From March until July 1970, Dark Shadows was set in a universe other than the one where the action had taken place up to that point. In that universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time,” the counterparts of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and woebegone lowlife Willie Loomis were a married couple. That other Will Loomis was a bestselling but hard-drinking author who had squandered his earnings, and Carolyn Loomis was a poor relation of the master of the great house of Collinwood. They bickered incessantly, in an adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that, in the hands of John Karlen and Nancy Barrett, sometimes seemed to rival Edward Albee’s original.
We’ve been back in the original continuity for five weeks now. The Carolyn we have known from the first week of the show is back, but she is half mad, intermittently possessed by a ghost known as Leticia Faye. Willie is helping time travelers Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman in their efforts to battle two distinct supernatural menaces, one consisting of a group of ghosts including Leticia, the other a vampire whose identity they have not discerned but whom they know to be feeding on governess Maggie Evans. Carolyn and Willie have their first scene together today since the return from Parallel Time. It is infused with the energy Karlen and Miss Barrett brought to their versions of Albee’s George and Martha. Karlen has some scenes alone where he wanders around and shouts in the general direction of a microphone; those don’t work at all. But when he has Miss Barrett to anchor him, he’s terrific and so is she. When she addresses him as “Willie Loomis!,” we are, for one lovely moment, right back in Loomis House.
Carolyn gives Willie a riddle and tells her that unless he’s too stupid to solve it, it will lead him to the missing governess: “Where the north woods path is narrow, you’ll be at sixes and sevens, but look for the H and follow the arrow, that points to Maggie Evans.” That riddle reminds longtime viewers how far the show has come in the last three years. The last time Maggie was the victim of a vampire, it was the summer of 1967 and the ghoul was Barnabas. The ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah appeared to Maggie in the cell where he and his blood thrall Willie were keeping her and gave her a riddle which she solved, finding an escape route and avoiding the death Barnabas had planned for her. Now Maggie is helpless, and Willie and Barnabas are the good-ish guys. This riddle will enable Willie to come to her rescue.
Willie goes to the narrow part of the path through the north woods. He shines a flashlight directly into the camera, a sure sign that we are watching Dark Shadows. Willie finds himself in a graveyard. He notices a tombstone inscribed with the name of Harrow. Subtracting the H, what’s left is “arrow.” He keeps moving his eyes rightward beyond the edge of the stone and sees the door of a mausoleum. He goes inside and finds Maggie on the floor, beside an empty coffin. He infers that the empty coffin must be where the vampire rests during the day.
Willie takes Maggie back to her room at Collinwood and confers with Julia and Barnabas. Barnabas decrees that Willie and Julia should go to the mausoleum during the day and stake the vampire. When they do, they are uneasy to find that no one is guarding the coffin. The episode ends with Julia’s expression of shock when she sees inside the coffin.
Time travelers Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman are doing battle with two distinct supernatural menaces. One of these is the ghost of Gerard Stiles, who, as they learned while visiting the far-off future year 1995, is destined to destroy the great house of Collinwood and the people who call it home before the end of the current year, 1970. The other is a vampire whom they have not identified, but who has been feeding on their friend and frequent victim, Maggie Evans.
In the drawing room, housekeeper Mrs Johnson sees Gerard. Gerard takes control of her, as he does when he meets people in that room. She goes upstairs, where Julia is keeping vigil over Maggie. Mrs Johnson says she woke up from a frightening nightmare in which Barnabas was suffering. She describes the setting of the nightmare. Julia recognizes it as Rose Cottage, the deserted mansion where Barnabas has gone to confront Gerard. Julia tells Mrs Johnson to take over for her in Maggie’s room, and rushes off to her friend’s side.
Julia bursts into the room where Barnabas is standing around, his confrontation with Gerard having come and gone without noticeable result. Barnabas is surprised to see her. As she explains what Mrs Johnson told her, the room bursts into flames. They try to escape, only to find that the door will not open. All seems lost, until the door opens from the other side. A woman named Roxanne Drew has come to their rescue.
Before their sojourn in 1995, Julia and Barnabas spent a while in an alternate universe which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” In Parallel Time, Barnabas met Roxanne’s counterpart while she was comatose. Charmed by her immobility and silence, he fell in love with her. Even after she came to and started moving around and speaking, Barnabas remained attached to that Roxanne. Barnabas and Julia escaped from Parallel Time through a room in a burning house; we learned in #1071 that Roxanne followed Barnabas and Julia into the burning room too late for them to rescue her. We can only assume she died in the fire. In the current universe, an inverted mirror image of that one, this other Roxanne is the one who rescues Julia and Barnabas from a burning room.
Roxanne separates from Barnabas and Julia in the woods, saying she has something else to do. They return to Collinwood. They find Mrs Johnson unconscious and Maggie missing. In the woods, Maggie approaches a shrouded figure, whom we assume to be the vampire and who appears to be Roxanne.
This episode marks the final appearance of the character Mrs Johnson and of the actress Clarice Blackburn. Blackburn had taken a writing job on another soap by this time and was not available for acting work on a regular basis. She was an outstanding performer; Nancy Barrett says that Blackburn was the single best actor in the entire cast of Dark Shadows. Since Miss Barrett herself is a serious contender for this title, that is not an opinion to be taken lightly.
In the 1995 segment, Mrs Johnson died in the episode broadcast on 23 July 1970. That would suggest a dramatic date of 23 July 1995, very close to Blackburn’s actual date of death, 5 August 1995. But it gets eerier than that. In #1071, when charming rogue Quentin Collins says that he looked into Parallel Time and saw Roxanne trapped in the burning room, he goes on to fix the date of Julia and Barnabas’ departure from Parallel Time as 3 August, two weeks after the broadcast date. That would be the date of their arrival in 1995, and would mean that the third night of their time in that year, the night when Mrs Johnson died, would have been 5 August 1995.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are trying to prevent a disaster that is fated to destroy the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it before the year 1970 is out. They have a handful of cryptic phrases that clue them in to events that will precede this disaster. One of the phrases is “The night Rose Cottage was destroyed.” They have no idea what Rose Cottage is, and have been unable to find anyone who does.
Julia finds heiress Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes leaving the great house. Carolyn says nonchalantly that there is something she has to do at Rose Cottage. Julia gets Carolyn to say that going to Rose Cottage involves leaving the grounds of Collinwood through the front gate. She asks her to mail a letter for her on her way. She agrees, and waits outside while Julia goes back into the house to get the letter.
Julia rushes to a bedroom where Barnabas is sitting with governess Maggie Evans, who is the victim of a vampire other than himself. Julia fabricates a letter while repeating to Barnabas what Carolyn said. Julia takes over the vigil, and Barnabas gives Carolyn the phony letter. He then follows her to a deserted mansion in the area.
Barnabas barges in on Carolyn in a room in Rose Cottage. He ignores her indignation at his following her and presses her with questions:
CAROLYN: Barnabas!
BARNABAS: So this is Rose Cottage.
CAROLYN: You followed me here!
BARNABAS: Carolyn, who is your friend? Who were you talking to just before I came in?
CAROLYN: That, that really is no concern of yours, now is it?
BARNABAS: Carolyn, you must tell us everything you know about this place, who lived here and who it was you were trying to find.
CAROLYN: Why are you and Dr. Hoffman so interested in this place?
BARNABAS: We’ve told you before one of the events that’s to happen before the disaster at Collinwood is the destruction of Rose Cottage.
CAROLYN: Rose Cottage… [laughs] Now, that’s a strange name for a place like this, isn’t it?
BARNABAS: I know now why it was so difficult to find. How did it get such a name?
CAROLYN: Oh, it happened a very long time ago, when Carrie was very small.
BARNABAS: Carrie lived here?
CAROLYN: Are you going to be quiet and let me tell you?
BARNABAS: I’m sorry, go on.
CAROLYN: Carrie, Carrie always dreamed of having a doll’s house which she would call Rose Cottage. So for her birthday I asked Quentin to build her one. Quentin was so good with his hands you know, and so terribly inventive. He actually built a replica of this house, and I gave it to Carrie for her birthday. [laughs] I told her she would have to find another name for it, but she said no, it would always be Rose Cottage to her. So she kept calling it that, and before very long people called the mansion itself Rose Cottage.
BARNABAS: When was all this, Carolyn?
CAROLYN: I’m not going to answer any more of your questions! You were very rude to follow me here, very rude indeed!
Carrie died in 1841. Her ghost has taken possession of teenager Hallie Stokes. The ghost of Carrie’s friend Tad has taken possession of David Collins. Tad and Carrie, in personis David and Hallie, are currently at Windcliff, a psychiatric facility Julia controls. Before they were taken there, Carrie and Tad did some mumbo-jumbo and restored their late governess Daphne Harridge to life. Daphne then led Tad and Carrie in an unsuccessful attempt to do the same for another ghost, erstwhile pirate captain Gerard Stiles. Carolyn is possessed by the spirit of a certain Leticia Faye, though unlike Hallie and David her own personality still exists within her body and from time to time asserts itself.
We have seen the dollhouse of which Carolyn/ Leticia speaks many times, and we know that it is in some supernatural sense identical with the full-scale mansion. The episode opened with a reprise of Friday’s cliffhanger, in which Gerard used the dollhouse to trap Daphne in the mansion and to set fire to it. Carolyn/ Leticia interrupted Gerard and saved Daphne.
Barnabas returns to the great house and tells Julia that he now knows where Rose Cottage is. He says that he saw Carolyn there. She asks if he got any information out of Carolyn. He says that he did not. He does not mention the business about Carrie and the dollhouse, which is just bizarre. He and Julia know about a mysterious playroom full of toys appropriate to small children that intermittently appears in a space in a little used part of the great house otherwise occupied by a linen closet. They know that all four ghosts are associated with this playroom. You would think he would therefore realize that a story about a toy of Carrie’s would be relevant to their concerns, but apparently the connection escaped him.
In the last scene, Julia is in Maggie’s room when she is suddenly seized by a fit of sleepiness. A dark figure in a cloak and a slouch hat appears inside the window. Maggie gets up and goes to the figure, who is no taller than she is.
