“I’m in an unfamiliar time, without a touchstone.”
It’s narrative collision time on Dark Shadows, as a brand-new storyline begins, using brand-new second-hand stories. By now, the Dark Shadows writers have fully acclimated to the idea that this is how you write a soap opera, throwing together bits and pieces of other people’s stories, and when the end comes, as it will, they’ll spend the next several decades patiently explaining that they couldn’t continue writing the show, because they’d run out of source material to plunder. They believe it, too. This is all they know.
So it’s Rebecca this time, a vaguely spooky drawing-room tragedy about a dim young woman of modest means who’s swept off her feet, and into an enormous mansion which she is not prepared to manage. The main character, who has 416 pages to think of a first name and never manages to come up with one, marries a handsome widower with a charming manner, an enormous manse and an inadequate explanation for what happened to the original Mrs. de Winter.
When Mr. de W. brings his replacement wife to her new home, she finds herself nominally in charge of a splendid estate full of rooms and beds and nightgowns and unhappy memories, and a formidable housekeeper who makes it clear from the outset that she liked the original wife and doesn’t really feel like participating in a peaceful transfer of power. Mrs. Danvers is not interested in democratic norms, and she does not believe in reboots.
But maybe she has a point. Practically the first thing the new wife does is knock over a perfectly innocent statuette and smash it to bits, and then she stuffs the shattered remains into a drawer and pretends it never happened. Naturally, Mrs. Danvers considers this the beginning of a crime wave which, left unchecked, would reduce her home to fragments within weeks. You can’t be too careful with things like this. Once you allow the master of the house to bring home stray spouses, it’s only a matter of time before the place is overrun with clumsy exotic pets, and life becomes insupportable.
So Mrs. Danvers sets up a series of clever scenarios where the new wife is contrasted with the old one, and then she glides up behind the interloper and urges her to fling herself out a second-story window. This plan comes very close to succeeding, but then people find a sunken boat with the old wife’s body in it, and everybody talks about that until Danvers gets fed up and burns the house down. This is also pretty rough on the statuettes, but sometimes you have to express yourself.
Meanwhile, on Dark Shadows, we’ve got Hoffman, a handful of sharp objects who’s serving up crabmeat, champagne and attitude. This is Parallel Time, we’re told, a different existence taking place at a vibration setting that’s not the one we’re used to. In our world, Julia Hoffman is a fully-accredited mad scientist with a specialty in monster medicine and sedatives, but in this reality, she’s Mrs. Danvers. This is apparently a choice that Julia made at some point in her life, either medicine or this. They must have given her one hell of a scholarship to housekeeping school.
Parallel Quentin has recently married Parallel Maggie, and it’s not sitting well with Hoffman, who was dangerously attached to Angelique, the first Parallel Mrs. Collins, who died under mysterious circumstances, as first wives tend to do. So Hoffman’s set her first trap for the new bride, arranging a cozy dinner by the fireplace, which was Angelique’s favorite spot. Quentin’s flown off the handle and out into the night somewhere, and now Maggie’s left alone and unguarded, with this sinister domestic.
Hoffman takes Maggie upstairs to her new bedchamber, which is something of a disappointment. Maggie asks about Angelique’s old suite, and Hoffman rhapsodizes. “It’s the most beautiful room in the house, I think,” she says. “It’s in the east wing, of course. The sun seems so much brighter there.” As the new mistress of the house, Maggie is apparently responsible for how bright the sun is. She had no idea Collinwood had such a difficult entrance exam.
Meanwhile, on a nearby set, they’re doing a mash-up of Dracula and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which is a nice double-feature, if you can manage it. Barnabas Collins has fallen out of the world, tumbling down a parallel rabbit-hole into this new world. Here, Carolyn has an unhappy marriage of her own, hitched to washed-up author Will Loomis, and they’re living in the Old House, where Barnabas was planning on setting up base camp.
He’s got Carolyn in his thrall, and convinced her that they should hide his coffin in the basement, and pretend that he’s a houseguest. For some reason, these two brainboxes seem to think that Will won’t notice if Barnabas bunks out in the basement. Carolyn’s rationale is that Will is always drunk, which he is, and that this renders him incapable of telling the difference between a guest and a ghoul, which it doesn’t. Carolyn’s new at this, of course, but Barnabas has been around the block a few times, and this is a new level of self-sabotage, even for him.
Will is one of those picturesque alcoholics that you see on stage, jovial and rueful and bitter, and they get some great George-and-Martha type dialogue. Carolyn snaps at Will about losing a book, and he sighs, “Oh, honey, I’m a loser. You know, some people everything sticks to, like fame and fortune. Me? Well, I’m just the opposite. Yes, sir. I can’t even keep the bottle full.”
