‘Dark Shadows: Reincarnation’ in Development at the CW — Plus An Exclusive Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Original

It was born from a dream.

According to Dan Curtis, the concept for Dark Shadows came to him in a dream. “I awoke suddenly,” he recalled, “and the bedroom was pitch black, yet I could see the dream clearly. My dream was about a girl riding on a train. She was reading a letter and gazing out the window.”

He went on to explain that there was a voice-over which said that she had been hired as a governess at an old place (which would eventually be known as Collinwood) along the New England seacoast. The dream ended with the girl standing at a deserted station in the middle of the night as the train pulled away. “I forced myself to come awake and lit a cigarette,” he reminisced. “I thought about it and it was brilliantly logical to me.”

The next day he sold ABC on the idea as a daytime soap opera based on that dream. Notes writer Art Wallace, “What came to him in a dream, if it was a dream, was the idea of doing a gothic show, but he had no show. He just had the idea of doing a daytime serial which would be different. He had no characters, no story, no nothing. The idea of doing a gothic show is what interested the network. Now if Dan Curtis dreamed that, then it’s fine with me. I wrote the show, creating the actual details. For the first thirteen weeks of the show, I wrote the whole thing, 65 scripts.”

The evolution of the concept.

Explains Art Wallace, “He wanted to know if I was interested in producing it. I told him I wasn’t, but I might be interested in writing and creating it. I had written a one-hour movie for Studio One, a very prestigious anthology series. My script, called ‘The House,’ was about a woman who hadn’t left the house in 20 years, and it was very much like the beginnings of Dark Shadows. I used ‘The House’ as a basis for developing all the characters that were on the show in the beginning. I wrote a bible for the show, and ABC decided to go ahead with it.”

The title Dark Shadows was settled on, and exteriors of the brooding 40-room mansion was shot in Newport, RI, while footage of Barnabas Collins’ old house — where the resurrected vampire would live — was obtained in Tarrytown, NY.

‘Dark Shadows’ in the beginning.

Series director John Sedwick explains that early on, the show was “sort of a tame mystery filled with dark shadows. Actually, in the first few months there wasn’t all that much happening.”

Adds Art Wallace, “The show’s basic plotline was very typical of the Gothic novels: The Girl comes to the house to be governess to the kid, and the house is very mysterious. But it wasn’t supernatural. It became supernatural in the 10th or 11h week on the air, which I give total credit for that change to Dan Curtis. Dan insisted that it had to become supernatural and not that ‘it might be’ supernatural. He was absolutely right, and that’s when our first ghost appeared.”

With a positive audience response, a number of ghost stories followed, which led to one dealing with patriarch Roger Collins’ ex-wife, Laura, showing up, revealing herself to be a Phoenix trying to lure their son into the flames.

“When that happened,” says producer Robert Costello, “the ratings began to go up. We tried a few more eccentric things, getting a little bolder and bolder. We found that dealing with the supernatural seemed to increase the audience and there was a better response to the show. We realized that that was the road to follow.”

Adding a bit of the undead.

Series head writer Sam Hall reflects, “The show was limping along. Really limping. And ABC said, ‘We’re cancelling it. Unless you pick up in 26 weeks, you’re finished.’ Dan had always wanted to do a vampire picture, so he decided to bring a vampire on the series.”

Adds writer Ron Sproat, “We were having a cousin coming from England. It was another blackmail plot that had been projected. It was Dan Curtis who said, ‘I want to go for broke. I want a vampire in there.’ I loved it. The only concern I voiced was, ‘What are we going to do to top it?’ I just couldn’t think of anything we could do after that which would top it. As it turned out, though, he stayed on the show until the end. At any rate, we did it and Dan said this was Russian Roulette. So we went with it and had lots of story meetings. I remember one meeting that lasted 27 hours, because we were fighting deadlines and making this stuff up. It was exciting and fun.”

