Tag: dark shadows before i die

Episode 415: Sarah Collins

Sarah dies. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Dark Shadows first aired in June 1966, it kept hinting that behind the action we saw there was a back-world of supernatural presences some of whom might eventually interact with the characters. Often these hints occurred in conversations between a character native to the village of Collinsport and newly arrived governess Vicki. The local would use the word “ghost” metaphorically to refer to unresolved conflicts around the estate of Collinwood, Vicki would shriek “You don’t mean you believe in ghosts!?,” and the other would say that he damn well did believe in ghosts and that if Vicki stuck around long enough she would, too.

The first ghost whose name we heard was Josette, mentioned in #5 as a grand lady from France who came to town to marry Jeremiah Collins, was unhappy with him, and threw herself to her death from the precipice known as Widows’ Hill. Josette manifested herself on camera in #70 and rescued Vicki from murderous groundskeeper Matthew Morgan in #126. In that climactic encounter, we saw Josette and a group of other wraiths. Joining the ghosts of women who jumped from Widows’ Hill at various points in the 19th century was the ghost of Bill Malloy, who had been a living character in the first ten weeks of the show and had shimmered into view as a ghost and sang a song in #85. This assemblage suggests that the spectres haunting Collinwood know each other and act with a common purpose at least occasionally.

The first supernatural menace to appear on the show was undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, mother of strange and troubled boy David. Josette warned several characters of the threat Laura posed to David. Josette herself was unable to fight Laura directly. In #165, she manifested in the room where Laura held the sleeping David, but had to retreat when Laura ordered her to go. Thereafter it was up to Vicki, advised by Josette, to organize the opposition to Laura. If #126 showed that the benevolent spirits can act together to defeat a threat from a mortal man, #165 and its aftermath showed that they must withdraw into the back-world when the enemy is of an uncanny nature.

In April of 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded Laura as the show’s new danger from beyond the grave. In #212, Barnabas went to the Old House at Collinwood, the place where Josette is most present, and told her portrait above the mantel that her power was at an end. In #223 and #240, Josette’s friend David felt her absence from the Old House and lamented that the family had lost its tutelary spirit. With that, we bid farewell to the wispy presences we had seen in #126. A vampire is too dynamic an adversary for them. It seemed for a period that the show had simplified its ontology- there are those who live by the laws of nature we know, there is Barnabas, and that is that.

That period ended in #255. Barnabas has passed himself off as a cousin from the Collins family’s long-lost English branch and settled in to the Old House. He is keeping Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, as a prisoner in a barred cell in the basement. Maggie looks out her window and sees a little girl in 18th century garb sitting in the corridor. The girl is holding a doll and singing “London Bridge.” She does not respond to Maggie’s attempts to get her attention.

In the next several episodes, we learn that the little girl’s name is Sarah, that she has a big brother, and that she can’t find anyone she knows. Even if the closing credits hadn’t immediately given away the fact that she is the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister, we would be able to gather that she is a supernatural being who was pulled out of the back-world when Barnabas rose from the grave. For the next 22 weeks, Sarah keeps popping up in the world of 1967. We wonder what she will do next, when she and Barnabas will confront each other, and what other paranormal beings are waiting to erupt into the visible world.

In #365, the major characters held a séance to contact Sarah and ask her what she was trying to tell them. Sarah spoke through Vicki and said that she would not appear to them again. She also said that she wanted to “tell the story from the beginning.” With that, Vicki vanished from the table and a woman in an 18th century dress appeared in her place. The woman identified herself as Phyllis Wick, governess to Sarah Collins, and demanded to know where she was. Meanwhile, Vicki found herself in the year 1795, in Phyllis’ place. At a stroke, the back-world and the foreground are interchanged.

Now it is 26 January 1796, Sarah’s eleventh birthday. She is not having a happy one. Last night she found Barnabas in the family mausoleum with blood smeared on his face. She may not know that he has become a vampire, but she knows that something has gone horribly wrong with him. She runs off and hides behind a tombstone. By the time faithful servant Ben finds her and carries her home, she is severely weakened by exposure. She cannot speak, but mouths Barnabas’ name and looks distressed. Her mother Naomi and cousin Millicent keep vigil at her bedside.

