Dark Shadows and Dan Curtis

I was just reading at another Blog that Dan Curtis, the TV producer, died last week. He was the force behind the TV soap opera about vampires, werewolves and a strange little town called Collinswood where the Collins family consisted of a group of inbred relatives of dubious mental state and their cursed ancestor, a vampire named Barnabas. Who sometimes was a vampire, sometimes wasn't, and was in love with a blond witch wannabe who looked just like his 17th century love named Angelique, who had been reincarnated as a rather bitchy woman now named Cassandra.

(I know there are a lot of thirty and forty somethings who wonder why they have those names. They can blame it on Dan Curtis)

The matriarch of the family, Elizabeth Collins, was played by former child actress Joan Bennett in sort of a haze of bad acting, further enhanced by years of plastic surgery and pancake makeup leaving her perpetually unable to move any muscle on her face. And the overall effect included jet black hair, forever tied in a bun to hid her facial wrinkles being pulled back with the old trick of taping back hunks of hair from the sides and forehead tightly - the effect was like having your facial skin pulled with rubber bands. She had one expression - puzzlement - because her eyebrows were somewhere in the middle of her forehead.

(I just looked up her credits and bio on IMDB - she was born in 1910, making her nearly 70 at the time I was watching her on Dark Shadows. And she started acting in the 1920's, as a child, with her big sister Constance. Yikes!)

There was a small rotating cast of mostly Canadian actors, who were always playing the 1700 version of their identical 1960's selves - to the point that everyone had two names. Everyone except Barnabas, of course. The 1700 version of him was the 1960's vampire version, too.

There was a man-made monster named Adam, and an Eve, and the cousin who was turned into a werewolf, and the caretaker who was forced to do Barnabas' daytime dirty work. There were pretty women that worked as nannys in the family castle on the sea cliffs, caring for what were supposed to be Joan Bennett's elementary school-aged children (I guess when your family is cursed by a vampire, menopause is the least of your worries). There was Quentin who was in loved with the oldest daughter. He even had his own theme music and later surfaced as the malignant landowner next door to Falconcrest where he plagued Jane Wyman instead of Joan Bennett. (Played by David Selby, of course, on that soap he managed to repeat his bad karma and pine for his true love when she drowned in the swimming pool after catching her engagement ring in the drain on the bottom).

Anyway:

Starting in middle school, my afternoons were ruled by the need to get home in time to see Dark Shadows, which started at 4:00 here in the New Yawk area, followed by the 4:30 Movie on channel 7, followed by Bill Beutel and Roger Grimsby on Eyewitness News at 6. There was Maggie and the Beautiful Machine on channel 13 - WNET - an exercise program led by a woman with waist length grey hair that I thought was soo cool back around 1968 or so (Now that I am a woman with long greying hair she seems even cooler) which started at 3:30 and ended at 4, perfect timing. My best friend Patti and I would talk on the phone, stretching the cord around the wall from the kitchen into the dining room and just barely into the living room where I could hold it at arms length and see the TV (B & W, of course). So when I think of Dark Shadows, I remember a lot of shouting of "OH MY GOD - ROGER, LOOK OUT - the Reverend is a VAMPIRE NOW!" to the telephone handset about a two feet from my face, as close as I could get it without pulling the phone off the wall...."

Dan Curtis went on from Dark Shadows to direct and produce a lot of really bad TV to better TV (at least a better budget) with "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance". And "Supertrain" - one of the most incredibly over-budgetted BAD TV shows and series of all time.

RIP, Dan - you made my teenage years an interesting place, filled with bad production values and imagination.