As Dan Curtis noted at the time, “I’d always felt that a vampire was as spooky as we could get. That if the viewers bought it, we could get away with anything. If it didn’t work, I figured we could always drive a stake into his heart.”

Needless to say it worked, and Barnabas Collins was spared the stake.

The arrival of Jonathan Frid.

As the vampire storyline drew closer, Robert Costello found himself in charge of casting the role. “We were down to the wire and still looking at actors. As a matter of fact, I had to pose for the portrait of Barnabas which hangs in Collinwood, except for the face. Incidentally, I got the name Barnabas off a tombstone in Flushing, New York. I don’t remember the last name, but it was registered in Flushing and dated back to the 18th Century. The name just sounded right.”

During casting calls, an indifferent Canadian actor named Jonathan Frid arrived at the studio. Getting tied up with a series was contrary to his plans of going to California and becoming an instructor of drama. He’d only come to the studio to placate his agent.

“At the time,” he recalls, “I said, ‘Well, I’m never going to get it, so why am I wasting my time?’ I think that because I was in that frame of mind, I ended up getting the job.”

John Sedwick notes, “We felt Jonathan played it very honestly. He had a wonderful, mysterious sort of quality… a larger than life quality. He could be an English gentleman on one hand, and on the other he could look evil and exude this vampire-undead mystique.”

Adds Robert Costello, “When Jonathan appeared, we said, ‘That’s it.’ He couldn’t have been costumed any faster. A couple of days later, he was in the coffin.

The soap becomes a phenomenon.

Soon after the arrival of Barnabas, the ratings began to skyrocket and it wasn’t long before the show that had been gasping its last breath had become a full-blown pop culture phenomenon. As a result, there was no longer talk of killing the character, but, instead, making him more sympathetic. A reluctant vampire.

“Dan never wanted him to be sympathetic,” says Ron Sproat. “He hated it. We just felt we couldn’t get that much mileage out of a character who is pure evil. Even the villain has to have different colors other than snarling and snapping. In fact, in the book Dracula, he hardly appears at all. He’s in the beginning and the end, but most of it’s the search for him. Anyway, that’s how we started to evolve.”

For his part, Jonathan Frid decided it would be best to approach an unrealistic role in a realistic manner. “I tried to make him a perfectly sensible person. I never played a vampire. I played him as a man with a hell of a conflict. I never thought I created fear with the fang business of Barnabas. I always felt foolish doing that part of it. The horror part I liked was the lie.

“There’s nothing more horrible than looking someone in the eyes who’s telling you a lie,” he adds. “Somehow that scares me more than anything. An inner conflict or emotional confrontation is more of a drama to me. That’s why with Barnabas there were many scenes I was thrilled to do, and why the show came alive so many times for me.”

It was Barnabas’ lie, that he was pretending to be something that he wasn’t, which motivated Jonathan more than any other aspect of the role. “That pretense was something the actor playing Barnabas had to remember all the time. He got the lust for blood every once in a while, but always what preyed on his mind was the lie.”

The vampire meets his adoring fans.

Merchandise from the show exploded, but while Jonathan didn’t make much from that, he did on weekend public appearances, where he was greeted by thousands of people. “It was the time of The Beatles,” he observes, “and I was getting something of the same treatment they were.”

With the success of Barnabas, the supernatural gates were opened with a vengeance. The show introduced warlocks, witches, werewolves, man-made monsters, ghosts and much more. And somewhere in there, lightning struck again when David Selby joined the cast as the silent spirit of Quentin Collins. David played the character as a ghost, a werewolf and in a variation of the story of Picture of Dorian Gray.

The actor was hired after Jonathan made it clear to Dan Curtis that he couldn’t keep up the pace he was on. He wanted some competition to give him back his edge.

“They tried two or three things until Selby came along,” he says. “The ratings were going down at that point and we were delighted that Selby boosted them. I think if it hadn’t been for Selby, the show would have gone off the air in four months. He gave us a much needed shot in the arm and it ran for another year and a half or so.”

Heading towards the end.