Night falls; Barnabas rises again, and Ben tells him that Sarah is gravely ill. Barnabas resolves to visit her. Unable to talk him out of this plan, Ben offers to help him get into her room unobserved.

Ben relieves Naomi and Millicent, then ushers Barnabas into the room. Barnabas tries to reassure Sarah. Eventually she warms to him. She regains the power of speech, and with her first words she asks her brother to hold her. He does. She tells him she will always love him, then dies in his arms.

This is Sharon Smyth’s last appearance on Dark Shadows. As a child, she had some rather obvious limitations as an actress, a fact Sharon Smyth Lentz cheerfully acknowledges nowadays. During her first 22 weeks, she was playing a ghost, so there were many scenes where all she had to do was seem vague and detached and she could be effective. The story moved very slowly during that period, giving the writers and directors time to figure out her strengths. Near the end of it, she excelled in two scenes with a lot of dialogue. In #348 she had a complicated, serious conversation with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, and in #364 she had her confrontation with Barnabas. Supported by Nancy Barrett and Jonathan Frid, she executed those scenes very well indeed.

In 1795, Sarah is alive and the plot moves at a breakneck pace. Under those conditions, it would have taken intricate advance planning to craft scenes that would have been in Sharon Smyth’s range. But the writers of Dark Shadows rarely had time to do any advance planning. When the show was moving slowly enough, they could usually hit all the major points the audience would expect to see, but there are some glaring omissions in 1795. Young Daniel Collins will be played by David Henesy, who also plays David Collins. Since the relationship between Vicki and David had been the core of the first 39 weeks of the show and the relationship between Sarah’s ghost and David had been one of the most intriguing elements of the 22 weeks she was haunting Collinwood, it is particularly disappointing that we barely see Vicki with Sarah and never see Sarah and Daniel together at all.

I first saw Dark Shadows on the SciFi Channel, as it was then called, in the 1990s. I saw a handful of episodes on random mornings when I happened to be off work. They whetted my curiosity about the show, but I left it to chance until I saw an episode with Sarah’s ghost. Then I decided to set my VCR and watch regularly until I found an explanation for what was going on with her. The whole idea of supernaturalism is that there are phenomena which defy explanation, so of course I never reached that point. Naturally, I got hooked on the show within a couple of weeks.

On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn rather unfairly, albeit hilariously, griped that “Sharon stopped acting after Dark Shadows, or possibly during.” When she looks back on her days as a child actress, Mrs Lentz talks about how excited her mother was to meet show biz celebrities, and says that her main gratification was in pleasing her. But she has fond memories of many castmates, and says that her favorite person to run lines with was Jonathan Frid. So there is something sweet about her ending her time on the show in his arms.

Episode 414: Walks the night

There was a lunar eclipse on the night of 24 January 1796; it reached its maximum at 10:09:20 Eastern time. In our time-band, that eclipse was not easily visible in central Maine, but in this episode we see that in the universe of Dark Shadows, it was spectacular there. Caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes and fluttery heiress Millicent Collins come inside from the terrace of the great house of Collinwood after watching the eclipse.

In the drawing room, Nathan proposes marriage to Millicent. She gladly accepts. Matriarch Naomi Collins enters. Millicent is worried Naomi will disapprove of them being alone together so late, while Nathan wants to tell her of the engagement. Before they can say anything, Naomi tells them that her daughter Sarah, whose eleventh birthday is day after tomorrow on the 26th, has gone missing. Nathan volunteers to take charge of the search parties.

Sarah had been looking for her big brother Barnabas. Unknown to her, Barnabas has become a vampire and has been snacking on the women who frequent the waterfront of the village of Collinsport. In yesterday’s episode, Sarah caught a glimpse of Barnabas, followed him to the cemetery, and wound up in the outer room of the family mausoleum, near the secret panel behind which Barnabas’ coffin is hidden. At the top of today’s episode, the door out of the mausoleum slams itself shut and Sarah is unable to open it.

That moment suggests a solution to a riddle that has been part of Dark Shadows ever since Barnabas joined the cast of characters in April 1967, when the show was set in contemporary times. Doors in structures associated with Barnabas would close themselves and trap people. Sometimes this advanced Barnabas’ objectives, but just as often it was an inconvenience to him. Today, he most definitely does not want Sarah to be in the mausoleum. Part of the curse that made Barnabas a vampire is that everyone who loves him will die. Barnabas has killed the malign Angelique, the witch who placed the curse on him, but he is still a vampire- the curse lives on. So perhaps the curse itself has a power that makes the doors slam shut, keeping Sarah in this cold room until she falls ill.

