My Journey is Beginning…

I am 16, sleeping on the train, zipping and zooming through a thick, subterranean darkness. My notebook is open in my lap. I’m supposed to be doing homework for a Biology class I don’t know how I passed.

The terse robotic woman on the speaker announces my stop and my eyes open, fluttering like some fairytale princess awakened from her sleep…or a deathless vampire reposing in a chained up casket.

The first thing my bleary eyes see is an ad, luridly colored, on the ribbon above my seat.

Dark Shadows! I know what that is. Or I feel like I do. the name has lingered in the back of my mind, like the last vestiges of a childhood dream, swirling in the void of long ago years.

I didn’t have much of an opinion of Tim Burton except that Jack Skellington is the best guest party member in the original Kingdom Hearts. Likewise, I didn’t care much for Johnny Depp. But the name…Dark Shadows. I knew it from somewhere long ago.

I’m not usually wrong about these things: I did know it from long ago. Or, at least, my Mom did. It was a soap opera that she’d watched with her mother as a little girl, every day after school.

Long before she tagged along on Luke Spencer and Laura Webber’s flight from the law, their night in Wyndham’s Department Store, their battles with the malicious Cassadine family, and the enthralling pageantry of their wedding, she had found herself immersed in the intrigue and drama of a great house on the crest of Widows’ Hill.

A place where vampires, werewolves, and demons journeyed through time and space to kill each other, fight each other, save each other, love each other…

Typical soap opera stuff. Just with vampires.

And I knew soap operas. I had grown up with them too. While my Mom drifted from the sudsers not long after General Hospital’s mega couple gave the genre its last true parade through the public consciousness, my Grandma kept watching them. As yours did too, I bet. Maybe she still does.

Some of my earliest memories of T.V. aren’t of Blue’s Clues, but of people arguing in dimly lit but nicely decorated living rooms. Slaps being thrown, tears being shed… My grandmother, witnessing a woman (Stephanie Forrester?!) reeling from a heart attack, yelling at her scene partner, “Do something, you idiot!” with such urgency that I had no choice but to agree.

Granted, daily episodes of infidelity and licentiousness probably aren’t healthy viewing habits for a small boy, but I could barely understand what was going on anyway. But I could feel what was going on. I could feel the closeness between my Gran and the people in those living rooms. I could feel her despair when they fought and broke up, her joy when they got together, her vindication when they told each other off.

And, feeling those things, I was closer to her too.

Years later, I would come home from school from time to time to find my Gran still watching her stories: Victor Newman and Jack Abbott plotting against each other, Brooke Logan and Stephanie Forrester vying for control of their (ex-)husband’s fashion empire, even my mother’s own girlhood champion Laura Spencer, now a mother herself and being put through hell by her kids the same way she’d once tormented her own mother Lesley.

That’s the magic of soaps. It’s a subtle, understated magic, but it’s magical all the same. And it is a magic altogether similar and wholly different from the magic of the ‘Vampire Soap’. So, to make a long story short (chorus: “Too late!”, etc.), my Mom and I watched this new-fangled Dark Shadows motion picture on some forgettable day around the end of the school term.

Suffice it to say, Tim Burton’s ‘reimagining’ of Dan Curtis, Ron Sproat, Lela Swift, et. al’s gothic/supernatural/sci-fi mashup was bereft of any magic, soapy or otherwise.

We can easily chalk this up to Tim Burton Just Not Being What He Used to Be, which is an entirely defensible argument, though others can, should, and will be made, here and elsewhere.

So I forgot about Dark Shadows for a while. My search continued, as life itself continued…

I’m 20, watching The Young and the Restless, by now as much a part of my life as it ever was for my Grandma. I’m scrolling idly through soap fansites, blogs, and the jabbering marketplace/festering cesspool we denizens have affectionately named ‘Soap Twitter’…and I see a headline:

“Dark Shadows turns 50.”

Huh.

And suddenly, inexplicably, as though some ghost were whispering in my ear (Is that jasmine I smell?)  I decided maybe it was time to make my own trip to the house on Widows’ Hill. The series exists in various online mediums in different forms. I, however, have always tended more toward the analog side of things. And who doesn’t love DVDs?

Well, to clarify, not those DVDs just yet… You see, the ‘Complete Series’ isn’t quite complete. No, to actually start the series, I needed to dig a little deeper…

I’m a completionist, you see.

While the prevailing consensus is that the show doesn’t really get ‘good’ until the introduction of Barnabas Collins in Episode 210, (a consensus so prevalent the first 209 episodes were kept out of reruns for decades and were essentially lost to fans until this century) I feel that if the entire series exists to be consumed, I might as well consume it.

I understand the paradox in this. As a lifelong soap fan, I’m much accustomed to the structure of a soap opera, whose ‘endlessness’ allows new viewers to jump in at any point and catch up within an episode or two.

But I couldn’t approach Dark Shadows the way I’d approached The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful and General Hospital. I can’t go back in time, a little kid at my grandmother’s side, learning the lives of the people behind the screen from my Gran’s own reactions and responding in kind.