Despite the impact of David Selby as Quentin — and the fact that a movie version, House of Dark Shadows, was produced in 1970 — ratings began to drop again and the show was clearly out of creative steam. The latter Sam Hall puts right at the doorstep of Dan Curtis.

“He began to say, ‘We’ve got to get more scares, more romance, more mystery,’ and finally ended up with plots… we had one plot that I didn’t even understand. You needed subtitles; you had no idea what was happening.”

Agrees Ron Sproat, “I thought it got kind of crazy at the point where you have a witch who has been transformed into a vampire, talking to a man-made monster who wants a man-made woman, and the Devil is walking around telling everybody what to do. There was another vampire, plus there was a werewolf. I was just throwing my hands up in despair. I told Dan that I felt we owed a certain obligation to the person who isn’t able to get to the television every day, to explain what’s going on. That we should keep a fairly clear storyline. Fans didn’t want to have a guide that would untangle all this.”

Yet ‘Dark Shadows’ lives on.

Ultimately they didn’t need one. It all came to an end after 1,225 episodes on April 2, 1971. “The end wasn’t really a great shock, because the writing on the wall was always there for me,” Jonathan points out. “Every time the show went up another notch, I figured it was peaking and that it would start to go down. It lasted a hell of a lot longer than I thought it would. They went through all the stories three or four times and we started repeating ourselves until the show burned out.”

As to the show’s legacy, Sam Hall observes, “There’s a whole mythic quality about Dark Shadows. I think we gave the audience legends: a Greek god and goddess period with strange happenings on Mount Olympus.”

But things didn’t quite end there.

‘House of Dark Shadows’

Produced in 1970 — while the soap was still on the air — House of Dark Shadows essentially retold the Barnabas storyline from the series, but in a tight, 90-minute format. Series creator Dan Curtis serves as director, and he delivers the Barnabas story the way he always wanted to — but could never get away with on daytime TV at the time. The hell with sympathy, this vampire was a true monster. However, two people not thrilled with the end results was screenwriter Sam Hall and the man who had to play that monster, Jonathan Frid.

“You can’t be happy dealing with a product being directed by a man who was incompetent as a director,” Sam reflects. “It was like you saying to me, ‘Let’s sit down and write a play. I’ve never written a play, but why don’t I try?’ Despite the fact that you come up with act endings which are marvelous doesn’t mean the play is going to be any good. He got what he wanted out of it, which is the secret of Dan Curtis. He didn’t give a s— if the thing was well-written, so long as he got the chance to direct.”

Jonathan Frid’s view of ‘House of Dark Shadows.’

For his part, Jonathan says, “I thought the script was merely a rehash of earlier episodes and it got too realistic. You see, it’s an odd thing, I don’t know why directors are so fond of cars. I hate any movie that has a car driving up to a building, let alone crash into another car, or car chases. I suppose there’s a validity to it, but it becomes such as cliché, and anyway, the movie had too much of that element to it, too many realistic scenes. There were highways, whereas in the series there were only very old lanes. The show was more Brigadoon-ish, charmingly naïve. Collinsport was in Maine, but that was as close as you ever got to specific geography. Once in a while, someone would mention specific geography, like Boston, but that’s about it. The movie constantly referred to New York, Boston and other towns. I remember Dan Curtis wanted to get a car in the series once, and it was an old jalopy. That I didn’t mind, because it was charming. The movie had too much zipping, zapping and too much silly violence for violence sake.

“I don’t know how many vampires landed up in that thing. It’s like a porno movie that panics, and they have to do every bloody thing, and that’s the problem with them. Pornography is made for the movies, by the way. It can be beautiful, but the people who are in them are always sleazy people and they have no taste. They get panicked and throw more bodies into the scene until you don’t know who’s doing what to whom. It’s just absurd. The movie was like a bad porno movie, moving from one ridiculous thing to another. It was like, how can we upstage the scene before? I mean, first I beat the s— out of Willie, and now we have a car crash. Anyway, I thought it was dull and lacked the charm of the soap opera. At the same time, I thought it was interesting to do, because I’d never done a movie before, and found that my lines in the movie amounted to one episode in length spread out over a period of five weeks. It shows how much soap opera people are taxed. We did the whole movie in five weeks, which made a lot of people nervous. To me, it was a luxury. I mean, the dialogue I usually had to learn in one night, I had five weeks for.”