At the waterfront, Barnabas meets a woman named Ruby Tate. Ruby is fashion-forward, to say the least; her outfit would become stylish nearly a century later. It’s the sort of thing that might have been admired by the women Jack the Ripper killed in the Whitechapel section of London in 1888-1891. Indeed, this foggy scene is a fairly obvious reference to the Whitechapel murders.

Ruby smiles for the last time. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas is alarmed when Ruby recognizes him and calls him by name. He is befuddled when she tells him she had heard that he went to England- he doesn’t know that his father Joshua is spreading that story to conceal his death, which Joshua believes to have been the result of the plague. Ruby keeps saying that the other girls will be jealous when she tells them she spent the night with Mr Barnabas Collins, alarming him further.

In the early months of the show, the story of Burke Devlin’s quest for revenge on the Collinses had occasionally brought up the contrast between the working class village of Collinsport and the lordly family on the estate of Collinwood and suggested class conflict as a theme. Those suggestions were never very richly developed, and lately we have spent so much time holed up with the Collinses in their mansions that it is startling to see them through the eyes of the villagers. Ruby’s excitement at pairing off with one of the area’s grand aristocrats reminds us that the curse threatens the future of more than one family.

Ruby promises Barnabas not to tell anyone about him, but does notice him looking at her strangely. Something clicks, and she cries out “It’s you!” Barnabas draws closer. Fleeing him, she falls into the water. Barnabas calls Ruby’s name, but cannot stop her drowning.

Apparently Barnabas found someone else to attack after Ruby drowned, because his face is smeared with blood when next we see him. He returns to the mausoleum. Sarah sees him. He keeps his face turned away from her while she pleads with him to take her home. He keeps telling her to go without him. He finally turns to look at her. She sees the blood and shouts “You’re not Barnabas! You’re not, you’re not!” She runs out of the mausoleum, and dawn breaks.

Ruby Tate is played by Elaine Hyman. Hyman was busy as an actress in New York for decades before her death in 2020. She was in three plays that made it to Broadway, and her TV credits included episodes of The Sopranos, Broad City, and several iterations of the Law and Order franchise. She’s a sensation as Ruby, it’s a shame this is her only appearance on Dark Shadows.

Episode 411: No longer really human

Messy eater. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At the top of the episode, wicked witch Angelique is in the secret chamber hidden inside the Collins family mausoleum. She is standing before the open coffin of Barnabas Collins, a stake in one hand and a mallet in the other. The sun is setting; once it does, Barnabas will rise as a vampire. She would drive the stake through his heart to prevent this outcome, but she is moving in time with the background music, and it is too slow. Barnabas awakes, knocks the equipment from her hands, and grabs her throat.

In 1967, throat-grabbing was Barnabas’ reflex when someone opened his coffin at dusk. The character first appeared in #210 as a hand darting to the throat of would-be grave robber Willie Loomis; Barnabas would bite Willie and enslave him. In #275, seagoing con man Jason McGuire opened the coffin; again the hand darted to the throat, and in #276 we learned that Jason was dead. That was the first time in 1967 Barnabas killed someone.

Now it is 1795. When we return from the opening title sequence, Barnabas has let go of Angelique. He has questions, and she is trying to avoid answering them. He realizes that she is afraid of him. When he figures out that she has turned him into a monster, he strangles her. In 1967, thirteen weeks separated Willie’s freeing of Barnabas from the death of Jason; this time, Barnabas chokes the life out of Angelique only eight minutes after he first awakens as a vampire.

Barnabas opens the door to the outer part of the mausoleum. The mechanism that opens this door is hidden inside one of the stairs leading out, and the camera lingers on it long enough to show that Barnabas must already be very familiar with the room to have gone directly to it. Returning viewers will remember that Angelique seemed unable to find it yesterday, and committed fans will remember that strange and troubled boy David Collins spent a whole week trapped in the secret chamber in September 1967 because it was so well hidden. The ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah had to manifest to David in #315 and show him the door opener before the plot could move forward.

