“It has possessed me more than once, so that I’m no longer afraid of it. Death and I are old friends.”
Angelique just wants to be free.
She needs to expand her consciousness, liberating her life force energy and extending it beyond the limitations of the earthly plane. She needs to get outside her own head, transcending the guilt and hang-ups of the past, to be at peace with the harmony of the universe.
I mean, yeah, she’s a vampire. But apart from that, she’s just like every other young woman in 1968.
So she’s waited until the adults are out of the house, and she’s down in the basement with her new boyfriend, messing around with stuff that they’re not really sure how to use. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea, but she tells him to be cool, and just let it happen.
And just like anything that’s worthwhile in 1968, it’s going to be a sunshower of lights, colors, electricity and noise.
So, as Jeff pulls the big switch and begins the experience, let’s turn off our minds, relax, and float downstream.
The sequence starts with Jeff twiddling on some instruments. A chorus of bleeps and bloops kicks up.
There are some extreme lighting effects as Angelique moans in a kind of pained ecstasy…
Some jolts of electricity from a nearby spark gap…
A guest appearance by the apparatus, bubbling away…
Some more exquisite agony…
Mood lighting for the equipment…
And then the images start merging, and flowing together. The boundaries between Angelique’s sensations and the buzzing machinery begin to blur.
Angelique isn’t being affected by the experiment anymore; she’s become a part of it. Her experience is the experience.
So, if we can step outside of the experiment for a minute, the obvious question is: What the hell are we looking at here?
Because these visuals — this is not what a Frankenstein movie looked like, circa fall 1968.
For example: Hammer’s 1969 film, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, starring Peter Cushing.
The props look familiar — the apparatus is present and correct, showing up in the first five seconds of the trailer — but beyond that, there’s no connection with the ecstatic, noisy lights-and-sparks aesthetic of Angelique’s experiment.
For one thing, everyone in the Frankenstein trailer looks super grumpy. I’m not sure what they’re all so hung up on, but everybody appears to be in a barely-contained murderous rage almost all of the time.
Practically every shot involves running, or pushing, or shooting, or breaking down doors, or shaking people, or knocking things over, or tripping over the furniture. It’s all terribly aerobic, and nobody’s having any fun, up to and including the audience.
Clearly, Dark Shadows is not doing a Frankenstein movie, and Lord knows this looks nothing like a daytime soap opera, so why does this style look so familiar?
This is what Angelique’s head trip actually looks like: The Doors performing on The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1967.
Seriously. Check it out.
It starts with a long shot, to set the scene…
We see close-ups of hands manipulating the instruments…
Moans of agony and ecstasy…
Some shots of the machinery at work…
And, of course, the in-camera mixing of the main character’s face and the noisy, chaotic action exploding around him.
That’s the shot that really makes this a late-60s variety show musical number — seeing the lead performer from multiple angles at the same time.
They did this kind of shot all the time on variety shows and in concert films, for exactly the same reason that they’re doing it on Dark Shadows — it’s a one-time live performance, they’ve got three cameras, and showing the same person from multiple angles at the same time is super engaging to look at.
It teases the brain and tantalizes the eye, a kind of double-perception that is literally impossible to achieve unless you’ve got psychoactive chemical assistance, or (failing that) a video editing board that lets you do in-camera effects.
On The Ed Sullivan Show that night, they even used the same colors that Dark Shadows reaches for when they want things to look unearthly — that lurid pink and uneasy green.
In this moment of anguished celebration, calling upon the powers of the Horned God and the Lizard King, the witch is both consuming and consumed, tied to the stake of transcendental enlightenment.
Come on, baby, she purrs, standing on a pile of stacked kindling. Light my fire.
Tomorrow: The Can’t Let Me Know What Scene.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
Once again, they set up several shots of Angelique reflected in a mirror. It looks fantastic, but vampires don’t cast reflections.
Angelique pauses in the middle of a line, and Jeff thinks that’s his cue:
Angelique: You will have to learn all that you need to know by tomorrow night.
Jeff: You’re —
Angelique: I’ll come back here, and you can do the experiment for me then.
Jeff: You’re crazy. I couldn’t learn enough in twenty-four hours.
Carolyn gasps for breath when Adam wakes her, and she ends up coughing over his line.
Jeff has obvious bite wounds on his neck in act 1, but then he talks to Carolyn in act 3, and the wounds are apparently gone.
Tomorrow: The Can’t Let Me Know What Scene.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
Funnily enough, Dark Shadows gets name checked at a Doors concert right around the time this episode was made. If you listen to the Doors at the Hollywood Bowl, just before a performance of The End, Jim Morrison is having a problem getting the house lighting tech to cooperate in providing a specialty spotlight for him with a certain color, and as he stands there imploring and shadowed by the lighting tech’s reticence, you can hear someone in the audience call out “Dark Shadows!”
That’s fantastic. That’s on the recording?
You can hear it on the double CD The Doors In Concert, which has the Hollywood Bowl 1968 version of The End as the final track.
If you have the CD, start the track, number 11 on disc 2, and listen carefully with headphones or a really good stereo system. As the band launches into a brief instrumental improvisation to start the song, at 0:08, in the left channel, you hear a young male voice from the audience going “Dark Shadows time!”, and at 0:11, in the right channel, you hear a young female voice going “Dark Shadows theme!”, so it’s name checked twice, and then Jim does his “Hey Mr. light man!” routine….