So that’s what we’re doing today, bouncing back and forth between library books. This is always the best part of a Dark Shadows storyline, the happy beginning, when everybody has new stuff to talk about and the world is full of promise.
Looking back on the Leviathan storyline, the H.P. Lovecraft inspiration didn’t really give them very much to work with. “The Dunwich Horror” is a great story, but it’s mostly a dispassionate recital of facts. There isn’t a main character — the person who you think is the main character actually dies two-thirds of the way into the story, and it just continues on without him. And most of the story is spent wondering what’s going on over at the Whateley’s place, as viewed from the outside. There aren’t enough character parts to distribute among the cast, and there are only two sequences with visual appeal, both of them unfilmable.
Nobody has ever made a successful film adaptation of a Lovecraft story, unless you count Alien, or The Seeds of Doom, or any of the many, many stories in all mediums that are influenced-by but not based-on. It turns out there’s a reason why, namely: there’s not enough to point a camera at. They’re quiet stories, on the whole. Atmosphere pieces, where you get little glimpses of another world, and then you back out of the room as fast as you can.
There have been a number of literary borrowings on Dark Shadows that haven’t produced as much story as you’d expect — Edgar Allen Poe, for instance, which you think would be perfect, but never managed to power more than a single episode before petering out. Quentin heard the thump-thump of The Telltale Heart, Quentin was trapped under the swinging pendulum from The Pit and the Pendulum, and Judith trapped Trask, Cask of Amontillado-style, in Quentin’s room — these all involve Quentin, for some reason — but those were single moments, not ongoing storylines. The one exception is Barnabas trapping the original Trask behind the brick wall, which was originally just one episode, and then later on the wall fell down.
So, yes: Dracula, Frankenstein and The Wolf Man all turned out to be strong enough to power months of interesting story points, but just being in the “horror” category isn’t enough. You need a story that involves lots of cast members, lots of incidents and lots of things to talk about.
So now they’re taking a route that has been successful before: pick up a non-horror story, and give it a monster twist. In Rebecca, everybody’s metaphorically haunted by memories and regret; in the Dark Shadows version, Rebecca actually comes back to life and swaggers into Manderley to reclaim her title. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf involves a secret family member that nobody can talk about; in the DS version, it’s an undead cousin in the basement.
Dark Shadows is big and crazy and packed with action, so there’s a temptation to say that you could do pretty much anything on this canvas, but the soap opera format creates noticeable boundaries. Atmosphere and rising tension is all very well, but we’ve got twenty-two minutes a day to fill up with characters and dialogue and Chromakey. Art is theft, especially in this town, but you need to know which literary grave you’re plundering, before you dive in and help yourself to other people’s property.
Tomorrow: The Terror of Tarrytown.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
In act 1, when Quentin tells Maggie, “It was me, I was wrong,” a boom mic swings by overhead.
We see the open coffin at the end of act 1, and it’s already got the cross in place inside the lid.
Barnabas tells Carolyn, “Guard him carefully — guard me carefully!”
Hoffman tells Maggie, “Oh, I think — I wish you would look at them.”
The painting over the fireplace in the drawing room is buckling at the top corners of the frame. You can see this when Hoffman asks Maggie if Quentin is comfortable in their room.
When Maggie pours tea for Will, there’s a loud ding! from the studio.
As Barnabas walks into the basement at the end of the act, you can hear John Karlen running over from the Old House set, and whispering that he needs the cross.
In the basement, Barnabas is off mic when he says to Will, “Let me die.”
Tomorrow: The Terror of Tarrytown.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
Perhaps it is that Lovecraft wasn’t meant to be adapted in the lengthy serialized narrative format. Night Gallery did at least one interesting Lovecraft adaptation that I can recall, Pickman’s Model, and several others in the spirit of Lovecraft. Maybe they should have brought Rod Serling in on the Leviathan story as a guest writer, or at least as a consultant.
Here’s a 22-minute adaptation from a few years ago, using computer animation (creator and uploader: NueArtPictures).
I was crazy about Night Gallery when I was a kid. It was one of the few shows that was actually scary. Pickman’s Model was a big favorite.
I loved night gallery and still watch it and Alfred Hitchcock/Presents on METV.
I think Serling’s adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” was even better – Serling made it a tragic love story.
Thanks again, Danny, for another laugh-out-loud read! You made my day.
(Plus, I just got a DVD of Rebecca for Christmas!)
So…Parallel Sarah Johnson is the resident brain surgeon at Windcliff?
Parallel Victoria Winters is a brassy, no-nonsense bartender at the Gold Doubloon Tavern in Collinsport?
Parallel Nicholas Blair is pastor at the Presbyterian Church?
Parallel Tony Peterson is leader of the Collinsport biker gang, ‘The Warlocks’?
Parallel Buzz Hackett was the second man to walk on the moon?
