Tag: danielle gelehrter

Episode 471: Be quiet, Harry!

The opening teaser is a reprise of the last scene of Friday’s episode. Dr Eric Lang is trying to convince his patient, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, to participate in an experiment he wants to start. He addresses him as “Barnabas Barnabas.”

It had been a quirk of Barnabas’ previous physician, Julia Hoffman, to repeat Barnabas’ first name, and as Julia, Grayson Hall manages to put a fresh inflection on “Barnabas, Barnabas” every time she says it. But as Lang, Addison Powell simply says “Barnabas Barnabas” without a pause, as if he were saying a compound name like “Jean-Claude” or “Jim Bob.” He even calls him “Mr Barnabas” at his exit, as if he thinks his full name was “Barnabas Collins Barnabas.” This is by no means the worst thing about Powell’s performance, but it is such an obvious contrast with Hall that it is as if the makers of Dark Shadows are sticking a thumb in our eye and taunting us with his inferiority to her.

As if that weren’t bad enough, Powell has competition for the title of worst actor in this episode. Craig Slocum washes up in the role of ex-con Harry Johnson. Well-meaning governess Vicki is the first to see Harry; she immediately screams in horror and starts to sob, the correct reaction to the sight of Slocum in any role.

At least there is a silver lining to Harry. He is the son of housekeeper Mrs Johnson, played by the estimable Clarice Blackburn. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century, and Blackburn played repressed spinster Abigail Collins. Abigail was a triumph, an irresistible comic villain who was the highlight of every episode she was in. Mrs Johnson’s scenes today are the first we’ve seen of Blackburn since the show returned to contemporary dress, and she is razor-sharp. She is intriguingly sheepish when she asks matriarch Liz if her son Harry can stay with her for a little while, and alarmingly quick to assure Liz that Harry won’t make trouble. When she hears Vicki scream, Mrs Johnson comes hurrying in, is unsurprised to see that Harry is the source of Vicki’s panic, and cuts Harry off before he can offer a defense. She takes Harry into the drawing room while Liz calms Vicki upstairs, and tells him that he is one false move away from going back to prison forever.

Mrs Johnson reads Harry the Riot Act. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Blackburn is so much fun as the unillusioned mother that it is a terrible shame Slocum never manages to read a line or move a muscle in a way that a living person might in the given situation. She gets laughs in spite of him, but with a competent actor in his part the scene where Harry faces his mother would be some of the best intentional comedy in the whole series.

There is one other thing about Harry that makes me smile. On the blog of the Terror at Collinwood podcast, Danielle Gelehrter posted an article some time ago about some concept artwork Eric Marshall did for a hypothetical Dark Shadows animated show in the style of early 1970s TV cartoons such as Scooby Doo or Filmation’s adaptations of Star Trek or My Favorite Martian or Gilligan’s Island. The show Marshall imagines features Harry. Personally, I would have chosen motorcycle enthusiast Buzz, who dated heiress Carolyn for a couple of hilarious weeks in 1967, since his outlandish appearance makes him so much more obvious a choice for animation, but at least Harry’s presence suggests that had such a show been made Clarice Blackburn might have been in the cast and had the chance to do some comedic voice acting.

Eric Marshall’s proposed cast for an animated Dark Shadows that might have been made in the 1970- everyone but Harry. Posted at Terror at Collinwood.
Eric Marshall reminds us that Mrs Johnson’s first name is supposed to be “Sarah.” Posted at Terror at Collinwood.

There is some nice stuff in the drawing room between Barnabas and his sometime victim/ fiancée Vicki. Vicki has figured out that the spirit of wicked witch Angelique is once more at work in the great house of Collinwood and that it will take a great effort to stop Angelique from finishing the destruction of the Collins family that she began in the 1790s. If Vicki ever knew that Barnabas was a vampire, she has forgotten it, and Barnabas cannot confess it to her now. He certainly cannot tell Vicki that it was Angelique who made him one. So he listens to her report, but cannot accept her help in the battle against Angelique.

Quite the contrary. Barnabas looks at the spot on Vicki’s neck where he used to take his meals and feels the old hunger coming on. He says he must go to see Lang. Vicki protests that he should stay and let her tend him while they wait for Lang to come to them, but Barnabas insists.