The figure’s slight build and short stature may suggest it is a woman, but no woman on Dark Shadows has ever worn shoes like that. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
I don’t know if the above makes it clear, but this episode is a sharp step up from last week’s offerings. It is tightly paced, clearly developed, and forcefully acted, a bright spot in a storyline that has been desperately dreary so far.
For several months starting in late 1968, Dark Shadows did an adaptation of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw. This segment is often called “The Haunting of Collinwood.” For the last six weeks, they’ve been doing a second adaptation of that same novella. I call the current segment “The Re-Haunting of Collinwood.”
So far, the remake has been so close to the original that it is little more than a test of the patience of longtime viewers. The last few days, they’ve been deviating a bit. So the ghosts of teenagers Tad and Carrie have erased the personalities of their lookalikes, David Collins and Hallie Stokes, and are now operating as living beings in their bodies. That didn’t quite happen in 1968 and 1969, when David and his friend Amy Jennings were beset by ghosts who were excited by their resemblance to their late ancestors Jamison and Nora Collins.
Carrie and Tad have cast a spell that has conjured up their old governess, Daphne Harridge, as a living woman. Amy and David never even tried to bring lady’s maid Beth Chavez back to life. She remained an unspeaking ghost until the show went back in time to 1897 and we met her in her proper lifetime. Today, Daphne orders Tad and Carrie to go through the same spellcasting procedure to bring the other ghost, the evil Gerard Stiles, back to life. Again, David and Amy did not try to bring Quentin Collins back to life. He is alive today only because he was immunized against death and aging in the 1897 segment, since he was such a hit with the audience.
Yesterday, David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins questioned Carrie and Tad and revealed their true identities. Neither of them was able to name the parents of the person they were possessing. Tad was also unable to name David’s former governess Victoria Winters. Through the show’s first year, Vicki was the chief protagonist and main audience identification character. She was written out in 1968, and Barnabas’ question was the first reference to her in months. She comes up again today. Carrie brings some contemporary clothes for Daphne to wear. She explains to Tad that “They belong to a governess that was here once… Her name was Victoria or something.” She says that the current governess told Hallie that Victoria left the clothes behind, but did not explain why.
Two consecutive episodes alluding to Vicki will be enough to get longtime viewers wondering if we will see her again. They had run out of things for Vicki to do in the story long before she left the show, and there is no clear opening for her now. When Carrie calls attention to the fact that there is a mystery around the circumstances of Vicki’s departure, she reminds us that that Vicki disappeared into a time warp. Since The Re-Haunting of Collinwood seems to be heading into a trip back through time to the year 1840, that might lead us to hope that what we find in that year will have something to do with Vicki. Then again, if all the ghosts are going to turn into living people, maybe they will be able to cancel their reservations for the journey to the past and stay in contemporary dress. Perhaps in that case, Vicki will find her way back as well. We might imagine that we will find tomorrow that they have failed to bring Gerard to life, but have conjured up Vicki instead. Maybe the summoning procedure only brings up governesses with long black hair.
Daphne is played by Kate Jackson, in her first screen role. Miss Jackson would go on to star in primetime series such as The Rookies, Charlie’s Angels, and Scarecrow and Mrs King.
Vampire Barnabas Collins joined the cast of Dark Shadows in April 1967. Barnabas introduced himself to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her family as their distant cousin from England. Soon, Liz had given him run of the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, and she was treating that house and its contents as though they were Barnabas’ property.
In May and June of 1967, Barnabas took Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, as his new victim. He did not merely want to drink Maggie’s blood. He wanted to erase her personality and overwrite it with that of his lost love Josette. At the climax of this plan, he would make her into a vampire like himself, and the two of them would go forth to prey upon the living.
Barnabas’ plan failed. Maggie recovered her will and escaped from Barnabas. She would have exposed him, had her psychiatrist Julia Hoffman not betrayed her and magically mind-wiped her memory of what Barnabas was and what he had done. Julia attached herself to Barnabas as his personal physician, making it possible for him to go long periods without biting anyone. Barnabas continued to make his home at the Old House and to pass as a live Englishman. In time, the relationship between Julia and Barnabas became the core of Dark Shadows, and its most important stories were their adventures.
With Barnabas’ introduction, the show became a hit. By the time 1968 turned into 1969, it was one of the major pop culture fads of the period. That gave executive producer Dan Curtis an opening to pitch a Dark Shadows feature film to Hollywood studios. The one that bought the idea was MGM, headed at that time by Kirk Kerkorian, a tycoon who was trying to get out of the movie business and put MGM’s brand and other resources in service of his chief goal in life, making himself the king of Las Vegas. Kerkorian still had contracts with distributors that obligated him to provide a certain number of features a year. Dark Shadows already had a fan base, so that a film version of it wouldn’t require as much spending on advertising and promotion as would a new product, and the show was done so cheaply that Curtis couldn’t very well argue that he needed a big budget for production. So Kerkorian saw a way to meet his legal obligations at minimal financial risk.
The movie that resulted from this business decision is slow-paced, confusing, and amateurishly shot. I love it.
Most of the events and characters are drawn from the first seven months Barnabas was on the show. There are lots of Easter eggs for fans of the show. Almost all of the music is recycled from the show, including a brief bit of one of the rock and roll numbers that often played on the jukebox at The Blue Whale tavern in the first year but that have rarely been heard since. Both Maggie, in the opening scenes, and the sheriff later on point flashlights directly into the camera. The sheriff and his deputies display the same clownish ineptitude that distinguished them on the show. My favorite example comes after a deputy has driven his car directly into a tree. The sheriff says that he wouldn’t have done that unless he saw something, prompting us to think that a Collinsport law enforcement officer probably would be more comfortable driving with his eyes closed.
The events do not take place in the same sequence as they did on the show, and some of the characters are jumbled as well. So in 1967, the governess in the great house was the well-meaning Victoria Winters and her boyfriend was dashing action hero-turned hopeless schlub Burke Devlin. Vicki and Burke were already past their peak of interest in April 1967, and have been gone and forgotten for years at this point. Maggie is the governess on the show now, and she is the governess in this version of Collinwood as well.
Maggie’s last steady boyfriend was hardworking fisherman Joe Haskell, who left the show when he was the victim of a vampire in 1968. So in this Collinwood, Maggie is engaged to Jeff Clark, who corresponds to the character who married Vicki after Burke was lost in a plane crash. Like his namesake on the show, this Jeff is played by the repellent Roger Davis. There is a costume party in the movie, as there was in the show. Jeff wears an eighteenth century naval uniform that was originally worn on television by Nathan Forbes, a character who, like Joe, was played by Joel Crothers. It is as if Curtis is acknowledging that we would rather see Maggie and Joe, but rubbing our faces in the fact that we’re getting more Roger Davis instead.
Julia is not Maggie’s psychiatrist in this universe. When Barnabas is freed from his coffin, she is already at Collinwood, researching the Collins family history. She claimed to be doing that as a cover story in 1967, but here it is apparently the truth, for some reason. She confirms that Barnabas is a vampire when she sees that he does not cast a reflection in the mirror in her compact, the same gimmick she used on the show. She makes her offer to cure Barnabas of vampirism 56 minutes into this 96 minute movie, after he has killed several people and thrown the whole area into an uproar. She falls in love with him shortly after, to his embarrassment. When the treatments misfire by causing him to age rapidly, as they did in the show, he deviates from the original by killing her.
That sets off the final crisis. Barnabas takes Maggie to his hiding place and tries to Josettify her. Several characters set out to hunt him. Jeff finds that Barnabas has killed some of them and turned them into vampires. He kills two of these, then finds Barnabas and destroys him just as he is about to turn Maggie into a vampire.
We had barely seen Jeff and Maggie together, and in their few shared scenes they had no chemistry at all. Nor has he been involved in any of the other action sequences. Indeed, he begins the climactic sequence by being woken and told that he has overslept, which serves to underline his peripheral position in the plot up to that point. So it is entirely unsatisfying that he comes out of the blue and is the rescuer in the grand finale.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that we have seen Maggie interact quite a bit with Roger Collins, brother to Liz and father of strange and troubled boy David. Roger also took an active part in the first destruction of a vampire, when his niece Carolyn was staked. So it would make sense for him to be the rescuer, and for Mr Davis’ character to be left out of the movie altogether. A romance between Roger and Maggie would hark back to the early days of the show, when there were a few hints that Vicki, a Jane Eyre analogue, might start dating Roger, whose position as father of her charge and whose very name recall Mr Rochester.
Fans often wonder what Barnabas’ long-term plan was in the Spring and Summer of 1967. Maggie was known to everyone and her disappearance was big news, so he could hardly have presented her to the family once she was Josettified. And his own operations as a vampire were an ongoing disaster that had everyone in the Collinsport area on edge. Add a second vampire to the household, and the situation would become entirely unsustainable.
The show indicated what would probably have happened had Barnabas succeeded, first in February 1969, and then in more depth in July 1970. In #694, the ghost of Quentin Collins takes control of the great house, forcing all of its residents to flee for their lives. In episodes #1061-#1070, Julia and Barnabas come unstuck in time and find themselves in the far-off future year 1995, where another ghost has taken control of Collinwood. The great house is in ruins, the grounds overgrown, and the residents of Collinsport are unwilling even to mention the estate, let alone go there. Surely those were the only surroundings in which Barnabas and a vampiric, Josettified Maggie could have gone on existing.
That’s very much the situation that is about to come into being at the end of this film. We don’t see the great house. Instead, Jeff encounters occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes on an island overgrown with weeds, finds that he has become a vampire, and destroys him. He then goes to a building in ruins, apparently located on the same island (though the scraps of film that make up this movie are so confusingly pieced together that you can never be quite sure where anyone is supposed to be at any time,) and finds Roger sitting on a sort of throne. Roger is also a vampire, and Jeff destroys him too. From there he goes to the Old House, probably, where he confronts Barnabas in a big space that is also in ruins. The structures we do see show us what would happen to the great house if Barnabas survived, and what may happen to it anyway. The only living members of the family are Liz, who was catatonic after she found out that her daughter had become a vampire and doesn’t seem likely to make much of a recovery, and David, who was already pretty screwy when the movie started. It’s hard to see how either of them is going to keep such a big place up.