‘Night of Dark Shadows’

When Jonathan Frid made it clear that he had no interest in a sequel to House of Dark Shadows, the decision was made to make these films a horror anthology with Collinwood being the only continuing “character.” The result (actually the only result) of this decision was 1971’s Night of Dark Shadows. The film is described as follows: “A young artist, Quentin Collins (David Selby), inherits a mansion that has been in his family for generations, and he moves into the house with his wife, Tracy (Kate Jackson). Soon Quentin becomes tormented by strange, dark dreams that seem to echo his clan’s macabre history. Eventually, the ghost of Angelique (Lara Parker), one of Quentin’s ancestors, appears, and he starts to take on bizarre and violent behavior. Can the curse of the Collins estate be broken?” 

“The second was a revelation to me,” admits writer Sam Hall. “Dan, in his newfound directorial style, loved a certain style. If you and I are sitting here talking and that’s the scene, and I say to you, ‘I’ll show you what we’re talking about,’ you and I walk to the kitchen, then down a long hall, then another long hall, and finally get to the point of the scene where I show you what it is. He did this with every scene — people kept walking. Those scenes started with dialogue, ended with dialogue, there was no conflict, just mood all the time.”

The ‘Night’ goes on and on and on …

Sam elaborates, “At the time, the manager of MGM, one of the great monsters of the industry had seen no takes of the rushes. It was filmed quickly, and Dan spent six weeks putting it together and it came out to two hours and forty-five minutes, with Dan convinced he had a masterpiece. Dan and I flew to Beverly Hills and showed this film to MGM at nine in the morning. A man from the company, who didn’t give two s—s, came in and sat there. I hadn’t seen Dan’s final cut, and I just sat there without a word being said, scrunched into my seat. At the end of it, the head monster said, ‘You didn’t know when to stop, did you?’ Dan said, ‘I think it merits that length’ and the man said, ‘I don’t. I want one hour cut out of it by six this evening, and if you don’t take it out, I’m going to.’ ‘You can’t do that!’ ‘I know your audience far better than you do. Take it out.’
 
“We spent until six that night cutting the film, and it was the incredible bastardizing … We really had to take out one entire subplot. Once it was over, and I was sitting back in the Beverly Hills Hotel with a drink — we were in such a state of shock over this kind of treatment, and this true sense of filth which you deal with. People who refuse to see any point but their own. The next day I got onto a 747 and the stewardess said, ‘Do you want to see a movie?’ and I broke into tears. I realized with some horror that I had invested too much emotion into the film, and that I was unable to deal with this kind of insane, erratic behavior where, ‘You do this because I have the power!’ We’re not talking about what’s right with the film or story, but with what this man thought would net MGM more money.”
 
Ultimately it backfired. Night of Dark Shadows was the last film of that series, though, as it would turn out, DS as a whole was still far from over.

‘Dark Shadows’ takes on primetime.

In 1991, NBC briefly aired a prime time version of Dark Shadows, which was a one-hour weekly show that retold the early Barnabas storyline from the soap, but in a much quicker fashion. Playing the character was British-born Ben Cross, best known at the time for his role as Olympic athlete Harold Abrahams in Chariots of Fire (1981).

“I think one of the first things is the way women might view a vampire and vampire tale is somewhat different to the way a man would,” Ben offers in regards to the appeal of the Barnabas character. “The series gets to a certain point where we simply have to go back to the past and find out exactly what went on. So we see Barnabas as this really very nice guy. Very happy family, and it’s really like a cautionary tale for married men. He actually has a fling with the wrong person, and the phrase of hell having no fury like a woman scorned is absolutely true, because, in fact, she comes from hell. In a sense he makes a human mistake that a lot of people, if they’re honest, have actually made. He regrets it, and then becomes a victim and a vampire. In a sense, he is as much a victim of his own condition in the way that the people he finds himself biting.” A total of 12 episodes were produced.