Parallel Philip Todd and Sky Rumson are backup dancers in Mitzi Gaynor’s Las Vegas revue? (Because even Parallel Mitzi Gaynor is a STAR.)
What’s up with Barnabas’ hair? Since when do vampires suddenly go gray? What sort of decision was made to let Jonathan Frid stop dying his hair? Narratively it makes no sense… He’s been chowing down a lot lately so he should look younger. And then when he comes out of the box (and back from Tarrytown) he’s dark haired again.
It’s the super-demon bat that Jeb Hawkes summoned from the depths of hell to turn Barnabas back into a vampire. His run-in with the bat caused a few noticeable white streaks. It’s supposed to symbolize an encounter with a witch or the devil .
I figured it was those drugstore spray-on streaks for hair–they were big in the mid- to late-60s, and came in white, grey, and blondish tones. I think they were supposed to wash out.
Barnabas’s hair goes gray after he’s turned back into a vampire by Jeb Hawkes. They realize, soon enough, that this is NOT a good look for him, I think after he comes back from filming the movie. (Then again, maybe by that time, the makeup people simply forgot about the gray—it’s hard to be sure.)
I thought it was a result of Julia’s serum aging him like it did before, just not as much. Once the serum is out of his system, he’s back to dark hair again. Could just be my trying to make sense of it. I haven’t actually gone back to check exactly when the grey started.
Just when I think I’m out of having new insights into DOCTOR WHO stories… “Seeds of Doom” as a Lovecraft story? I’m amazed I’ve never thought of it that way before…
Yeah! Danny let us in on this a while back, early in the Leviathan story where he just did a post that was all Lovecraft quotes – including “the crinoid things of Antarctica”. And Philip Hinchcliffe/ Robert Holmes improvised on that riff. (It never occurred to me either…it was just “that story that scared the shit out of me when I was 5 or 6”. How about the villain and his stooge, lol? It all looks a bit different when you’re grown up).
That explains why parallel time Quentin is such a jerkface. Whenever he tries to be nice, somebody gets hit with a bloom mic.
It’s a duller curse than lycanthropy, but a lot less messy.
It’s almost like this PT Quentin was engineered to sabotage David Selby’s popularity. He lacks all charm, all humor and all passion – we’re never convinced for one minute that he has strong feelings for Maggie or Angelique. He’s a real bore.
He is rather fucked up. I thought it was just me…lol.
Let’s not forget the lifting of themes from the Bronte sisters. The 1897 subplots of Rachel Drummond & Jenny Collins were from Jabe Eyre. And Wuthering Heights provided a bit of inspiration for the Bramwell/Catherine story in PT 1841 (which also borrowed from Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery)
The Bramwell/Catherine story sucked.
I always wanted to see Jenny actually light a bed on fire.
Come on, baby, light my fire!
Yeah, they had plenty of other fires on the show, why not that one?
(And it would have been especially apt, considering how Quentin’s infidelity helped trigger her big breakdown.)
Doesn’t she set fire to Edward’s bed?
A fake. The smoke didn’t even come from that direction.
The best one was Henesy jumping back from a real fire’s sudden explosion. Was it a book? Collins Family History, maybe?
Love Judith Anderson (Mrs. Danvers). Just four years later she plays a fashionable, wealthy woman keeping a 30-ish Vincent Price as a boy toy in “Laura.” Then, 40 years later, she’s the Vulcan High Priestess who relinks Spock’s katra with his body at the end of “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.”
Don’t forget her turns as Memnet in CB. DeMille’s epic The Ten Commandments, and as Big Mama in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. And King’s Row, The Red House, And Then There Were None, All Through The Night…I haven’t seen her Lady Macbeth from 1960, but I don’t doubt that she is magnificent. A riveting actress!
Hoffman:
I’d like to pretend to say I’m sorry if I did anything wrong, but first let me take one step up the stairs, so I can turn around, and look down on you.
Huh! As many times I’ve seen “The Seeds of Doom” I’ve never connected it up with Lovecraft — there’s a story with a ton of roots (pardon the plant-based pun). Well-spotted!
There’s always the theory (my own, of course) that The Seeds Of Doom was based on the Gracie Fields song, “The Biggest Aspidistra In The World”. 🙂
I like the symmetry of Will chaining Barnabas in a coffin in 1970 PT as a parallel to Willie releasing him from his chained coffin in 1967.
I enjoyed that; also Parallel Willie getting the drop on Barnabas so easily. You can bet he wouldn’t put up with beatings with the Willie Whacker and orders to steal every cow in town.
I just watched this on Amazon–I think the loud ding! sound when Maggie pours tea for Will comes from her striking the base of the silver-plated tea pot on the rim of the metal tray as she picks it up.