Barnabas goes to Lang’s house. Lang tells Barnabas that if he participates in his experiment, he will not only be entirely free of the vampire curse, but that he might also have the physical appearance of Peter Bradford, alias Jeff Clark, an unpleasant young man who is more or less Vicki’s new boyfriend. This intrigues Barnabas, but Lang will not explain what he means. Since we know that Lang is a mad scientist who is forcing Peter/ Jeff to steal parts from newly interred bodies, we can assume that he will eventually be constructing a Frankenstein’s monster. Presumably he means that the finished product will look like Peter/ Jeff, and Barnabas will somehow live inside it. Since the creature is being built from parts, to look like Peter/Jeff it would have to be finished with salvage from Peter/ Jeff’s corpse. How Peter/ Jeff will be converted from his present state of living and obnoxious to dead and recyclable is what awaits explanation.

Episode 442: For the love of God, Montresor!

When vampire Barnabas Collins rose from his grave to prey upon the living in April 1967, he was a bleak, frightening presence. As the show went on, we saw him spend a great deal of time ruminating on murders he might like to commit, but he had few opportunities to act on those thoughts. By November, when well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and wound up in the year 1795, Barnabas had killed only two people, only one of them with premeditation. Both of those victims, seagoing con man Jason McGuire and addled quack Dave Woodard, had long since lost their relevance to the plot, and neither has been mentioned more than a few times since his death. As a result, Barnabas’ talk of killing comes to seem like nothing more than a series of hostile fantasies.

Soon, Dark Shadows will have to return to a contemporary setting. It was the frightening impression Barnabas created in his first weeks that made Dark Shadows a hit, and to keep it going the show will have to make him seem dangerous again. In the fifteen and a half weeks they have been in the 1790s, he has killed at least six people, including his uncle, his aunt, his wife, two streetwalkers, and a woman named Suki. That’s an adequate rate of murders to reestablish Barnabas as a fiend, but volume will only get you so far. They need to give us some shocking images of cruelty, preferably as the result of crimes committed with slender motives, to get him back in place as a truly scary creature.

Today, the show addresses both that need and the need to give a fitting sendoff to a character who has been one of the standouts of the eighteenth century flashback. The Rev’d Mr Trask, visiting witchfinder, was, along with repressed spinster Abigail, one of the two bright lights of the show’s otherwise dreary reworking of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Now the witch trial is over, Vicki has been convicted, and she is waiting to be hanged. In #437, Vicki gave a speech which left little doubt that at the moment appointed for her execution she would return to the 1960s and the costume drama period would end. Therefore, Trask can hardly reopen the case without confusing the whole plot. As a personality totally warped by fanaticism, he can’t very well branch out into other kinds of stories without a long buildup, much longer than they are likely to stay in the 1790s. Yet Trask has been so much fun that the audience would feel cheated if he simply went back where he came from.

So Barnabas lures Trask to his basement, ties him to the ceiling, and seals him up behind a brick wall. Unfortunately, this homage to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” does not adapt the most celebrated line of that story and have Trask cry out “For the love of God, Mr Collins!”

Barney’s bricklaying project. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Closing Miscellany

In a moment of black humor, the closing credits run over an image of the completed brick wall. We might imagine Jerry Lacy still dangling from the ceiling behind the wall. Mr Lacy was often a model of an actor’s devotion to his craft, but I very much doubt that even he took matters that far.

Hey Jerry, you OK in there until tomorrow? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

A recording of Jonathan Frid reading “The Cask of Amontillado” made in the spring of 1992 can be found on YouTube, posted by Frid’s longtime business partner Mary O’Leary.

In #264, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins visited Barnabas at home. When it was time for a drink, Barnabas offered him a glass of amontillado. Poe’s story is so famous and amontillado is such an unusual variety of sherry that it must have been a deliberate reference. Perhaps the idea of Barnabas sealing someone up behind bricks was floating around among the writing staff for months and months.

Several fansites label it a continuity error that Trask reacts to the sight of Barnabas by exclaiming that he is dead. The family has been covering up Barnabas’ death, putting word about that he went to England. Many think Trask should not be among those privy to the Collinses’ secret. But as Danielle Gelehrter points out in a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, Trask and the gracious Josette discussed Barnabas’ death in #412.

I am writing this post on 19 February 2024. In a bit of synchronicity, yesterday, I saw this post on the site that all normal people still call Twitter: