Dark Shadows

[Blogger is not paragraphing right tonight.]

* * * This is Barnabas Collins, a 200-year-old New England vampire. He's from Maine, I think. Barnabas is the centerpiece of a 1960s afternoon soap opera called Dark Shadows. The show came on ABC every afternoon--right after General Hospital--for four or five years. I used to run home every afternoon to get the wits scared out of me in broad daylight!

* * * In the early days the show seemed much like a regular soap opera, except for the presence of the vampire. It offered love stories and intrigue, the lives of folks from the coffeeshop waitress to the matriarch of the wealthy Collins family. Later in its run, however, Barnabas was joined by ghosts and witches and werewolves and other vampires. The show even offered time travellers as it took long narrative leaps into New England's Puritan past.

* * * Watching Dark Shadows changed the way I slept. After a time or two of getting scared silly--running outside onto the porch and watching through a window--I began to sleep with heavy cover. I needed to feel the weight of quilts on top of me in order to feel safe in the night. I pulled these up around my throat--winter and summer--and wrapped them around my head like a hood. This has stuck with me to some extent. I still find it difficult to sleep with only a sheet, even in the hottest weather.

* * * Recently I've been renting episodes of Dark Shadows on DVD. It's a silly show. Most of the things the creators thought hip back in the 1960s (and early 1970s) are purely campy now. It's a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants production. And it seems to have been done live, or almost so. Actors stumble over their lines. The lighting is usually bad, and the microphone is often in the shot, either in shadow or in reality.

* * * Dark Shadows is a piece of nostalgia, and, believe it or not, the only thing that scares me these 40 years later is the fact that it scared me in the first place.