In the outer part of the mausoleum, Barnabas finds much put-upon servant Ben. Ben had been Barnabas’ devoted friend, but Angelique cast a spell on him and forced him to do her evil bidding. He is glad to hear Angelique is dead, and pledges to help Barnabas. As a living man, Barnabas had always gone out of his way to reciprocate Ben’s friendship, but throughout their conversation in the mausoleum he keeps telling Ben about the reasons he has to kill him. Only when Ben points out that he will need someone to protect him during the day does Barnabas agree to let him live. This was the same appeal that mad scientist Julia Hoffman made to Barnabas in #351. Since Barnabas was busily preparing to kill Julia a few episodes after that, this echo does not inspire much hope for Ben’s future.

Barnabas and Ben are having a little talk about how to dispose of Angelique’s corpse when they hear someone approaching the mausoleum. Barnabas hustles back into the secret chamber. Ben turns to the entrance, an appropriately helpless expression on his face.

Ben faces the darkness, waiting for whatever fresh hell may be approaching.

Haughty overlord Joshua Collins enters. Joshua is Barnabas’ father and Ben’s legally recognized master. Joshua accuses Ben of coming to rob Barnabas’ grave. Ben denies it. Joshua demands to know who he was talking to a moment before. Ben says that he was praying and that the only way out of the chamber is the way Joshua came. Joshua says that it is not the only way- Ben’s confederate could have gone into the secret chamber. Joshua opens the secret chamber, looks inside, and sees only Barnabas’ coffin. He is about to close the panel again when a bat flies out and flusters him. After the bat is gone, he agrees to let Ben stay and say more prayers for Barnabas.

Ben is in the graveyard when Barnabas materializes in front of him. Barnabas tells Ben that his new existence has brought him new powers. When the two of them return to the mausoleum, Ben sees that Barnabas’ face is streaked with blood. Barnabas tells him that he has discovered that along with his new powers, he has a new need- he must drink other people’s blood in order to survive. Tomorrow, Ben will hear of an unfortunate woman in the village killed by a wild animal. Barnabas says that he should have let Angelique destroy him; Ben protests that he oughtn’t say things like that. Evidently Ben is going to stick with Barnabas no matter how gruesome his deeds become.

Episode 410: Do you know the word “vampire”?

The name “Barnabas Collins” was first spoken on Dark Shadows by strange and troubled boy David Collins in #205. By the time of his first appearance in #211, it was already clear to the audience that Barnabas was a vampire. Yet the word “vampire” was never spoken on the show in those days. Barnabas was referred to as one of “the Undead,” a title that had previously been given to David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, and also as “the living dead.” At times avoidance of the word led to a bit of fun. So in #315, mad scientist Julia Hoffman is trying to talk Barnabas out of killing David, and says that the boy must not die “at the hands of a-.” When her voice breaks off, Barnabas smiles, leans in, turns his face towards her, and asks “at the hands of a what, doctor?” He is positively gleeful that she has come so close to blurting out a taboo word. It’s as if he had caught her about to make a fool of herself by uttering a slur, and he all but dares her to say it out loud.

As of today, Barnabas has been a part of Dark Shadows for 41 weeks, the same length of time the show had been running before David spoke his name.* The embargo on the word “vampire” finally ends today. We are in the year 1795, and wicked witch Angelique has cursed Barnabas. The first part of the curse has killed him. His father, haughty overlord Joshua, believes Barnabas died of the plague and has hidden his corpse in the secret room of the Collins family mausoleum lest this news cause a panic at the shipyards. Joshua refuses to tell anyone where Barnabas’ remains are, even Angelique, who was Barnabas’ wife.

Angelique regrets the curse, and tried to lift it while Barnabas was still alive. Now that he has died, she wants to prevent the second part of it from coming true. If she does not drive a stake through Barnabas’ heart before dusk, he will rise as a vampire.

Angelique summons much put-upon servant Ben. Ben had been Barnabas’ loyal friend, and to his great misery Angelique has used her powers to enslave him and force him to help in her evil schemes. Now she orders him to find Barnabas’ body, make a sharp stake out of holly wood, and report back to her.

Joshua violently disapproved of Angelique’s marriage to Barnabas and wants to be rid of her. He offers her $20,000 in gold if she will go away and leave behind a signed paper promising never to return. He leaves the paper and the passbook to the bank account containing the gold, and we see her sign.