And, anyway, Collinwood isn’t Genoa City. Genoa City is home for me, but Collinwood is as strange and dark a place to me as it was to young governess Victoria Winters, disembarking from a train to enter a world beyond her most wretched nightmares and her most beautiful dreams. If I wanted to know the world of Dark Shadows, I had to approach it from the beginning, a stranger in a strange land.

And just like plucky Miss Winters, I found a world haunting and beautiful, weirdly entrancing as it was ridiculous, absurd as it was enthralling. This wasn’t the world Tim Burton tried in vain to condense and pastiche, and I soon realized why.

Dark Shadows was, is, and will always be a soap opera. A very different (perhaps the most different) soap opera, but a soap opera all the same.

And Dark Shadows can only be a soap opera. Besides the logistical nightmare of condensing five years of 20-minute episodes, aired five days a week, into a feature film, soaps just lend themselves to a certain type of storytelling.

And, as different as Dark Shadows’ storytelling style became as it went on, it never stopped being a soap.

Delving, bit by bit, into the legend of Collinsport and the family that built it, into the romantic foibles of Carolyn Stoddard, the despair and desperation of lovable old Sam Evans, the delightful neuroses of that slick bastard Roger Collins and his smart-aleck psychopath of a son, the can-do spirit of that truest of heroines, Maggie Evans, I found myself falling in love as I once fell in love with the Newmans, the Abbotts, the Hortons, and all the rest of the bickering, backstabbing, beloved families of my childhood.

And, by the time I reached that fateful day when Barnabas Collins emerges from the darkness of a forgotten past, I felt as much a member of this sad and spirited family on the hill as the orphaned governess who first came to the place 209 episodes ago.

Which brings us to this blog.

This won’t be the first blog to discuss Dark Shadows. It won’t even be the first to bother reviewing those elusive early episodes.**

I’m not that interested in being the ‘first’ to do things, anyway. There’s too much pressure. And anyway, we all approach things from our own venue of experience, so anything you, I, or anybody else writes about Dark Shadows will have no choice but to be unique.

I hope to approach the show as not only a fan of Dark Shadows, but as a fan of the entire soap genre, someone who grew up watching the sudsers and, perhaps because of this, wasn’t so daunted by the slower early episodes.

You can also expect perspectives from me as a horror fan, a writer, a history nut, a continuity nut, a Friendly Neighborhood Gay, (if you don’t want to hear the phrase ‘Roger Collins is a homosexual and here is why’ repeated several times a week, go now and forever hold your peace) and various other things that are bound to vary week by week.

Above all, however, I hope you never expect me to take myself too seriously. Dark Shadows, straight as it plays itself, never took itself deathly seriously, and it thrived because of it. I hope this blog follows that example.

*I should note, for the sake of transparency, that the photographed ‘casket collection’ actually is the complete DVD series. The first DVD collection does begin with episode 210, but not that one. But how could I resist a chance to show you guys the coffin box?

**I would be remiss not to shout-out Prisoner of the Night’s excellent Dark Shadows From the Beginning, a blog that is exactly what it sounds like. It is, hands down, the most comprehensive look at the pre-Barnabas era of the show available on the Web. If you’re a big fan of those episodes, of the show in general, or even just the Magic of Television, do check him out. He’s doing the Dark Lord’s work!

Schedules, Schedules…

Dark Shadows ran 1,225 episodes, Monday – Friday from June 1966 to April 1971. To put that in perspective, if I reviewed one episode a week from beginning to end, it would take 23 1/2 years for me to finish.

Or so. Look, you’re not here for math; you’re here for vampires.

But if I expedited things and did a week a week…that is, five episodes…I would collapse of exhaustion long before Josette Collins ever gives us the time of day.
So, to compromise, I am splitting the weeks into threes.

One Friday, we’ll cover Monday and Tuesday episodes. The next Friday will cover Wednesday and Thursday. Then the following Friday will cover, well, Friday. As a soap, Dark Shadows is expected to deliver gripping cliffhangers at the end of a Friday episode, to see to it you tune in after the weekend. These cliffhangers get more and more absurd as the series continues, so I think it’s only fitting they get special days to themselves.

Occasionally, you can expect special features. Perhaps I’ll have a little essay on the brain about, say, the price of sardines, or why anybody should give a toss about Victoria Winters’s parents, or why Joe Haskell is a living dream boat. These won’t necessarily interrupt the episode review schedule. I suppose I could drop them whenever I like. I don’t know, I haven’t thought of any special features yet.

Collinsport Chronicling

If you’re interested in watching along again or for the first time, but don’t want to spring for DVD, Dark Shadows can be found online, on Prime Video and Tubi, both of which begin with Episode 210, the introduction of Barnabas. To the best of my knowledge, the pre-Barnabas episodes are not currently available for streaming anywhere, which is some dumb luck, isn’t it?

Your Journey is Beginning…

I hope it opens the doors of life to you and links your past to your future.

Welcome (or welcome back) to Collinsport. I’m glad you’re along for the ride.