Who knows, maybe to some rock fans the Doors and Dark Shadows seemed complementary, with each exploring the darkest uncharted reaches of their respective medium. When I’m watching the 1967 and 1968 episodes, in the evening I’ll put on the Doors’ first three albums as a prelude. To me they seem to fit well together, and apparently also to the production and technical crew when conceiving the scene in the lab with Angelique for today’s episode.
If any vampire would cast a reflection, it’s Angelique. She’s not only a rebel but she’s got a damn good reflection.
Perhaps we can explain away Angelique’s reflection in-show because she’s not a “pure” vampire – in the same way Barnabas is? I mean, we really don’t know what methods Nicholas used to transform her. Barnabas was bitten directly by a vampire bat, hence his “purity”. It’s possible Nicholas used another method entirely and maybe she’s some sort of weird hybrid vampire-like creature? That’s my theory anyway.
More evidence that post-1795 is a parallel world to pre-1795? Pre-1795, vampires do not have reflections. Post-1795, we’re in a parallel world where they do.
Angelique is a total bitch. This was a total assinine idea and she could have been better served as biting Jeff and be done with it. I did not agree with this episode.
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is one of the grimmest of the Hammer Frankenstein films. The writer, new to the series, reversed recent trends and made the Baron a real bastard–much more so than in Hammer’s last Frankenstein movie, which was… (wait) for it… Frankenstein Created Woman!
And Frankenstein Created Woman features somebody’s “life force” being placed in another person’s corpse.
What a strange coincidence..I wonder if the movie writers lifted this from the show…
Don’t think so. The movie came out in 1967.
Speaking of Hammer, today in the mail a 5-DVD set arrived of the complete Hammer House of Horror, which was a 13-episode series that aired on British TV in 1980. One of the special features is titled “Grave Recollections: A Visit with Kathryn Leigh Scott” who appeared in one of the stories in the series, “Visitor from the Grave”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_House_of_Horror
Great set!
Well, as Richard Nixon would have said: “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Baby.”
I didn’t read this I just skimmed it. I think I have the right episode. There’s a wonderful scene between Carolyn and Adam and I had hoped that you were going to write about it but apparently you didn’t. It’s really too bad because it’s pretty amazing when she gives him the gift and he asks her whether all children are loved. When he cries because he’s happy. And when she’s so incredibly diplomatic about the things that she needs to say. She is such a far cry from the Carolyn that we used to know. It’s like she’s studied psychology somewhere.
But I guess there’s a lot of supernatural things happening later on in the episode and they are probably more exciting then the character moments that I just watched.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful.
I guess I will go watch the stuff with Angelique now. I didn’t want to spoil myself. It’s been 17 years or so since I saw it the only time I saw it.
It’s a lovely scene and I’m glad you pointed it out.
Fond childhood memories, just turned 11 in ’68. Watched Ed Sullivan, sure I saw The Doors. Watched as much Dark Shadows as I could, couldn’t get home from school in time, so only saw it in summer, school holidays, snow days, sick days. I did see the first and last episodes, as they aired, but caught the rest in the 90’s on SciFi.
I also remember how, back in the 60’s, Hammer previews scarred the bejeezus out of everybody who was in the theater to see Don Knotts in The Ghost And Mr Chicken.
If you didn’t quote a Beatles lyrics, then I probably wouldn’t have to correct you:
Turn off your mind, relax, and float (not “flow”) downstream
— from “Tomorrow Never Knows” (final track on “Revolver” — probably one of the first psychedelic LPs).
Oh, you’re right. Thanks for the correction!
Reblogged this on Colonel Assignment – and thoughts about writings and the world.
Quite an interesting take on the approach taken in filming these scenes, Danny. I never thought about them in that way before, but I think you’re on to something here.
I love Angelique, but in my foolish habit of trying to be logical about storylines, I was dumbfounded by something Angelique said in this or the next ep, along the lines of “I’ll be free, and there’s nothing Nicholas can do about it”. What? You were under his command as Cassandra, having implicitly sold him your soul. He was able to raise you from the dead on his own, and make you a vampire into the bargain. How will this “experiment” remove you from his grasp?
The apparatus looks like it’s made up equally of parts from Radio Shack and Spencer Gifts. With maybe a Sybian in the mix too, judging by Angelique’s reactions.
Carolyn’s gift to Adam scene was so sweet and kind of redeemed Adam to me. It was very genuine and heartfelt and it made my heartbreak for him when she asked if he had never received a gift as a child. How strange to have never been a child.
As of September 2020, all of the actors who appear in this episode are still alive. I haven’t noticed any previous episodes with that distinction. Has anyone else?
Robert Rodan, R.I.P.
Carolyn wears a lot of make up to bed.veven false eyelashes.
I’d be curious to know what kind of direction Lara P. was given for her Life Force transference scene, as it seemed to be the kind that was probably given to Meg Ryan in the restaurant scene in “When Harry Met Sally.”
Man, the clicks, beeps and bloops heard as Jeff manipulates the Life Force Machinery sounds like it was culled from either Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” or Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music,”
Usually Nancy Barrett looks good in anything they have her wear, but I cannot abide that light peach number she is wearing in Scene 2. The color is all wrong for her. But I still love her, she is Dark Shadows secret weapon.