“Why would you imagine dogs howling?”
It was the best of times.
“Mail for the show recently has been running to almost 6,000 letters a week since Barnabas soared to fame, with Frid himself receiving nearly 5,000 of that total.”
It’s late summer 1968, and Dark Shadows’ ratings have skyrocketed from 2.8 million viewers to 4.5 million, since Jonathan Frid debuted as reluctant vampire Barnabas Collins.
“Ben Cooper has licensed a line of masks and costumes based on the Dark Shadows theme and featuring Barnabas. Western Publishing is also on the way with a boxed board game, comic books and puzzles.”
Call it magic or genius or just being in the right place at the right time, but apparently what American housewives and teenagers want more than anything in the world is a vampire soap opera at 4 o’clock in the afternoon.
“Several weeks ago, Frid appeared in three Stern Brothers stores in the New York City area as a guest at fashion shows displaying ‘Monster Shoes’ — the latest in girls’ and women’s footwear. Stern’s officials described his appearance as one of the biggest in memory.”
There’s just one problem: Barnabas Collins isn’t a vampire anymore. He used to be, once upon a time, but he was cured three months ago. Any viewers tuning in to see neck-biting will be sorely disappointed, and so will their 4.5 million friends.
It’s a weird move for the show to make, taking the vampire out of the vampire show just at the point when the audience is really getting excited about him. The only way to explain it is that Barnabas had been tearing through the supporting characters, and that’s not sustainable long-term. Barnabas was popular, they wanted to keep him around, and the only solution that they could see was to make him human again.
So what we have on our hands at this point is a nerfed vampire. He’s not seducing innocent young girls anymore, or plotting to cut their boyfriend’s head off and wear it as a mask. This is the new, respectable Barnabas, who cares about other people and worries about his family.
All week, we’ve been talking about the danger of opening scenes with Barnabas sitting around and reading. Besides the aesthetic and narrative concerns, there’s also the practical, commercial angle. Nobody’s going to buy a Halloween costume depicting a fangless guy in a burgundy smoking jacket, curled up with a book.
So it’s a huge relief when today’s episode opens with some good old-fashioned dognoise.
Barnabas is out in the woods helping Jeff search for Vicki, who’s been kidnapped for some reason, but his heart isn’t in it. He hears dogs howling, which is apparently the early warning system for impending vampire skulduggery.
“They must sense something is happening,” he says to himself. “What could it be?”
Well, I know what the dogs are so excited about, and here he comes — Tom Jennings, a local handyman who’s helping Nicholas fix up his new house.
Nicholas is a satanic sales associate of some kind, who’s recently moved to Collinsport to promote a mysterious new line of devilry. Nicholas was the supervisor of the wicked Angelique, the scourge of the Collins family, but she interfered with his plans, and he punished her by aging her into a dusty old bag of bones. Angelique expired in an armchair, and now she’s resting in peace, more or less, in a coffin in Nicholas’ basement.
But that shouldn’t make anyone suspicious, because who looks in basements? The only potential snag is if Nicholas hires a guy to fix the wiring and check on the foundations. Enter young T. Jennings, today’s lucky winner.
Tom is played by Don Briscoe, the cutest guy that they’ve cast in the last two years. The only hunks in the original cast were Joel Crothers and Mitchell Ryan, and Mitch left over a year ago, replaced by the unloved Anthony George. That left Joel as the show’s only eye candy, playing cutie-pie fisherman Joe Haskell in the present day, and the roguish Lieutenant Nathan Forbes in the 18th century.
But the show has been investing more heavily in the men’s department lately, starting with Roger Davis and Robert Rodan. Yes, Jeff is irritating and squinty, and Adam’s whole story is based around the idea that he’s Hollywood ugly, but they’re a step in the right direction.
And it’s thanks to Roger that Don’s on the show. They were college friends from Columbia, and Roger encouraged Don to audition. So it turns out Roger Davis is good for something after all.
Don was born in Mississippi and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, and he gives Tom an aw-shucks, down-home Southern accent. I don’t know if anybody mentioned to him that the show is set in Maine, but if they did, then he must not have been listening.
But you can’t blame the guy for being nervous. He was fairly new to television — he’d been a recast for a minor character on Days of Our Lives for about two months, plus an episode of I Dream of Jeannie and commercials for Folgers Coffee and Palmolive soap. And now he’s here, the cute new boy on the hottest show in America, and he’s in the basement of a haunted house, trying to act like coming across a surprise coffin is a totally normal part of a person’s day.