The 2004 unaired TV pilot

In 2004, the CW produced a pilot for what would have been the third television incarnation of Dark Shadows. By all accounts, that version of the show would have very much followed the storyline of the other two, though there was a shift to younger actors which could have potentially given it a different sort of energy.

Of Barnabas’ motivation as a character, Alec Newman, who played him, offers, “I think there’s en epic love story driving him. What he has is a supernatural ‘condition’ — he doesn’t treat it as a curse. I mean, he knows who he is. Somebody was telling me that in one of the original episodes the character of Dr. Hoffman gave him the option to not be a vampire, and the reason he wanted to do that was to be with Victoria Winters, even though as a man, as a human man, he knows she is not really the reincarnation of his lost love. But such is the height of his pain about what happened 200 years ago. That’s very, very powerful. So one of the essential driving forces of Barnabas emotionally is love and regret, and trying to make that love tangible.”

Creating ‘Shadows’ With Audio

Beginning in 2006, Britain’s Big Finish Productions — the creator of a wide variety of audio full cast dramas and readings — launched Dark Shadows on audio with The House of Despair and has continued the series ever since. The actors bringing the characters to vocal life include David Selby (Quentin Collins), Lara Parker (Angelique), Kathryn Leigh Scott (Maggie Evans) and John Karlen (Willie Loomis), with other members of the original. New actors have been added along the way, including Andrew Collins (there’s a last name for you!) as Barnabas. There have been about 75 released so far, including Jonathan Frid’s last portrayal of Barnabas in The Night Whispers.

The Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie

If you want to talk about a polarizing film, you wouldn’t have to look beyond Tim Burton’s 2012 movie version of Dark Shadows, starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins and Eva Green as Angelique, among others. Here’s the thing: Both director and star have said this film was made from their memories of Dark Shadows. We can honestly say that this campy mis-fire doesn’t represent any of our memories of the show, but there are undoubtedly people who enjoy it. Somewhere. It did, however, provide a very quick opportunity for a cameo of original cast members.

‘Master of Dark Shadows’

The good news for fans of Dark Shadows is the fact that there’s a new documentary on the way called Master of Dark Shadows, which MPI describes this way: “A comprehensive celebration of the legendary Gothic daytime series and its visionary creator, Dan Curtis. The feature documentary, which was shot in New York, LA and London, includes interviews with key actors and filmmakers involved in the undyingly popular story of vampire Barnabas Collins and all the eerie goings-on at the gloomy Maine mansion Collinwood. The Dark Shadows documentary was directed by David Gregory and is set to be released this spring. Narrated by Ian McShane (Deadwood), Master of Dark Shadows offers insights from Curtis himself in addition to Oscar-winning writer-producer Alan Ball (True Blood), screenwriter William F. Nolan (Trilogy of Terror), author Herman Wouk (The Winds Of War), veteran actors Whoopi Goldberg , Barbara Steele and Ben Cross, Dark Shadows stars Jonathan Frid, David Selby, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Lara Parker, John Karlen, Nancy Barrett, Jerry Lacy, Roger Davis, Marie Wallace, Chris Pennock and James Storm, plus other colleagues and family members.

“The feature-length documentary reveals the fascinating history, far-reaching impact and lasting appeal of Dark Shadows with a compelling blend of rare footage and behind-the-scenes stories while also exploring the dramatic talents of creator-producer-director Dan Curtis. Known as the ‘King of TV Horror,’ the Emmy-winning filmmaker followed Dark Shadows with other iconic genre favorites including The Night Stalker, Trilogy of Terror and Burnt Offerings before earning accolades for the epic miniseries The Winds of War and War and Remembrance.”