Barnabas Collins leaves people who appear to be his distant cousins Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes and David Collins, as well as Carolyn and David’s houseguest Hallie Stokes, in David’s bedroom. Barnabas is still within earshot when these three address each other as “Leticia,” “Tad,” and “Carrie.” He rushes back into the room, looks at those who might be taken for Hallie and David, and declares “You are both possessed!” He ignores the fact that the same evidence indicates that Carolyn is also possessed.
Initially, Tad and Carrie pretend they were only using those names as part of a game. Barnabas says that in that case, he will play, too. He asks Tad to name David’s mother. He cannot. He then asks who his previous governess was. He can’t answer that, either. He asks Carrie why Hallie lives in the great house of Collinwood. She says that it is because there was an accident. Barnabas confirms that is so, and that the accident involved her parents. He asks her what their names were. She cannot answer. He presses on when they object. Finally, Carrie calls out to Daphne, a ghost whom she and Tad had previously denied ever having heard of, to come and help them. Shocked, Tad looks at her and calls her Carrie. The cat is out of the bag.
Longtime viewers will be thrilled by Barnabas’ questions. Not only is it a refreshing change to see him demonstrating presence of mind and moving quickly to advance the story, but the references to David’s mother and to his previous governess bring up characters who used to be very important to the show and who have been absent from the story and unmentioned for a long time. Real heads know who those women were, Tad and Carrie are exposed as noobs.
Throughout this interrogation, Carolyn/ Leticia was standing still, watching placidly while Carrie and Tad got flustered and blew their cover. Barnabas asks what the ghosts of Daphne and of someone named Gerard want. At that, Carolyn/ Leticia breaks her silence. Smiling, she says that Tad and Carrie do not yet know the answer to that themselves. Neither does she, come to that. She wafts away, leaving everyone reeling.
Yesterday, Tad told Carrie that if they let on who they really were, they would be defeated at once. It was not at all clear then what anyone could do to bring that about. Tad tells Barnabas that he and Carrie are here to stay, and that there is nothing he can do to stop them. This seems to be true.
After Barnabas leaves Carrie and Tad alone in David’s room, they wonder what happened to Hallie and David. They say that they liked them, and that they hope nothing bad happened to them. Carrie asks Tad if he thinks David and Hallie are dead. He says he doesn’t think so, but he sounds very doubtful. Carrie asks where they are. He says they aren’t anyplace. While he and Carrie are using their bodies, Hallie and David “don’t exist.” It may seem obvious that ceasing to exist qualifies as something bad happening to a person, but ever since Epicurus in the fourth century BCE that has been an open question among philosophers. So maybe nothing bad did happen to David and Hallie. Certainly nothing at all will happen to them ever again.
Though Carrie and Tad have entirely erased Hallie and David, Carolyn persists. Leticia sets out to tell Quentin Collins something. By the time she gets to Quentin’s room, Carolyn has reemerged and is unsure what she is doing there. Quentin is drunk, which is not unusual. He is under Daphne’s power and has been unable to do anything to prevent Tad and Carrie from taking over David and Hallie’s bodies. Carolyn became clairvoyant when Leticia moved in with her, and can tell Quentin is feeling guilty about something. He denies everything.
There’s a lot of spellcasting today. Quentin tries to break free of Daphne by setting fire to her handkerchief. This fails immediately. Carrie and Tad try to raise one of the ghosts from the dead. They hope they will get Daphne, because they are afraid of Gerard, but they have no way of knowing which one it will be. The episode ends with a knock at the door. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out whether that will be Daphne, Gerard, or the man from the gas company come to read the meter.
In July 1970, Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman came unstuck in time and spent two weeks in the far-off future year 1995. They found that the great house of Collinwood was in ruins, its residents either dead, missing, or insane as the result of a mysterious disaster that took place before 1970 was out. Since returning to their own period, they have been making fruitless efforts to learn what is happening and prevent the disaster.
Today, we see Julia sitting on the couch in the drawing room, reading a book and picking her teeth. Barnabas is pacing nearby. I am not making this up, the ABC network actually broadcast this on national television.
This thrilling scene follows an exchange in which Barnabas and Julia talk about a place called Rose Cottage that they heard about in 1995 and have been trying to find for the last six weeks. Julia tells Barnabas that it has just occurred to her that the place may not be known as Rose Cottage now. Barnabas does not understand what she means. Julia tries to explain that it might be possible for people to use one name for a house at one time and a different name for the same house at a different time. Barnabas has difficulty with this concept. Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid, highly trained and much-honored actors, play this exchange with great emotional tumult, focusing our attention on the precise level of cognitive ability it suggests the characters have.
Just as we are thinking that the show has finally come to a dead halt, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes enters. Julia and Barnabas notice that Carolyn seems to be in a good mood, to which they make it their business to put an immediate stop. They say Carolyn must not have heard about the latest crisis concerning teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins:
JULIA: Carolyn, how are you feeling?
CAROLYN: Quite well, thank you. But both of you look so terribly distressed. Whatever’s the matter?
BARNABAS: Well, hasn’t anyone told you?
CAROLYN: Told me what?
BARNABAS: Well, the children are missing.
CAROLYN: Oh, that. Yes, I know.
JULIA: Well, aren’t you the least bit concerned about it?