Tom is an especially interesting character for this moment on the show, because he’s the first example of something that we haven’t seen before — a regular Joe who happens to stumble onto the supernatural, and pays the price in blood.
So far on the show, vampire victims outside the Collins family have fallen into a few clearly defined buckets — con men, investigators, and prostitutes. None of them deserve their gruesome fates, of course, but in all three cases, the character is aware that they’re operating in a dangerous environment.
But Tom is the first guy who’s living a perfectly normal, carefree life, right up until the moment that he opens the wrong door. This is the point in the show when just living in Collinsport becomes a health hazard.
So it’s a big day for everyone — for the dogs, for Tom, and for the 4.5 million vampire enthusiasts tuning in from coast to coast. Dark Shadows has figured out what to do with a vampire show after your vampire isn’t a vampire anymore: you call in reinforcements. This might turn out to be an exciting summer after all.
Tomorrow: All Tied Up.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
In act 3, Barnabas and Julia are talking in the foyer, and Barnabas is clearly reading off the teleprompter. Julia turns toward the drawing room, where another camera is waiting for the next shot. Barnabas stays where he is, facing the wrong camera, and he keeps reading his lines. You can tell that he’s not where he’s supposed to be, because the beginning of his next line, “He said he wanted his revenge,” isn’t picked up properly by the boom mic.
Tomorrow: All Tied Up.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
If you’re going to have a vampire soap, you may as well have a vampire on it once in a while, particularly if your leading vamp has traded in his fangs for quiet and cozy evenings by the fireplace. For better or worse, despite the fact that the show is much more than that, a vampire soap is how Dark Shadows is perceived in the collective mind of the public, thanks in large part to the long shadow cast by Frid’s famed portrayal of Barnabas. In between time travel epics, whenever the present day pacing of story reveals signs of lagging, the introduction of a new vampire always seems to lend an air of mystery and suspense that cannot be matched by other spooks that come and go, as if the show is returning to the core inspiration of its supernatural roots–or maybe it’s because, in symbolic terms, the vampire is the most popular supernatural figure. The show will always return to the vampire motif to the end of its run, with the exception of 1840 parallel time–but even then there is a vampire reference in the final scene of the last episode, with a close-up reaction shot of Bramwell/Barnabas, as if to acknowledge the element that ultimately made Dark Shadows the stuff of legend.
Great analogy – I think that right after the vampire comes the witches/warlocks and werewolves. While the ‘man-made man’ is an interesting story on it’s own it really doesn’t have the same scare factor as the others. Also the fact that this creature was ‘created’ by a mad scientist who just happened to be at the hospital at the time the vampire was brought in to the ER is too far fetched for even DS standards. Now we’re supposed to go along with the creation of another being brought to life by no less than the vampire and his own version of a mad doctor. The intro of the Jennings clan couldn’t have come at a better time. I wonder if these are the relatives that Joe Haskell visited years ago when Barnabas was feasting on their farm’s livestock?
I like Mitchell Ryan but don’t think of him as a hunk a near middled aged man with nice features. Joel Crothers is younger and Don Bricone is a 20’s something pretty boy. John Karlen is attractive in a way Being middle aged I like the middle aged men like David Ford, Louis Edmonds and Jonathan Frid myself.
Humbert Asendo I like too I like him with the moush for sure
1897, 1970 PT, and 1840 are examples of the series figuring out how to depict a vampire protagonist. He still has his 1795 moments in 1897 and 1970 but by PT of that year and 1840, he’s a fairly benign vampire. We see no evidence of his attacking random women on the docks (though he does put a couple women under his spell).
Perhaps the series still believed in 1968 that its “star” must be “normal.” I’m glad it eventually realized otherwise.
You are right. By PT Barnabas has become very similar to the Barnabas of the Marylin Ross novels. Yes, he still feeds (he has to) but the effects are quite mild – we can see this M.O. in his dealings with Buffy Harrington. Compare his dealings with Ruby Tate with what he does with her. He takes her indoors, tries to keep her calm, and when she faints, it is on the bed. After that, we can assume that he follows this M.O., and that’s why there are no reports of any attacks. He has learned to fly under the radar.
(I guess that it is the same pattern that Henry Fitzroy follows in “Blood Ties”. You can easily believe that one realizes that there is a vampire around. Women with scars on their throat who all they can remember is that they had great sex…)
That’s why I think that if there is a reboot, it should follow the PT pattern, with the vampire being introduced, but being low key at the beginning to allow the other characters to shine, and avoid getting the vampire into a dead end that needs a trip to the past to extricate him.
