“You broke into my room to tell me about a dream?”
Here’s the kind of thing that Dark Shadows had to deal with: They moved the taping schedule around to accommodate Jonathan Frid’s insane ten-city publicity tour a couple weeks ago, and as it shook out, there were three episodes this week that taped the day before they aired.
It’s actually hard to get your mind around how close to the edge that is. If anything went wrong with the taping, then there’s nothing to show tomorrow; it’s dead air. And this is Dark Shadows; of course something’s going to go wrong. Things go wrong, like, all the time.
So if this was a show produced by sane people, they’d probably want to throw together a couple episodes where everybody sits around in the living room and talks over the events of the day. That’s what every other daily soap opera ever made does all the time anyway. But, no — it’s Dark Shadows, which means we need three cops and a Frankenstein monster and a seance and a dream sequence and a skeleton and a brick wall falling apart and a root cellar.
In fact, they’re living so close to the edge of what’s possible that you can actually watch the production team struggling to figure out how to make the show.
At the end of Friday’s episode, they were wrapping up the sequence where Adam, the mixed-up Frankenstein monster, abducted Carolyn and held her against her will for two days. With the police hot on his trail, he brought Carolyn to Widow’s Hill, where she slipped and almost fell to her death.
You’d think that would be a perfect place to end the episode — a literal cliffhanger — but instead, they showed Adam pulling her back up to safety. Cornered by the cops, Adam jumped off the cliff himself, and then everybody just turned around and went home.
So, the question is: Why stop the episode there, when it would have been much more dramatic to end with Carolyn dangling over the edge?
Here’s where the production issues take over. The budget only stretches to five or six cast members a day, so if they started Monday’s episode with Adam pulling Carolyn up, they would’ve been stuck paying for Adam and Sheriff Davenport, with nothing for them to do after the first scene.
Unfortunately, Adam jumping off the cliff to his death isn’t necessarily a tense moment that brings people back on Monday. It actually feels like this is the end to the Adam story — the monster’s dead, Carolyn’s safe, everything’s fine.
To remind the audience that this is still a high-stakes plot point, they played Dr. Lang’s dying words that he recorded for Julia, explaining that Adam’s life force is draining Barnabas’ vampire curse. If Adam dies, then Barnabas will become a vampire again.
This message — which we’ve heard in a dozen episodes so far — is played over footage of waves hitting the rocks below Widow’s Hill. These are film clips they shot in 1966, before they started production, and the films are in black and white, so they have to put a blue filter over the footage so it’ll look like it’s in color.
That’s all very clever, and three cheers for creative problem-solving. Unfortunately, it means that we have to sit through Lang’s message twice — once at the end of Friday’s episode, and again at the beginning of Monday’s — which is simply intolerable. This is why you should always make sure that there’s at least one living character on your show who understands the lunatic plot contrivance that’s driving the main front-burner story.
So we kick off the week with a lengthy scene of Barnabas and Willie standing on the coastline with flashlights, calling Adam’s name. Willie is convinced that Adam hit the rocks, and washed out to sea. Barnabas’ position in the debate is that Willie should keep yelling “Adam”.
Willie says that Adam is dead, and Barnabas says that he’s alive, and there doesn’t seem to be anything they can do about it, so after a while, they start talking about the Dream Curse.
If you haven’t heard about the Dream Curse yet — and how I envy you, if you haven’t — then the gist is that the sorcerous soap vixen Angelique has cast a spell that’s given the cast a recurring nightmare, which hops from one person to the next until it finally reaches Barnabas, and turns him back into a vampire.
The weird thing about this — well, one of the many weird things, technically — is that it’s not totally clear why it matters whether Barnabas is a vampire or not. I mean, I guess it matters to him, but from the audience’s perspective, it doesn’t actually seem to make any difference to the story.
Alive Barnabas acts exactly the same way that he did when he was Vampire Barnabas. He’s got the same secrets, the same problems, and the same relationships. The “cure” didn’t unlock anything new in the story; it’s just a MacGuffin to fight with Angelique over.
Willie is the seventh character to have the Dream so far, and he’s just as exasperated with it as we are. He needs to pass it on to Carolyn by telling her about the Dream, which seems like a perfectly reasonable request. Barnabas forbids Willie from talking to Carolyn about his witch-generated nightmares, which I guess is something you could say to your employees in 1968.
So they bicker about it, and then they loop back around to arguing about Adam. This continues until it’s time to break for a word from Heinz ketchup or Bounty paper towels or whatever.
Meanwhile, back at Collinwood, Carolyn is sitting in her bedroom, not eating a sandwich. She recently spent two days locked in a root cellar with a 6’6″ Frankenstein monster and no food, but she’s a soap opera character, which means her need for nourishment is nothing compared to the need to process her feelings.
Surprisingly, she’s not that broken up about her terrifying ordeal.
Liz: Carolyn… did he hurt you?
Carolyn: No. Not really.
Liz: But he kept you against your will; he must have had to use force.
Carolyn: Yes, he did.
Liz: And yet, he didn’t hurt you?
Carolyn: He was such a strange, pathetic sort of man, Mother. I had the feeling he was trying, in his own clumsy way, to be gentle.
So that’s got to be one of the fastest recoveries on record.
This is a good example of how Dark Shadows is moving away from the traditional soap opera focus on how women feel. Carolyn isn’t actually very interested in talking about her own experiences; she wants to figure out the plot points.
This convenient superhuman resilience to trauma is more in the mode of adventure stories than soaps. The characters in monster movies aren’t really affected by their experiences for very long, because that’s boring and it gets in the way of the next adventure. Carolyn was terrorized for two days, but the main impact on her is that she doesn’t really feel like eating.
I’m kind of conflicted about this approach. On the one hand, this is another fantasy-metaphor rape story, which makes her instant emotional turnaround feel staggeringly inappropriate. Adam brutalized Carolyn for several episodes — grabbing her, pushing her down, even pulling her back to the root cellar by her hair at one point. Then he held her, yelping “Love! Love!”
This was clearly an assault. Adam didn’t see it that way, because he’s a newborn patchwork corpse-monster with no life experience, but from Carolyn’s point of view, it’s assault. And just like all the other fantasy-metaphor rapes that we have around here, her recovery and healing happens in the amount of time it takes to let her tea get cold.
But that’s how adventure stories work. This isn’t a story about Carolyn’s emotional journey; it’s a story about huge monsters who kidnap people and jump off cliffs. So even though Liz wants to talk about whether Carolyn feels safe, Carolyn wants to direct our attention back to what’s wrong with Adam. This episode fails the Bechdel test for sure.
At this point in June 1968, ABC Daytime is about a month and a half away from launching One Life to Live, a new soap opera that’s going to focus on social issues in a more realistic way. OLTL storylines were about interracial romance, class struggle, and drug abuse.
One of the strongest themes on One Life to Live was recovering from rape — the main character, Viki Lord, suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder, which was eventually revealed as stemming from her father’s sexual abuse. Another major storyline involved a college gang rape, which drove stories for more than fifteen years.
One Life to Live is going to premiere at 3:30pm, bumping DS forward a half-hour to better serve the growing teenage audience who want to watch it after school. ABC didn’t mean it this way, but OLTL is basically a forty-year apology for allowing Dark Shadows to do fantasy-metaphor rape storylines in that timeslot for five years.
In fact, Dark Shadows is so insane about this that they actually do it to Carolyn again five minutes later. She goes to sleep, and Willie climbs up the wall, breaks in through the window, and wakes her up to tell her about the Dream Curse.
Carolyn is apparently not able to finish a day with only one terrifying physical assault to recover from. Her life is that complex.
Carolyn jumps out of bed, and he blocks the exit.
Carolyn: Willie, I want you to get out of my room right now. Now, get out.
Willie: Please, Carolyn, I gotta talk to you.
Carolyn: I said to get out of here!
Willie: Now, please don’t get mad; I’m not gonna hurt you.
She starts backing toward the window.
Carolyn: Willie, are you going to leave, or am I going to have to call for help?
Willie: Don’t do that; I said I’m not gonna hurt you!
This is not super comforting.
Carolyn: Willie, I don’t know what you’re doing, and I don’t care. I’d hate to see you get into trouble again, but if you don’t do as I say —
Willie: Carolyn, I swear! All I gotta to do is tell you the dream, and then I’ll go.
She puts her hand to her head.
Carolyn: The dream?
Willie: Yeah, that’s why I came here, to tell you the dream.
Carolyn: You broke into my room to tell me about a dream?
And that’s how they get away with doing this nonsense every day. They’re doing a pretty shocking scene that would be absolutely terrifying in real life.
A normal soap opera would spend weeks just on this, documenting Carolyn’s fear and shame, leading up to the dramatic moment when she files a police report, and then they all go to trial.
But Dark Shadows is the least normal soap opera ever made. At this point, the fantasy-metaphor part of the fantasy-metaphor rape is so outlandish that you just stop processing this as a real event.
After it all blows over, Liz tells Carolyn, “You don’t have to be afraid. No one can possibly get into this room now!” which as far as I’m concerned is just asking for trouble.
Tomorrow: The Spirit of St. George.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
At the beach, Barnabas says, “Willie, we’re going to get nothing accomplished if you keep arguing like this.”
At the end of act 1, Willie breaks character just a half-second too early. We see him nodding and smiling at Barnabas, as the camera fades to black.
Carolyn has a sandwich and a cup of tea on her tray, but when her scene opens, she’s got a fork in her hand. It’s not clear what she was planning to do with it before she got distracted.
There’s a tape edit towards the beginning of Carolyn’s conversation with Liz; it jumps from the middle of one of Carolyn’s lines to another.
Tomorrow: The Spirit of St. George.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
You bring up what I always considered the chief failing of the Dream Curse (and, yes, there are many): There are no real “stakes” for the viewer. The fate ‘worse than death” that’s presented is to “revert” Barnabas to a vampire, but we liked him as a vampire. That’s what made the series so popular. As you point out, Barnabas as a human is no different from Barnabas as a vampire. True, the Barnabas of 1968, while still selfish and all together frustrating, is still vastly more “human” (or rather more “humane”) than the villainous Barnabas of 1967. But we don’t get the sense that he’s going to become that Barnabas again, that he’s going to turn on Julia and start treating Willie poorly… well, he still does the latter.
It’s not like the Angel/Angelus divide on BUFFY/ANGEL. If the bad guys had put a “dream curse” in motion that would turn Angel back into Angelus, there would be stakes for the audience because as much as we might enjoy Angelus as a villain, we prefer Angel as a hero. We wouldn’t want this to happen.
Meanwhile, Barnabas shows no real empathy toward anyone else affected by the curse — aside from eventually Victoria. He doesn’t want Willie to tell Carolyn, not because it will hurt her but because it will bring the curse closer to him.
Curiously, this storyline would work better if Barnabas were still a vampire. The curse would then end with his actual destruction. That’s something we don’t want, even if we presume it won’t happen because he’s the star of the show. There are still viable stakes.
Yeah, and there’s also very little anxiety on Barnabas’ part at the thought of being turned into a vampire. Most of his energy is directed at defeating Angelique – that’s the end goal, not necessarily remaining human. I think we needed a bit more from the character himself on what he stood to lose if he were to revert to a vampire.
It’s also interesting that unlike in HODS or the 1991 revival, Barnabas’s humanity (temporary in both instances) doesn’t bring him any closer to Vicki. She’s in love with Jeff Clark. Even Adam’s threat to kill Vicki if Barnabas doesn’t do the experiment again winds up feeling like he’s threatening to kill the woman he’s been stalking. Barnabas and Vicki aren’t an item. If they were now (and by the way, where is Vicki?), the stakes would be raised. We could see what he stands to lose.
Perhaps they thought Frid and Moltke had no chemistry so never seriously paired them. Barnabas himself would have no present-day love interest until Maggie in 1970 (talk about memory wipes!).
Yep, I loved that Maggie was Barn’s love interest in the 70’s. By soap opera rules, there would be a wedding, and in the middle of it Maggie would remember, and there would be a gun nearby, and…
The rule about long forgotten plot points is that they never surface UNTIL they can do the most damage. Nothing is buried, nothing is forgotten, Like Cthulthu under the waves, it waits until the stars are right.
Willie is definitely more hyper-active since being sprung from Windcliff. He was never this excitable and outrageous before, even when he and Barnabas were keeping Maggie locked in the basement. Just like Julia he went from a sly but somewhat subtle character to a totally over the top hysteric. It’s hard to believe that later in the series Carolyn was actually married to ‘Will Loomis’…
Also that’s a great new set of the ‘rocky’ coastline…
I think Adam jumping off the cliff is a wonderful cliffhanger, because, as said above, the audience wants Barnabas to be a vampire. I remember being so excited the first time I watched this episode, because I actually thought they’d go through with it and have Barnabas revert.
That’s funny — I didn’t think about that. Stephen’s right, “reverting” isn’t much of a threat. I guess it depends on how much chaos Adam can unleash.
Sure, the audience likes Barnabas as a vampire–but does the audience like for Angelique to win when she’s battling over Barnabas’ fate? From the 1795 storyline, we already saw what such a transformation would mean for Barnabas. Having a regular thirst for blood and always being ready to kill any who might discover his secret as well as the need to enslave a protector by day tends to have a dehumanizing effect, and the writers have spent months trying to humanize him so that they can keep this character on the show. Having Adam in the story to drain him of his “condition” I believe is a further device to do just that, to keep him humanized. They can’t have him return to the way he was in his first few weeks on the show–that was the character they were planning on getting rid of by destroying after six weeks. Notice what happened when Barnabas first became a vampire in 1795–he was prepared to kill his closest friend Ben if he didn’t do what he was told. The audience doesn’t want THAT Barnabas back. The audience will get their vampire Barnabas back during past time storylines where he reverts, but is still on a mission to accomplish something good. The audience doesn’t want vampire Barnabas if it means having Angelique prevail once again.
Also, love that Lang voice-over with the waves in those various sequences. It’s obviously not the same voice part as when Lang was speaking it in his final heart attack scene in the lab, overemphasizing his words in his trademark “ham” acting style. He sounds a bit more restrained in the voice recording we’ve been hearing since, and the scene with the waves is quite an artistic and aesthetically pleasing way of reminding the audience of Adam’s true purpose on the show, as a means of keeping Barnabas humanized and protected from Angelique, to remind the audience of what is lost for him–as well as the show–if Adam is lost and therefore his protection against Angelique is lost: It would mean that all that effort of humanizing Barnabas over all those months would have been in vain and the show would be moving backward rather than forward, just repeating itself by going round in circles.
The only thing left interesting about the dream curse is that Barnabas and Julia have no idea the consequences of Adam dying. Only Lang and Adam know what will happen to Barnabas if Adam dies. But, even knowing that, as the audience, I’m not afraid of Barnabas becoming a vampire again. I think it makes for more conflict if he is a vampire. But, I’m not biting my nails every time Adam is almost killed by one of them because, oh no, if he dies then Barnabas will a be a vampire again, and they don’t know what they’re doing. The curse should make him even more diabolical than he was when we first discovered him. He should become the bloodthirsty thing of nightmare, instead of this gentleman vampire victim we would all want to spend eternity with.