It isn’t always very meaningful to compare prices across centuries. You couldn’t get a smartphone or a Lexus or a roll of toilet paper for any amount of money in the eighteenth century. But we can compare the price of gold from year to year. In 1795, the official price of gold in the USA was $19.39 per ounce. So, when Joshua offers Angelique $20,000 in gold, he is offering her 1031.46** ounces of it. As I’m writing this (17 January 2024,) the price of an ounce of gold is $2010.60. So, there is a sense in which Joshua pays Angelique $2,073,852.50 to leave Collinwood.

Ben returns with the stake; he and Angelique go to the mausoleum. There, Ben opens the secret room, remarking that Joshua showed it to him on his first day as a servant at Collinwood. Joshua had explained that he hid guns there for the Continentals during the War for Independence, and he wants Ben to keep it clean so that it will be ready in case it is ever needed again. Ben says that it is hard to believe that Joshua was a patriot during the Revolution, but he supposes he was. That Joshua still thinks it might be necessary to take up arms at short notice during the second term of the Washington administration suggests his politics might have been rather fervent.

In the secret room, Angelique and Ben see Barnabas’ coffin. She introduces Ben to the word “vampire,” then tells him to open the coffin. He refuses, and runs out of the room. He shuts the door, sealing her in the chamber with Barnabas. It is surprising that he can do this- perhaps her power over him is waning. She opens the coffin herself and picks up the stake and mallet. The music plays on the soundtrack, and she moves in time with it. She raises the mallet, we catch a glimpse of Barnabas*** in his coffin, and the episode ends.

Angelique prepares to stake Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

*Though he has been in the air for a bit longer than that. We first saw his portrait on the wall next to the front door of the great house of Collinwood in #204, and while the portrait was being painted an elaborate shot was tricked up in #195 to make it look like a portrait was on that spot. 

**To be exact, 1031.45951521 ounces.

***A stand-in wearing heavy makeup, not Jonathan Frid.

Episode 409: Some of the facts

When well-meaning governess Victoria Winters came unstuck in time and tumbled from 1967 to 1795, she brought with her a copy of the Collins family history. We first saw this book in #45, when flighty heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard read this excerpt aloud:

Jeremiah Collins, sixth generation descendant of the founder of Collinsport. In 1830 married Josette Lafrenière of Paris, France. The construction of Collinwood, the family mansion, was begun the same year.

Right up to the last few weeks before Vicki left for the past in November 1967, Dark Shadows kept equivocating about whether Josette, Jeremiah, and the rest of them lived in 1830 or in the late 18th century. The name “Lafrenière” was not mentioned again after #45, but neither was any other surname given for her birth family until the name “DuPrés” was introduced during the 1795 segment. Likewise, #45 is the only time we hear that Josette was from Paris. Her association with the island of Martinique is established in #239, when the vampire Barnabas Collins tells his victim Maggie that he met Josette there and taught her English on the journey to Collinsport, where she was to marry Jeremiah. That Josette was the daughter of the richest French planter on Martinique, a condition that in 1795 in our time-band characterized the lady who would become the Empress Josephine, is something the show commits itself to during the flashback segment.

These were only a few of the myriad revisions and retcons the show went through in regard to Barnabas and Josette’s time as living beings. Today, Josette and her aunt, the Countess DuPrés, go through the book and remark on its many inaccuracies. The episode ends with a shock when they realize that at least one of these inaccuracies is the result of a conscious decision by haughty overlord Joshua Collins to falsify the record of events.

Josette and the countess read The Book. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I was going to write about how meta this all is, but then I reread Danny Horn’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day and found that he had already done it. I would just add that the very idea of traveling back in time is a metaphor for rewriting, so that the whole storyline is an exercise in self-reference by the writers and producers.

This episode features the death of Barnabas Collins. Barnabas has been the show’s main draw for a long time, but he was already dead when we met him in April 1967, and he’s been dying for the last four days of this flashback, so that’s less of a milestone than it might seem. The event is presented as another exercise in continuity. In #345, vampire Barnabas told mad scientist Julia Hoffman that before his death he had vowed to Josette that he would someday return to her. Indeed, Josette is at his bedside in his last moments as a human, and he does make that vow.

