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Married Geek Couple

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT DARK SHADOWS (Part One)

Okay, Barb and I have been talking about ourselves, but now we need to talk about Dark Shadows.

NO, not the 2012 Tim Burton movie. We try not to talk about that (although if it attracted some new fans to the real Dark Shadows— and it did– then fine, whatever). No, I’m talking about the TV show it was based on, from 1966 to 1971, the world’s first gothic daytime TV soap opera, Dark Shadows.

Barb got me into Dark Shadows.

Barb loves Dark Shadows. And, now that she got me into it some years ago, so do I.

When I was growing up, I saw ONE episode of Dark Shadows on TV– as a re-run. It was during what’s called The Leviathan Storyline, which happens to be the one where a Lovecraftian monster dude not entirely unlike Lovecraft’s story “The Dunwich Horror” –but who can turn himself into a normal human-lookin’ dude as long as he can get back to a specially-prepared saferoom back at his lair place– is trying (reluctantly) to help an ancient evil cult take over the world (starting with the New England town of Collinsport).

I was at home with my paternal grandfather, who was referred to as Granddad. Ever since his wife died, Granddad would often try to visit his children and grandchildren, but especially me, the cutest one. (What? It’s true! My parents were each the youngest of five, so by the time I came along, I was the only baby left amongst my many, many cousins.)

Granddad didn’t always exactly know what to do with himself when he visited– mostly, he sat on the couch and watched TV and napped and watched me if Mom wanted to go to the store. Grandad really liked the ’70s detective shows– Kojak, CHiPs, Starsky and Hutch (whom he called Starsky and Hooch), but he’d watch Emergency, Adam-12, whatever was on, soap operas.

And one day, a re-run episode of Dark Shadows was on.

Now, we never saw the Lovecraftian monster in his monster form. Like– no one did. This dude in a leather jacket would be somewhere sneering at people and things, but occasionally when you really torqued him off he’d start breathing hard and the camera would cut to a Monster POV shot of a cast member having a horrified look and screaming. Then we’d cut to commercial, and that cast member would be dead with bits of slime on them and there’d be a giant hole in the far wall (that the monster left by, you see). Then later the sneering dude would walk out of his special bedroom back at his place and his cult handlers would be like “you’ve got to stop doing this randomly, you’re gonna blow this whole thing for us, dude.”

But I’m saying Granddad and I didn’t even get a monster episode that day. Dark Shadows could only afford to pay four or five actors to be on screen every day, and I think this was a day when we kept the sneering guy off screen and let everyone else just talk to each other about the mysterious death that happened a couple of days ago and where could that slime have come from and have you noticed how strange half the town is acting lately? But even then, there was like a sinister book of magic (that the (brainwashed) kid of the family had– he was the only one who could read its eldritch prophecies) and thunderstorms and stained glass and, I think, a bizarre dream. Maybe it was the dream where the pretty blonde’s subconscious tried to warn her that her hot boyfriend who sneers at things a lot maybe killed her long-lost-until-recently father (a hint that she didn’t take. Like, at all). Or maybe it was some other bizarre dream—there are plenty in that storyline.

And I was like magic book, bizarre dreams, thunder and lightning, stained glass, and hey, is that guy a vampire? This is not your average soap opera.

But I didn’t really watch soap operas, and Granddad didn’t go out of his way to do so, so I never saw it again (in my youth, I mean).

And then later I met Barb.

And she was like “um the library has DVDs of Dark Shadows, can I show you the first movie they made, called HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS? It’s got a vampire.”

And I was like: sure, baby.

And it was… weird. Good, but weird. Almost the whole cast of characters died. Arguably awesomely, but wow, Hamlet has a smaller body count I think.

So Barb was like “What did you think?” And I told her honestly: “I thought it was pretty darn neat, but it was a little hard to keep track of who everyone was without a program, because you barely get introduced to characters and then POW they’re dead and/or undead and/or subsequently staked. Neat ideas about how to handle a vampire story, though.”

So Barb says to me she says Whaaaat if we tried watching a little of the actual Dark Shadows TV show, and I was like sure, baby, magic and vampires and really wild things.

So we started watching it and there were like… some bloopers. Because it’s the 1960s and I CANNOT TELL YOU how expensive and how much trouble it is to try to EDIT VIDEOTAPE, let alone to say “CUT, take two!”

And Barb was like… “Do you think it’s stupid?”

But I was like “Well that fly landing on that guy’s face was funny, but he was a pro and just kept going like a trooper, and yeah they stumble hard over a line or look at the teleprompter now and then, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re so into it, this is awesome, let’s keep going!” Which was the right answer.

Reader, I watched the whole thing. Five days a week of filming over five years. (Except for the very last storyline which is so frustrating that I can’t even watch every episode of the whole thing, but I am super not-alone in that, even in super-mega-Dark-Shadows fandom.)

Barb and I talk A LOT about Dark Shadows. A LOT a lot. This morning during breakfast we had a talk about when– 

Okay. Spoiler alert. You’re not ready. Meet me here next time for Part Two of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT DARK SHADOWS.