Here’s an idea on the dream curse. What if, instead of seeing all those random things behind doors that don’t seem to have any bearing from one person to the next, they each saw Barnabas as a vampire biting someone, blood and teeth and all. Behind every door is Barnabas the vampire destroying someone, or destroying themselves. One by one, they would become fearful of Barnabas the killer, who is walking around in broad daylight now, totally innocent. So, they would be fighting their fear and revulsion of a seemingly normal Barnabas. They would each be gaslit by Angelique, while suffering in their fear and loathing of this perceived monster. Barnabas would be suffering too, as he is the subject of their fear and loathing. And, if the dream gets all the way to him, he will become the very object of the dream they each had, and they will become his victims. But, if it doesn’t get to him after a certain period of time, the curse will fail, and they will each forget the dream ever existed. But Barnabas wouldn’t forget, and he would seek his vengeance on Angelique who was trying to make his own family into his victims. This would make the dream scare the audience too, because we do not want our beloved Barnabas to become this kind if vampire. The curse would have more bite! Pun intended.
Bummer, i wish i could edit my post. I got the dream curse and the Adam angle mixed up a bit in the first paragraph. Just ignore those first few sentences that mention Adam. They are different thoughts. I blame it on Covid, I am still recovering from Omicron! (and vaccinated)
If I lived in Collinswood, by now I’d have bars, no make that no break window shields they put on some school windows and THEN bars and a metal door with several locks on my room. 🙂 Then some salt by the entrances and I’d be burning sage on a regular basis.
Another maddening thing about the Dream Curse: It’s been around awhile now, and David and Mrs. Johnson have already had it, yet it’s news to Liz and Carolyn. This shouldn’t be. How could this dream be something new to them at this point?
“At the end of act 1, Willie breaks character just a half-second too early. We see him nodding and smiling at Barnabas, as the camera fades to black.”
I didn’t see that as a blooper, because Willie appeared to pause with his back to Barnabas, thinking. Then he turns, smiling somewhat maniacally – he has realised that he can simply go to Carolyn and tell her the dream. Barnabas is idiot enough to forbid him from doing that in one breath, then order him to go and look for Adam, by himself, in the root cellar, in the next.
But if Adam dies, then Barnabas becomes a vampire again – granted that Angelique doesn’t know that, but IF Barnabas reverted, then the Dream Curse would be pointless (more pointless, anyway). And Angelique has almost a 100% failure rate for undoing her spells. Maybe she could just have the next ‘beckoner’ be Silent Susie?
I’m glad this review focuses on the two things I was struck with: Carolyn goes from defending one attacker, to immediately defending another guy after he attacks her, too. She’s way more concerned with the motives of her aggressors than her own feelings. I get the reason Dark Shadows “gets away” with it, by focusing on the monster and the curse, but WIllie’s invasion was so shocking that it felt pretty icky to watch and unbelievable to then have Carolyn immediately expressing concern for how scared WIlly seemed.
That was super creepy and gross seeing Willie creep into Carolyn’s room and overtake her. I was glad she bit him. And where the hell is Roger with his gun?? And this Dream Curse is absolutely stupid. I hate that it made Carolyn empathize with Willie.
Well, the main practical effect of Barnabas’s “cure” is that he’s lost his superhuman strength, invulnerability, and other special powers. Basically he’s like Superman under a red sun now. He may see this as an acceptable trade-off but those powers do come in handy in certain situations, such as when you’re being choked by a 6’6″ creature with the mind of a two year old.
I see someone named Jack Sullivan directed this episode. I’m not sure if this is his first or if I just didn’t notice him before. Sometimes Tubi cuts off the end credits early.
Jack Sullivan directed 11 episodes, the first of them #504, under that name. He would direct 49 episodes under the name Sean Dhu Sullivan. He was an associate director on 173 more, starting from #15.
And what was Elizabeth doing wandering the grounds at 2 in the !morning?
Hey, Julia’s wearing pants! It’s a first.
Was Julia even in this episode?