On Friday, April 18,1967, in the final five minutes of Dark Shadows episode 211, the Collins housekeeper, Mrs Johnson (Clarice Blackburn) answers a knock at the door. As the door slowly opens, framed within the deepening twilight is the patrician visage of a dark-haired man wearing an Inverness cloak.
“Is Elizabeth Collins Stoddard in?” he asks.
Mrs Johnson inquires, “Who may I say is calling?”
“Barnabas Collins,” he says. “A cousin from England.” Then he pauses beside the portrait of his “ancestor,” Barnabas Collins.
The early Barnabas storyline treated the vampire issue very coyly. When he was released from his coffin by Willie Loomis, he bit his benefactor on the wrist. This satisfied his need for sustenance and, as a bonus, provided Barnabas with an unwilling servant and bodyguard to watch over his daytime slumbers and cover up for his nighttime roamings. Willie himself suffered a “bizarre illness.” It proved awkward to explain the odd marks on his wrist or why he squinted in bright light.
“We found out early that when we got to the vampire stage, we couldn’t comment on it,” John Sedwick remembers. “We could not camp it up. It had to be treated like he was a real vampire living in a real mansion like Collinwood. We had to take this bizarre situation and make it very real for the public, without the POWS! and ZAPS! like Batman did. That was one of the saving graces that made the show as successful as it was.”
In later episodes, when Barnabas went for his victim’s throats, the director had Frid open his mouth wide, the better to display the custom-fitted fangs created by a dentist. Frid was always uncomfortable with these shots. “The first time I ever did the bite was the most successful one because I put them [the fangs] in the wrong way and had to chew them up. So I slink in sideways. That was the best bite of them all, because I went about my business instead of showing them off.”
Shortly after his appearance in Collinwood, Barnabas becomes obsessed with Maggie Evans, seeing in her a resemblance to his own lost love, Josette Collins. This was an inspiration on the part of the writers - to give a human element to the monster they created and to use their already-established ghost. But the figure of Josette would no longer haunt the Old House. No, the woman walking the hallways in the 18th century wedding gown and veil would be Maggie Evans.
Barnabas kidnaps Maggie and puts her under a spell, intending, through his hypnotic power, to destroy her own personality and recreate Josette - a Josette who could live with him “through all eternity.”
Maggie, though dazed and enthralled by the vampire’s influence, manages to hold on to shreds of her own personality. She eventually escapes, aided by the helpful ghost of Barnabas’ nine-year-old sister, Sarah Collins. But because of her traumatic experience, Maggie emotionally reverts to her own childhood.
The storyline was leading to a final, climactic confrontation between the Evil One - Barnabas - and the forces for Good - Maggie Evans and Victoria Winters. Predictably, good would triumph. It was about time, the writers thought, for everyone to get just a little suspicious. On Dark Shadows, as in most horror films, all the people acquainted with the vampire have paltry powers of observation and never think that any of his strange habits are at all odd, including the fact that he is never seen before dark.
Jonathan Frid was about to get his wish. At last his character was to at last meet its justified end.
The agents of Barnabas’ demise would include two doctors working together on the case of Maggie Evans. When her father Sam Evans (David Ford) takes Maggie to Windcliff Sanitarium, one of the staff mentions a blood specialist who should be able to help Maggie. This expert is “Dr Julian Hoffman, one of the top men in his field.” Dr Hoffman was to be Dark Shadows’ “Van Helsing.” The plan called for him to discover Barnabas’ secret and eventually collaborate with Dr Dave Woodard (Robert Gerringer) in the vampire’s inevitable destruction.
As with some other fortuitous accidents surrounding Dark Shadows, an apparent typographical error in a script changed not only the gender of the respected Dr Hoffman, but also the good doctor’s alliances. Ultimately, Barnabas would not die, but Dave Woodard would, forging a bond between Barnabas Collins and Dr Hoffman.
Dr Julian Hoffman, with one slip of a typist’s finger, became Dr Julia Hoffman. And Curtis thought “Why not?”
