Marvel's ol' webhead in the 1977 Spider-Man as Mr Byron), as well as Maggie and her boyfriend Jeff Clark (Roger Davis) - as his own descendant newly arrived from London, the vampire swiftly inveigles himself into their company and confidence. 

Entranced with the young governess due to her remarkable resemblance to his late 1700s love Josette - yes, Curtis is the one responsible for the whole "bewitched by the modern doppelganger of a past romance" thing that made its way from the original show via this movie and then Curtis' 1973 Bram Stoker's Dracula to eventually infect its 1992 Coppola namesake (actually, thinking back, the real culprit of originating this is most probably Nina Wilcox Putnam who wrote the unproduced Universal Pictures Boris Karloff vehicle Cagliostro, elements of which wound up in 1932's The Mummy with its millennia-spanning love story betwixt Imhotep and Ankhesenamun / Helen Grosvenor) - Barnabas arranges for an out of town job opportunity to arise for Jeff so that he can move in on Maggie.  What girl could hope to resist a man with his own silver wolfshead cane (ideal for killing loup garous, as Larry Talbot and Jack Whittier can attest), crumbling old mansion (Barnabas has moved into 'the Old House', his original 18th century home) and mad Renfield-like servant (the unfortunate Willy Loomis, now under Barnabas's spell and acting as his handyman-cum-gofer).  As Barnabas and Maggie enjoy romantic strolls in the countryside he is supplementing his dating with some nocturnal predating upon Carolyn, who becomes a very willing Lucy Westenra-style blood donor.  It's like Carolyn his side piece of ass or fucktoy so that he won't feel the need to pressure lovely innocent Maggie.

The curious Dr Hoffman, meanwhile, works out who and what Barnabas really is (with the help of Professor Stokes) and her utter fascination with a specimen of the undead leads her to make him a promise that she can cure his condition with a series of alchemical injections that make him able to go out in the daylight unharmed - handy for his and Ms Evans' bucolic walks - but when Barnabas makes it very clear that he is interested only in her medical help rather than indulging in her doctor-patient fantasies the scorned scientist gives him an overdose of the formula that leads to him aging rapidly to his true age of two centuries (very impressive make up from Dick Smith, improving upon the TV series and a blueprint for his work on Dustin Hoffman in the same year's Little Big Man).  Barnabas responds by slaying the doc before rejuvenating himself by completely draining Carolyn of her blood, giving us an atmospheric rain-lashed funeral sequence that Curtis would repeat almost shot for shot for Lucy in his version of Dracula three years later before Carolyn rises in vampiric Bloofer Lady form to prey upon her young cousin David and her boyfriend Todd; a reign of terror ended by her staking at the Van Helsing-style hands of Professor Stokes.

When Barnabas sweeps Maggie away to a desecrated church on an isolated island to complete her conversion into the reincarnation of Josette Dupre as his vampire bride, Jeff has to draw on the Professor's arcane knowledge to arm himself with cross and crossbow to turn amateur vampire slayer and rescue his betrothed from a fate worse than un-death.  The film ends with a sequel-baiting final shot dangling the promise of Barnabas Collins' return but although a sequel would arrive but a year later it would be a very different beast than the writer and director intended.  Which we shall get to anon. 

I recall (god, I wish I didn't) once having a drink with film academic Dr Laura Mayne - co-host of the Second Features podcast, which covers some wonderful obscure gems of cinema and would highly recommend to anyone who suffers through the rubbish I write here as well as having a suspiciously familiar blurb about the byways and back roads of film (no Laura, I'm not accusing you of plagiarism, I'm just sayin') - and, upon her mentioning that her partner has acquired an original cinema poster for House of Dark Shadows, I responded rather embarrassingly.  So bewitched, beguiled and bewildered by her pulchritude was I that in my semi-inebriated state I blurted out how jealous I was of him for having that poster as well as her.  I am facepalming as I type this.  Your scorn is accurate.  No, she doesn't talk to me anymore.  Yes, I came close to cringing myself to death afterwards.

Still wish I had that poster, though.