DARK SHADOWS: An Appreciation and Lament

Dark Shadows, the first and so far only Gothic soap opera, had its premier when I was four years old--but things got interesting a year later, in 1967, with the introduction of the 200-year-old vampire Barnabas Collins (portrayed with tragic panache by the just-passed Jonathan Frid).  I'll not get into a scholarly treatise here about how Barnabas was intended to be a limited-run villain who instead saved an otherwise moribund franchise, or how DS paved the way for later generations of serial thrillers from The X-Files to Lost to Fringe.

No, I want to tell you how that gaunt, dark-eyed gentleman with the elegant wardrobe and the wolfs-head cane (and every so often, the wicked fangs) was my gateway drug into horror and occult fiction.  You see, Barnarbas--along with his werewolf cousin, Quentin (David Selby, who went on to prime-time soapy success in Falcon Crest) and the rest of the supernatural good'uns and bad'uns featured on Dark Shadows--spun off a massive line of marketing tie-ins:  trading cards (which I collected feverishly and pored over obsessively), a board game (about which I recall absolutely nothing), and... paperback novels.

These books--and there were quite literally dozens upon dozens of them--were my first "adult" reading material (and yes, I was precocious enough to be gobbling these things up as fast as they were released by the time I was seven or eight).  I'd say they probably rated a notch above the average paperback romance novel, but that might just be personal prejudice talking.  Most in particular, I remember a collection of short stories, The Dark Shadows Book of Vampires and Werewolves, that had some absolutely brilliant work in it (including "Wolves Don't Cry," by Bruce Elliot, which still may be my favorite werewolf story ever).

And what has Hollywood gone and done with this fabulously dark, mythic realm of my youth?

They've turned it into a camp parody of itself.  Pfaugh.

Now, I know in retrospect that a good bit of the mystique surrounding Dark Shadows has as much to do with my age at the time, and the era of its appearance, as anything.  My reply is:  So what?  One could make the exact same argument about Star Trek.  I guarantee, if JJ Abrams did to Trek what Tim Burton did to DS, there would have been riots unlike anything seen since the peasants stormed the Bastille, at the very least.

There was a very respectable 12-episode reboot of Dark Shadows back in 1991, with Ben Cross as our dear Barnabas; the Chiller network just had a mini-marathon of the series this weekend.  That's how one respects a source:  with style and class.

Me, I think I'll raid the used bookstores and see if I can scare up any of the old Marilyn Ross tie-in novels to take on vacation with me next week.

Harrumph.