Good Stuff! This is a benchmark episode, not just for the vampire tease/new threat for Barnabas to deal with, but also because of the Ron Barry interviews for WEST radio in Easton, PA that took place after taping. The event was also commemorated in a Famous Monsters of Filmland photo entitles “shudderbug captures Dark Shadows crew.”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JaRg1u86Mc, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYqeFn0AxOI.
I thought Frid did a great job acting skittish about the dogs howling. When he’s on his game he’s impossible not to watch.
I really thought Tom sounded like the shady Lefty Muppet from old school Sesame Street who tried to sell things like the Golden An LOL It was nice to have vampires make an appearance again.
The timing on the past few episodes is so silly. Vicki went to talk to Barnanas shortly after 9:00pm, then Jeff waits until 11:30 to go look for her?? Then there’s the whole search in the woods, and when Barnabas gets back, Julia’s still walking around fully dressed and wearing a corsage at what, 1:00am? And then there’s poor Tom, working on wiring and checking foundations in the middle of the night?
Last summer I read Dark Shadows Memories and I gathered that Don Briscoe would smoke pot on the set.
Enter Don Briscoe, yay! I never thought Frid was all that and Crothers was cute, but Briscoe was in the zone for me.
Oh, the first part of this post is TRUER THAN THE TRUTH. My classmate Judith and I were among the new viewers who tuned in because of the publicity in summer 1968– the TV Guide article, in our case– and there was Barnabas, but he wasn’t a vampire. My reaction, after weeks of watching and interrogating older viewers as to what had gone before, was to put new words to “Eleanor Rigby”, with the refrain
“All the sanguine people,
What did they cure him for?
All the sanguine people,
Why don’t they give us more?”
Judith and I sang this periodically and fed on the occasional glimpse of the glories of the past– the flashback when Maggie remembers her dinner with Barnabas as Josette, his brief trip to 1796 to save Vicki III– until we were fully satisfied by his going back to 1897. (Except that his becoming a vampire’s VICTIM was wonderful in another way.)
Poor Tom Jennings, becoming a nasty, unsympathetic vampire who just gave orders after only a few lines as a nice, normal human being, did not do it for us. Because…
…It never occurred to me that Don Briscoe was a hunk. I saw him as a nice, commonplace, soft-faced guy with nothing distinguished about his looks. Same for Roger Davis. It was not till I read your utterly wonderful blog that I was awakened to the fact that some people, especially gay men, might have a different view. (What with one thing and another, five of my top eight closest friends are gay men, so I have gathered lots of evidence.) Since then I have given him and the other male ingenus on the show a closer look, and admit that some could love them.
But both Judith and I were and are all about Jonathan Frid as the ideal of male beauty. I have a type, personified most by the love of my life, Boris Karloff, and Jonathan Frid is his prime avatar and the perfection of odd attractiveness. Judith, a straight woman, looked upon him to lust after him. I, who am asexual, just loved his looks aesthetically and emotionally. (I distinguished myself from Judith by saying I felt maternal toward him, after which our not-so-besotted friend Mona never failed to refer to him as “your son”.)
My first indication that our taste was not universal came years later, when my gay male friends who love the show started commenting on the cuteness of characters whose looks I considered negligible. That and reading darkshadowseveryday have brought me to the conclusion that gay men and straight (or asexual) women may have very different standards for male beauty. It it somewhat true in many cases that gay men like young, ingenuous looks and non-lesbian women, even in their teens, go more for the older and craggier? If so, there is much that could be said about stereotyping about one’s role in a romantic duo, but never mind that.
Of course, even I had to notice that David Selby was extraordinary. “Of godlike beauty,” as Judith put it. He wasn’t my type, but he could not pass unnoticed even by me.
All this discussion of male beauty, and not a word about Jerry Lacy? How could anyone – female or male, gay or straight – fail to give Lacy props as the handsomest man ever to set foot on the Dark Shadows set?
Yay ! Tom Jennings is here. He is really cute, too bad the drugs eventually took him off the show. Love the howling dogs and the suspense about a new vampire on the scene. And the commenter above had it right, even with Fridspeak, it’s impossible to take your eyes off of Jonathan Frid’s performance. It reminds me of watching any Bette Davis movie. No matter who else is in the scene, I’m always mesmerized by Bette.
Poor Tom Jennings. He was just a working stiff, a simple electrician called in by Nicholas Blair, and gets turned into a vampire for his trouble. But I suppose given a hickey by someone as hot as Angelique was a sort of compensation?