(1970. dir: Dan Curtis) The movie was cashing in on the TV series, which had been a monster hit (sorry) since 1966. The genius of the franchise was that it was the first time soap opera was melded with Gothic, or with the supernatural at all, now a staple combination on cable channels everywhere, from Grimm to Penny Dreadful to Sleepy Hollow. Not only did it bring the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel, it brought to the forefront that dreadful and steadfast Gothic law that, to some extent, the victim willingly submits. Possibly against his (her) conscious will, possibly in spite of the ego and the left brain, but, comes the moonlight, the Gothic victim is like an addict and cannot explain in the light of day what he (she) has gotten up to in the night. Crucially, the one intended victim in this movie who does NOT submit has yet to approach sexual maturity, and so, it is implied, is still thinking straight, and runs away to safety instead of relaxing into ecstasy and death.
Dark Shadows, Barnabas Collins and his whole dysfunctional clan, are so deeply imbedded in my underconscious that the tendrils could not possibly be weeded out of my psyche: the incomparable theremin music floating over waves crashing in Collinsport Harbor, the shiver-inducing sight of Collinwood Mansion, hunkered over, watching and simultaneously embodying all manner of malignancy and evil from beyond the reach and ken of mankind. If you scroll down through the "full cast" listing on IMDB, you see roles listed like "Ghost of One-Armed Man", "Figure Holding a Knife", "Zombie", "The Werewolf", and "Bat". It inspired the one and only time I ever switched off a television set out of sheer fright. I remember, vaguely, a dead man's head in a glass tank sitting in the parlor, and much concerned talk over it, and the camera lingering far too long and suggestively on it, until I was certain its eyes would open, and it would be a moment of Lovecraftian revelation too horrible to be withstood, it would have transported me beyond the Despair Event Horizon, and I would never have found my way back into the innocence of childhood. So I switched it off. Amazingly, my left-brain, science-only, no-nonsense brother concurred with the decision. To this day I don't know what happened with that head, but in my under-psyche, it's something unspeakably, unsurvivably dreadful.
This two-hour introduction incorporates many of the accepted vampire tropes: the beast is unchained from his bondage by a treasure-seeking Renfield (John Karlen), feeds himself back into strength, reintegrates with his family, where he finds the spittin' image of his long-lost love is employed as governess, and becomes obsessed with sharing eternity with her as his undead bride. Meanwhile, there is a whole ton of barely-suppressed lust and dark ecstasy brought to light by the introduction of the beast, and death is so fully and successfully associated with sexual satiation as to reach a certain level of shamelessness, which in no way curtails its enjoyment. It is lurid, unabashed, bodice-ripping, penny-dreadful, pulpy, potboiler greatness, done with a small budget and wildly divergent levels of talent in both acting and writing.
My favorite character is Dr. Julia Hoffman, indelibly played by Grayson Hall, she of the magnificent cheekbones. Although in reboots her character was played by the great Barbara Steele and then again by Helena Bonham-Carter, a general favorite of mine, nobody can touch the original. Her role in the initial plot is to isolate the "vampire cell" and offer to "cure" Barnabas of his affliction, but, on the brink of success, as is fitting in a Gothic story, the empirical is overwhelmed, utterly submersed, by the interfering demands of human emotion, and the beast remains, thank all the eldritch gods, incontrovertibly bestial.
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