CAROLYN: No.
JULIA: Why, Carolyn? Why aren’t you concerned? Carolyn, do you know something about David and Hallie you’re not telling us?
CAROLYN: Perhaps.
JULIA: Well, you must tell us. Do you know where they are?
CAROLYN: They’re gone. David and Hallie are gone.
BARNABAS: We told you that!
JULIA: Carolyn, we believe they’re in some terrible danger, the children.
CAROLYN: The children, in danger? No, no, that’s not true.
JULIA: How do you know it’s not true?
CAROLYN: Because I know the children are alive and well.
JULIA: If you know that much, then you must know where they are.
CAROLYN: No, that’s all I can tell you. They’re alive and well. Now, you must excuse me, I’m really very tired. (Exit)
BARNABAS (watching Carolyn go): Do you think she knows what she’s talking about?
JULIA (wonderingly): I have no idea.
They say that if a performer is really present in a scene, there is always a chance that when you throw the light on them something wonderful will happen. What Nancy Barrett does here is as pure an example of this I could hope to find. Carolyn’s blissed-out insouciance is so great to watch that it redeems everything that went before. I wonder if Frid and Hall’s ferocious overplaying was deliberate, meant to give the sharpest possible contrast to what they knew Miss Barrett was about to do.
Later, Barnabas encounters Carolyn in the little-used west wing of the great house:
BARNABAS: Carolyn, what are you doing up here?
CAROLYN: What, I just went to get something from my room.
BARNABAS: Your room?
CAROLYN: Yes, just down the hall.
BARNABAS: But your room isn’t up here in the west wing, it’s downstairs in the house proper.
CAROLYN (laughing): Don’t be absurd. You know perfectly well I’ve always lived in the west wing. I do think it the most enchanting part of the house.
BARNABAS: Carolyn?
CAROLYN: May I ask why you keep calling me that?
BARNABAS: Because it’s your name.
CAROLYN (laughing): You know very well my name is Leticia, and I live in that room just down the hall.
BARNABAS: Leticia?
CAROLYN: Of course.
BARNABAS: Well, Leticia, perhaps you can tell me where the children are. Can you do that?
CAROLYN: What an odd question.
BARNABAS: What’s odd about it?
CAROLYN: Do you realize how late it is? Where else would the children be but in bed? You are a strange one! (exits, laughing.)
In 1995, Barnabas and Julia found that Hallie and David had died in 1970, and that ghosts which looked like them were in fact the ghosts of teenagers named Carrie and Tad who died in 1841. So when they find that David and Hallie are not in the house, they fly into a panic. In that same year, they found that Carolyn was alive, and that she had gone insane in 1970. So far as they could tell, Carolyn believing herself to be someone named Leticia who lived in the west wing of Collinwood was no part of the disaster. So they stay focused on Hallie and David, and let Carolyn/ Leticia go her own way.
Barnabas takes “Leticia’s” suggestion and goes into David’s bedroom. There, he finds the young fellow asleep in bed. Later, Julia has gone to Hallie’s room and found her bed also occupied. Julia woke her and herded her into David’s room, where Barnabas confronts both teens. They claim that they ran away from home because all the talk about ghosts and whatnot had unsettled them, and that they came back because they realized they were being silly. Barnabas mentions the names of some of the ghosts; they claim never to have heard those names. Barnabas is startled by this denial. Returning viewers know that Julia has mentioned the names to David and Hallie, and it is likely she told Barnabas she had done so. They are trying to play dumb, but in fact reveal that something is very wrong.
Carolyn enters. Barnabas leaves her alone with the teenagers. He is still just outside the door when he hears the three of them bid each other goodnight. Carolyn calls them Carrie and Tad; they call her Leticia. Barnabas bursts back in and declares “You are both possessed!” All three of them are possessed, but what he saw in 1995 leads him to disregard Carolyn’s possession and to focus on David and Hallie’s.
Early in the episode, we saw what it means when Carolyn says “David and Hallie are gone.” They no longer exist. Their bodies are now the vessels through which Tad and Carrie have resumed living. Carrie and Tad talked about the importance of keeping up the appearance of being Hallie and David; Tad said that one slip would be enough to expose them, and then “the game will be over.” We might wonder how. What can the living characters do to defeat the ghosts, if they know what the ghosts are doing? Nothing we’ve seen in the last six weeks suggests an answer to that question. For all we can tell, Julia, Barnabas, and the rest of them are so completely helpless that the ghosts may as well throw all discretion aside and operate openly.
I first started watching Dark Shadows in the 1990s, when what was then The Sci Fi Channel was showing it Monday through Friday at 10:00 and 10:30 AM. I got into the habit of daily viewing when they were showing episodes from the summer of 1967, when the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins was occasionally dropping in on strange and troubled boy David Collins. Sarah’s brother, vampire Barnabas, was thinking he might want to kill David, and David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, was a blocking figure who refused to engage with any evidence that anything unusual was going on.
In those days, it appeared that if Barnabas got his way the estate of Collinwood would be peopled only by the unquiet spirits of the dead. I imagined how that might have played out, if the show were not an open-ended serial but were allowed to come to an end. I pictured the great house in ruins. Well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and her boyfriend, hopeless schlub Burke Devlin, would venture into the wreckage. Vicki and Burke would dodge phantoms and demons and make their way into the drawing room. There, they would find Liz sitting serenely while leathery-winged fiends flutter about her head. Vicki would plead with Liz to escape with them. Liz would only smile at her and say that nothing is wrong, nothing at all. Seeing that Liz had taken her commitment to denial as a way of life to its ultimate extreme, Vicki and Burke would have no alternative but to leave without her.
The makers of the show have acknowledged that Barnabas’ plan would have left Collinwood entirely uninhabitable. They did that in the feature film House of Dark Shadows, which replays the story that led to the summer of 1967 and takes it to that conclusion. And they are doing it again now.
Vicki has long since left the show, replaced as the audience point of view character by mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia tried to cure Barnabas of his vampirism in 1967; in 1968, she completed a procedure devised by a fellow mad scientist that did put the symptoms of his curse into abeyance. Barnabas has since bungled his way into another vampire curse, but his connection to Julia still makes it possible for him to be a permanent part of the cast of characters and, on balance, a defender of the status quo, which in a genre where the most important thing is that there is still a story left to tell in the next episode is the closest thing there is to a hero. As such, he is the successor to Burke, who was supposed to be a dashing action hero when Dark Shadows started.
In July 1970, Barnabas and Julia came unstuck in time and found themselves in the far-off future year 1995. There, the great house of Collinwood was in ruins, its residents either dead, missing, or insane as the result of a mysterious disaster that took place before 1970 was out. The estate was dominated by malevolent ghosts, and the people of the village of Collinsport dared not even speak of the place, let alone visit it. Since Julia and Barnabas returned to 1970 in #1071, they have been trying to figure out what the disaster will be and to prevent it.
At first, Liz was somewhat sympathetic to Barnabas and Julia’s efforts, as befits the several times in 1969 and early 1970 we saw her admit that uncanny events were taking place around her. But her old commitment to denial came back to the surface when she forbade Julia and Barnabas to talk with David or teenage houseguest Hallie Stokes about what they had seen in 1995, even though Hallie and David are clearly central to the upcoming disaster. Because they cannot talk with the teens, Barnabas and Julia have not been able to do anything to prevent the ghosts from encroaching on them and taking an ever stronger position in the house.
In #1088, Liz finally realized what was going on and ran to find Julia, crying that they would have to get David and Hallie out of the house before the ghosts got hold of them. But it was too late. She found herself looking into the face of the haunting, an evil spirit known as Gerard. By the time Julia caught up to her in #1089, Liz was entirely under the power of Gerard, and placidly refused to accept that anything out of the ordinary was going on.
Hints have been mounting that the disaster will occur soon. Today, Julia and Barnabas tell Liz that it is urgent Hallie and David be taken from the house at once. Liz refuses, telling them that when the night ends with no further disturbances they will have to admit that all of their fears are simply a “ridiculous fantasy.”
For their part, David and Hallie have been spending a lot of time the last few weeks sitting around moaning about how helpless they are. That does not make for gripping television, even when they look at a dollhouse and say they think the ghosts have been playing with the dolls when they weren’t looking. David gets an idea. The dolls in the ghosts’ dollhouse have connections with particular people around the estate, so if he and Hallie make a doll of Barnabas, perhaps that will cause Barnabas to be aware of what the ghosts are doing.
Hallie asks David why he wants to alert Barnabas in particular. He says that if anyone can fight Gerard and the other ghosts, it will be Barnabas, because “He’s… different.” In the summer and fall of 1967, David was the one person at Collinwood who was on track to figure out Barnabas’ secret, leading the show into a blind alley from which it escaped by going back in time to the year 1795. When they returned from that first costume drama insert in March 1968, David was for some reason no longer a threat to Barnabas. But he was still conscious about his distant cousin in ways his Aunt Liz would never countenance. So in #660, David told his friend Amy Jennings that “Barnabas knows a lot of things that he doesn’t tell anybody.”
The doll is not particularly realistic; the spirit world doesn’t require very high production values, and Hallie and David are under severe time constraints. So their Barnabas doll is adorably crude. I’m thinking of making it my PFP, replacing the tailor’s dummy known as “Mr Juggins” that I’ve been using since David and Amy showed him to Liz in #681.
Looks more like Jonathan Frid than does the Barnabas from the Gold Key comics. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Regular viewers know that David’s instincts are sound. Barnabas and Julia confronted Gerard in the room where the dollhouse is in #1070. Gerard was powerless against Barnabas. Something might have come of that, but Gerard then turned his attention to Julia, causing her to become very ill and forcing them to retreat. After they have put the doll in the dollhouse, David and Hallie leave the room for a little while. When they return, the Barnabas doll has been thrown from the dollhouse and destroyed, suggesting that Gerard did indeed see a danger in its presence.
Finally, Julia and Barnabas manage to corner Liz and force her to let them take Hallie and David away. After they leave her, Liz shuts herself up in the drawing room and apologizes to the unseen Gerard. She says she could not think of any way to resist them further.
This admission of defeat is the next to last time we will see Liz. She will appear again in one scene twenty and a half weeks from now, in #1198, in which she will simply serve to confirm that things are back to normal. Moreover, that version of Liz appears in a Collinwood where none of the events we have seen over the last several months has taken place; we have no idea what her character development has been. This is the final appearance of the person we have been watching since episode #1.
When Dark Shadows began, Joan Bennett was its biggest ratings draw and Liz was the most powerful character. Her function as Keeper of the Secrets set her on the path that would lead her towards extreme denialism and away from any active role on the story, but along the way Bennett used her great talents to give the show’s foundations their basic outline. For example, in the relationship between Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, Bennett and Louis Edmonds pioneered the dynamic of Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother, the same dynamic that makes Barnabas and Julia so much fun to watch and that turned Quentin Collins into a breakout hit in 1969 when we saw him with his Bossy Big Sister, Judith (also played by Joan Bennett.) In her other roles, Bennett will continue to be indispensable to the show, but those of us who started with #1 will never stop wishing the writers had found more to do with the character of Liz.
Governess Maggie Evans has been bitten by a vampire other than Barnabas Collins. Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are stymied in their efforts to find out who this other vampire is. They decide not to take Maggie to the hospital, since they don’t want to answer any questions. Instead, Julia goes to some unspecified location in the village of Collinsport to get several units of blood to transfuse into Maggie. I’m sure a no-questions-asked blood bank would be a highly profitable enterprise in Collinsport.
I wonder if Julia had to go in the blood store to get that bag, or if they have a drive-through. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Meanwhile, Maggie’s charges, gloomy teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes, are sitting around in a space that intermittently materializes in a location usually occupied by a linen closet. It is stocked with fancy antique toys, frequented by ghosts, and called “The Playroom.” The ghosts don’t take visible form today, but Hallie and David notice that they keep playing with a dollhouse in The Playroom.
The dollhouse is a scale model of a mansion known as Rose Cottage that stood somewhere in the Collinsport area in 1840, when the ghosts were living beings, and is in some supernatural sense identical with that mansion. The ghosts are big fans of scale models. Some time ago they gave David a scale model of a ship that one of them sailed when he was alive. Today, David and Hallie see that the ghosts have added a tiny model of the same ship, reduced in size so that it is in the same proportion to the dolls in the dollhouse as the original model was to the residents of the great house of Colllinwood. Hallie says that if they go to David’s room, they will find that the model is gone from there, because it has been transformed into this minuscule thing.
At the end of the episode, Hallie and David hear one of the ghosts telling them to look into the dollhouse and learn their fate. They comply, and see themselves in place of the dolls. David and Hallie have spent all day sitting around doing nothing, and when they look into the future they see that they are still sitting around doing nothing. Evidently the greatest horror the writers can imagine is that the show will go on as it has been lately. I have to admit they have a point!
David Henesy has been in the cast of Dark Shadows since the first week, yet today is the first time he has been called upon to deliver the opening voiceover narration, after dozens of other cast members have had their turns. He does a great job with it, he should have done it every time.
As the voiceover concludes, we dissolve to an extreme closeup of a fixture that has been on the show even longer than has Mr Henesy, the clock in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. We see that there is a little painting in the body of the clock, above its face. It is a rustic landscape centered on a small church. I believe this is the first time we have been able to see this painting; certainly it is the first time it has received such emphasis. The episode will end with a closeup of a cross that heroine Julia Hoffman is carrying as she goes off to confront a vampire. Opening with a picture of a church and closing with a cross would suggest that there is some kind of Christian content in between, though it escapes me what it might be.
Clock illustrationJulia’s cross
Today’s story is a whodunit. Governess Maggie Evans has been bitten by a vampire. Julia suspects her best friend, Barnabas Collins. Barnabas denies that he is the guilty party. They have three conversations which we might call soulful, if it weren’t tactless to remind Barnabas that he has no soul. When Julia sees Maggie’s indifferent response to Barnabas when he visits her in her sickroom, she is convinced of his innocence. That does raise the question of how Barnabas has been getting his nutrition lately, a question the show does absolutely nothing to answer or forestall.
Teenager Hallie Stokes fears that the ghost of the evil Gerard Stiles is responsible for Maggie’s condition. Her friend David Collins conjures up, not the ghost of Gerard, but that of Hallie’s lookalike Carrie Stokes, who indicates that Gerard had nothing to do with it.
So we know that we now have a B-story to complement the A-story of Gerard’s haunting of Collinwood, and that the villain in that B-story is a vampire who is new in town. Barnabas mentions that astrologer Sebastian Shaw arrived in Collinsport only recently; Julia rules Sebastian out as a potential vampire, since she has seen him during the day.
Sebastian arrived with a woman named Roxanne. Barnabas does not mention Roxanne as a suspect, perhaps because he is deeply infatuated with her and does not want to believe she shares his curse. But returning viewers know that Roxanne appears only at night that she has some hold over Sebastian that makes him miserable, and that just before Maggie showed up with the puncture marks on her neck Roxanne was quarreling with Sebastian about a date he had had with Maggie. Roxanne alluded to mysterious powers that she has and looked self-satisfied when she said she had further plans to use those powers. So I think we have to classify Roxanne as the prime suspect in the latest attack on Maggie.