In the movie, Mrs Danvers tricks the second Mrs de Winter into doing things that remind Maxim of Rebecca, causing Maxim to fly into rage. Those fits of rage convince the second Mrs de Winter that Maxim still loves Rebecca and that she can never measure up to the standards Rebecca had set. In the novel, it’s ambiguous just how much Mrs Danvers is doing to sabotage the second Mrs de Winter, but crystal clear that Mrs de Winter’s own feelings of inadequacy are by far the greatest danger she faces.
Here, it’s Miss Hoffman whose actions remind Quentin of his first wife and who is the target of his fury. While they do show Maggie as haunted by a sense of inadequacy, it doesn’t make any sense that those incidents should inflame it. If anything, seeing Quentin shout at Miss Hoffman should prompt Maggie to feel sorry for her. When she sees someone else- someone who is her subordinate- make the kind of mistake she was afraid of making and draw an angry response as bad as anything she could have been afraid of triggering, we would expect her to try to comfort Miss Hoffman, to put in a good word for her with Quentin, and to feel herself empowered to act as Miss Hoffman’s protectress. If Maggie were a less kindly character- if she were Kitty Soames, for example- she might see Miss Hoffman’s error and Quentin’s fury as an opportunity to dismiss Hoffman and replace her with her own sidekick. In either case, Miss Hoffman’s action would make Maggie feel more powerful, not less powerful.
Moreover, in both the movie and the novel, the second Mrs de Winter is established as deathly afraid of everyone at Manderley before she ever visits the estate, and even the assiduously friendly estate manager inadvertently heightens this fear. Aside from a remark that when she was a little girl she thought only grownups could be invited to Collinwood, Maggie isn’t shown in this light at all. On the contrary, she confidently assures Quentin that she more efficient than she looks and he needn’t worry about her ability to manage a big house. She’s clearly the same ol’ Maggie we’ve known all along.
As for Rebecca, the second Mrs de Winter never hears a word of anything but admiration for her from anyone. But people are continually making it plain to Maggie that they loathed Angelique. If they’d convinced us that Maggie was utterly obsessed with her own shortcomings, it might be interesting to see her fail to understand Liz, and Will, and all the others, but since she’s just our friend Maggie it doesn’t seem at all likely that she could miss such an obvious point.
It also doesn’t make sense that Maggie reacts to the note as she does. She has it open on the desk when Miss Hoffman comes in; they’ve given us no reason to expect her to do anything other than show it to her and ask her about it. Then she learns that Daniel resents her. Presumably he could copy his mother’s handwriting, and he certainly could have slipped the note under the door and found a way out of the foyer before Maggie looked. Her failure to draw this conclusion is the sort of idiot-plot move that killed Vicki. And skipping directly from the note to shots of Maggie leaning into the camera and looking like she’s about to throw up alienates her from the audience pretty thoroughly.
The entire point of the novel Rebecca is that the first Mrs. De Winter is being held up as this exemplary paragon of perfection by the very people who knew, for a fact, that she was a rotten to the core sociopath. Every one of these people also thinks only they knew the real truth and since her tragic demise, why ruin everyone else’s memories of her? That clash and clamor is what deafens and terrorized the current heroine.
Here, Maggie seems aware from the very first that she’s being set up, and everybody is tripping over each other in their rush to race around Angelique’s room and snarl about her wicked ways. Even Hoffman and PT Roger, who spend the most time talking her painted ear off, don’t really seem to believe she was genuinely good–they simply were overwhelmed by her.
It doesn’t make for a fantastic redo of the actual novel, really.
I loved Night Gallery, but don’t remember Pickman’s Model. Such a treat to see a young Louise Sorel in this!
Now I want crabmeat.
I haven’t rewatched this in 50+ years and it’s because from what I remembered I didn’t care for it. I see why. It goes wrong very fast and I’m sorry to say Quentin is the problem. Chaining Barnabas in his coffin is also not a good start. Nancy Barrett is incapable of a bad performance but what is John Karlen doing? Trying different accents? And the neck scarf has to go.
I get that they chained him up because he was off shooting the movie, but it really hurts the story.
Carolyn says Barnabas will pay for his lodging but with what? Whatever money he has on him may not be the same as this world and Josette’s jewelry most likely got passed down to their children, not sealed away in a wall. Maybe he intends to pawn his ring?
Some really great facial expressions from Julia during her scenes with Maggie.
Agree with other commenters that Selby’s performance is going to get old real fast. Most of the blame has to fall on the writers and directors, though, since they’re essentially dictating his tone.
Shouty Quentin is not good. The writers should be smacked for that one.
I’m actually enjoying servant Julia much better than Dr. Julia.
It’s a shame Barnabas is chained up once again. I did enjoy Carolyn enticing him to bite her again. Nancy Barrett is always the best.