On a particularly muggy summer day, actress Grayson Hall came home to her Seventh Avenue apartment from a day of shopping. She stepped into the narrow hall that connected the antique-laden living room with the rest of the house. She was standing in front of the air conditioner when the telephone rang. It was her agent, calling to see if she was “interested in doing daytime.”
“I thought why not? The agent told me I would get a contract for thirteen weeks and they would use me up in that time. And then she told me what it was about and my reaction was the usual: a soap about a WHAT? Anyway, I was going to play this doctor who would find out about the vampire, and the vampire would catch her and kill her and that would be that.”
But as all the elements came together and the story unfolded, public response was tumultuous and entirely unexpected. The ratings began a precipitously steady climb. And fan mail deluged the network.
“One day Dan gave me a handful of letters,” Frid remembers. “I said, ‘What are these?’ ‘They’re for you,’ he said. I said, ‘For me!’ Those were my first fan letters. And I remember that moment more than any other. That I got a handful of mail—me!—after that dreadful performance. Then it just built and built and built. It got out of hand. We couldn’t read it. All we did was sort the envelopes and take the repeats out to get a master list of addresses and send a card of acknowledgement. I couldn’t read 1,500 letters a day.”
“The response was phenomenal,” Grayson remembers. “The reaction of the fans to Jonathan, to all of us, was remarkable. I got so much fan mail from people who identified with Julia, with the predicament she found herself in.”
The predicament appealed to most viewers because of Grayson’s insistence on developing her character fully. Thirteen weeks or not, Grayson was an actress who was used to “fleshing out” a role. Three years earlier, she had been nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of a lesbian schoolteacher in Night of the Iguana. She also had extensive stage and television experience. So she tried to find motivation for Julia’s obsession with a vampire. Grayson decided that Julia wanted to save him, not stake him, for a very good reason.
Julia had fallen in love with Barnabas.
Grayson recalled that “I had never even told D.C. [Dan Curtis], but the audience picked up on it and wrote in their approval. We were in the same predicament, they and I, both in love with the vampire, and both unable to tell him or show him. I was with Barnabas, talking to him, being with him, touching him, and they sensed it. My mail got too good for D.C. to kill me, so I stayed on.”
Julia’s feelings not only went unmentioned, but also were unrewarded. She was a fortyish female doctor who, as most TV female doctors of that era had, given all her life to medicine. This created a wall between the two of them as real as Barnabas’ vampirism. The impossibility of her love for Barnabas, and Barnabas’ hopeless pining after Josette, created one of the program’s major plotlines, a triangle which would continue to the end of the series.
These stories not only held the old audience but drew in a new one. The Victorian-Gothic themes of lost love, timeless love, and love denied all combined to dictate a much different plot than Dan and his team of writers had ever contemplated.
“It was really something,” remembers Vincent Loscalzo, the program’s makeup artist. “Out of nowhere, it just landed on us. It was like your crazy brother-in-law just shot the Pope or something. There was all this attention, all of a sudden.”
By August of 1967 the ratings were bumping the 10,000,000 viewers mark, leaving ABC Daytime firmly entrenched in second place and making a real effort to unseat NBC.
The plot exposes Barnabas the hero within Barnabas the antagonist with his murder of Dr Dave Woo
dard, with Julia’s reluctant assistance. Through this act his conscience is probed. We hear the sad echo of Barnabas’ own loss in his taunting derision of Julia’s role in her friend’s murder: “You no longer have friends, Julia.” There is no way they can escape their own fates—her feelings for Barnabas, his lust for blood. Barnabas’ vampirism becomes an abstraction of a uniquely human fate.
Though Curtis was reluctant to surrender his vision, it was clearly obvious an evil Barnabas would have to die—and Barnabas was too popular to kill.
And popular was beginning to be an understatement.
The media were beginning to take notice of Dark Shadows. Journalists who had never acknowledged that TV existed before 7 PM were requesting interviews. In 1967, Newsweek acknowledged Barnabas, saying that Jonathan “played him with campy elan.”
Less kind was a 1968 review by TV Guide columnist, Cleveland Amory, which called Dark Shadows quite simply “the worst series in the history of television.” Referring to the legendary Curtis dream, Amory says, “All you can think or hope or even pray is that Mr Curtis never, ever gets that tired again.” However, even Amory had to admit that “when Saturday came,” after watching a week of the series, he “missed it.” He decided that the secret of Dark Shadows’ success was something along the lines of the worse it is, the more one loves it.
Still, the cluster outside the gate at West 53rd continued to grow and change. At Harvard, a professor stayed glued to Dark Shadows each afternoon, putting a tape on his office telephone that said, “Watching Dark Shadows. Phone back in one hour.” A Bryn Mawr co-ed wrote, “You and your colleagues have enabled me to escape from my mundane affairs into an engaging world of the fantastic and mysterious.” This seemed to be a major aspect of the series’ appeal: its difference from anything else on daytime television.
The fan mail was reaching several thousand pieces a week for Frid alone, and several thousand for the show itself as well as for the other popular actors. Most of the letters were shy and admiring, others friendly, still others ranged the gamut from the bizarre to the heart-rending. One child wrote that “Barnabas made me forget my illness and saved my life.” Perhaps escaping to the Collins’ mysteries and miseries made it easier for some to forget their own crises and worries.
Other children wrote to “Uncle Barnabas” as someone to whom they could tell their problems, making him what Frid called “a dark Santa Claus.” They watched as Barnabas struggled with “being bad” himself, just knowing he would understand their own conflicts.
Like their little brothers and sisters, teenagers identified with Barnabas’ loneliness and isolation. His desire to fit in was forever blocked, much like the adolescent audience Dark Shadows was drawing. They were moved and captivated by glimpses of the man behind the monster as Barnabas is humbled before the ghost of his beloved little sister Sarah. She tells him that she knows he killed Dave Woodard and recites back to him the words he had often said to her, “That wicked is evil is well understood, the wicked are punished, so you must be good.” Slowly, Sarah fades away, vowing never to return to him. Barnabas is shattered as he collapses, weeping, in the wake of his small sister’s vanishing shadow. The audience loved it.
Writer Ron Sproat remembers, “The response was phenomenal. ABC was at the time the third network, and they’d given a lot of time back to the local stations, which means a lot simply weren’t running it. In terms of advertising, it was the cheapest show on TV because the ratings were so terribly low. The ad rates then went up and up and up. For a long time the fact that it got high ratings was just amazing because so many stations weren’t running it. So in order to counterbalance that it was getting high ratings in the areas it was shown, ABC changed it from 3:30 to 4:00 because it had a large following of high school kids. So it would be wise to put it on when they could watch.”
Adolescent fans demanded to know more about Barnabas’ past. How had he become a vampire? Who was he before the curse was set upon him? What kind of man had brought such a fate upon himself? Was it deserved? Unjustified? Since the vampire was becoming the center of the storyline, the writers decided to explore his background.
A crucial element to the increasing success of Dark Shadows was the addition of writers Gordon Russell (in July of 1967) and Sam Hall (Grayson Hall’s husband) in the fall of the same year. They joined Joe Caldwell, Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein as the revolving group of writers.
Grayson Hall remembered, “When Dan Curtis asked Sam if he’d like to write for Dark Shadows he said he would give it a try, although he had never written for a soap before. He had watched the show for a few weeks while I was on and knew all the characters.”
The writing staff toiled away in an apartment a few minutes from the studio, fighting to keep two weeks ahead of the taped storyline while the plot projections were formatted only six weeks in advance. This gave the storyline flexibility; if the ratings declined the plot strategy could be adjusted. One such strategy - the “flashback” - would answer all those questions about Barnabas’ past.
Late in November, 1967, as the metal-grey skies over New York City promised an unseasonably early snow, ABC voyaged forth on a singular holiday excursion for the viewers of Dark Shadows. It would be an excursion to challenge the Dark Shadows creative staff like never before.
It was a trip of the mind, a journey of the imagination. The audience would be transported to less than twenty years after the United States of America had ceased its first war with Great Britain, an era known to most viewers only from history books and historical films. To most young viewers of Dark Shadows, it was an alien time.
It was perhaps as alien to them as the landscape of the moon, the exploration of which the White House announced was “just a few years off.” So while the rest of the nation looked toward the future, the viewers of Dark Shadows made their own small step into the past; into the life of Barnabas Collins in the year 1795.
“How did Barnabas become a vampire?” Costello asked. “It suddenly dawned on us - how did this guy get to be a vampire? So we had to create a situation of some kind. To say how it happened would allow us more story, and developing more story is always a big problem when you’re talking five days a week, 52 weeks a year. You’ve got to have a story. So anything we can set up to create and give them history is something we can draw story from.”
But where most programs would have simply dramatized the story in flashback form, Dark Shadows remained true to its supernatural disposition. Just as Victoria Winters had first taken us to her own past, she became our guide into Barnabas’ past. Victoria traveled back through time via a most unusual seance-a seance that, as the voice-over at the beginning of each episode would state for months “has transcended time and space and led one girl on an uncertain and frightening journey back to the year 1795...”
A few weeks earlier, Dark Shadows enacted its own piece of technical magic: going from black-and-white to color broadcast, which meant shutting down production for a week.
The choice for casting the flashback was a simple one. Kathryn Leigh Scott (Maggie Evans) had already played the ghost of Josette du Prés and the audience had not become confused. The decision was made to use the other regular actors as their own ancestors or, in the case of Julia Hoffman and Maggie Evans, perhaps their own “past-life selves.” This also was an economical solution. And it pleased the actors, who had already spent several months to a year and a half in the shoes of their particular occupants of Collinwood. Now, within the framework of familiar performers and technicians, they could comfortably develop all-new characters with different motivations, talents, attitudes, and new secrets or fears. This casting decision would be repeated for subsequent flashbacks and created a repertory feel to the series.
Ron Sproat recalls, “The show had much more of a community feeling than any other I’ve worked on, other than getting involved in the theater.”
Within the first few weeks the Dark Shadows audience met an entirely new (or an entirely old) edition of t
he Collins family. There was dour, soul-murdered Joshua Collins (Louis Edmonds), a man without spirit enough to reach out to his suffering son Barnabas. The alcoholic Naomi Collins (Joan Bennett) is Joshua’s wife and Barnabas’ mother. Jeremiah Collins (Anthony George, who had replaced Mitch Ryan as Burke Devlin in the modern era) is Joshua’s much younger brother. He is fated to die in a duel at the hand of his nephew Barnabas, who was raised as his brother. Joshua’s spinster sister, Abigail Collins (Clarice Blackburn), also lives in the house. From New York City arrive Cousins Millicent (Nancy Barrett) and Daniel Collins (David Henesy). Finally, there is Barnabas Collins himself: before the curse, he is a young man of means with an honest heart, who has been, perhaps, a little too sheltered from the world.
Victoria’s arrival at 1795 Collinwood coincides with that of Barnabas’ fiancée, Josette du Prés (Kathryn Leigh Scott), from her island home in Martinique. Accompanying her is her father André du Prés (David Ford), who proclaims himself “Owner of the largest sugar plantation on the island.” There is also André’s sister, the Countess Natalie du Prés (Grayson Hall), who has been her niece Josette’s companion.
A key member of the entourage is the young blonde maid, Angélique Bouchard (Lara Parker). She clearly has more of the island in her than the French colonial society to which her family is indentured. Angélique is overfond of “image magick,” a form of witchcraft, and spends her free time invoking rituals over burnt offerings. She resents her lowly status and covets the prestige and wealth of the family she serves. Specifically, she envies Josette. She also covets Josette’s fiance, Barnabas Collins.
The Dark Shadows Companion: 25th Anniversary Collection Page 9