Barnabas dies. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas accompanies his vow with a plea for Josette to wait for him. That, too, is a continuity moment. Josette is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who also played Maggie. When Barnabas returned as a vampire in 1967, he kept Maggie prisoner and tried to replace her personality with that of Josette. Whatever the living Barnabas may have been thinking in his last moments, the vampire Barnabas expected to find Josette waiting for him, 172 years after his death, and that expectation motivated the first major crime we saw him commit.

Episode 408: My imperfect science

Late in 1966, the ghost of Josette Collins emerged from the supernatural back-world behind the action of Dark Shadows and rescued well-meaning governess Vicki from homicidal groundskeeper Matthew Morgan. Early in 1967, Vicki and several other characters worked closely with the ghost of Josette to thwart the evil plans of undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. After these experiences, Vicki felt so close to the ghost that, to some, it seemed possible that her personality might disintegrate and she might become a sort of reincarnation of Josette.

In November 1967, the back-world and the foreground traded places. Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in 1795, where Josette and others whom she had met as uncanny entities are alive and she is the alien interloper from another world. Vicki did not in any way adapt to her new surroundings, and immediately brought suspicion on herself. Now she is in jail, spelled “gaol,” awaiting trial on charges of witchcraft.

Josette visits Vicki today and begs her to lift the curse that has brought a mysterious and apparently terminal illness to gallant gentleman Barnabas Collins. Despite her situation, Vicki is shocked that Josette believes her to be a witch. Unable to persuade her of her innocence, Vicki tells Josette that she is a time-traveler and sends her off to look for a book she brought with her from the future. Josette interprets this as a confession of witchcraft, and when she finds the book makes it clear that she could not possibly have interpreted it as anything else.

Vicki makes Josette cry. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

If the show had kept the memory of Vicki’s friendship with Josette’s ghost fresh, this might have been a powerful scene. But Josette’s ghost receded from the action after the Laura story ended in #191, and in #223 and #240 it was made explicit that she is no longer a palpable presence on the estate of Collinwood. We’ve barely heard of Vicki’s connection to Josette in recent months. By this point, even viewers who have been with the show from the beginning are unlikely to make a connection between Vicki’s behavior in her scene with Josette and those old stories. Instead, we see yet another case of Vicki being a tiresome fool.

Disappointing as that scene is, it is not the low point of the episode. That came in the scene immediately before. Actor Jack Stamberger appears as a doctor called to treat Barnabas. Doctors on Dark Shadows are ineffectual figures brought on to fill time, unless they are mad scientists who take a bad situation that is troubling one or a few characters and make it so much worse that it can be a major narrative arc. Stamberger’s part is of the former sort.

It is a particularly objectionable specimen of the category. The other G.P.s usually started with at least a theoretical possibility that they might do something to advance the plot, or turn out to be old friends with established characters who could show a new facet of their personalities in interaction with them, or at least bring out some unusual medical equipment that would be fun to look at. They’ve already foreclosed all of those possibilities before this doctor appears, so the scene is advertised as a waste of time.

One of these is not like the others. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Worse, watching Stamberger’s performance is like sticking your head in a bucket of itching powder. His scene partners, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Lara Parker, and Grayson Scott with dialogue, and Jonathan Frid with moans and anguished facial expressions, are all totally committed to the period setting, and really do seem like gentlefolk inhabiting a mansion in a previous century. Stamberger doesn’t even try to do what they are doing. He puts on a growly voice that might have been acceptable if he were playing a trail-boss in a Western, but that doesn’t have much place in any scene set indoors. It certainly doesn’t make sense for a man in genteel surroundings who talks about nothing but how helpless he is. He doesn’t maintain eye contact with any of the ladies long enough to put himself into the same space with them. He bungles most of his lines, and even those he speaks as written he follows by shuffling his feet, breathing heavily, and looking around. Dark Shadows was, for all practical purposes, done live; if videotape editing had been freely available, it’s hard to imagine director Lela Swift wouldn’t have stopped the scene and taken the time to smack him upside the head.

On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn argues that Addison Powell was, as he stylizes it, THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS. I’m not sure who deserves that title, but today Stamberger locks up the award for Most Irritating Performance.

Episode 407: Damn spot

In a moment of anger, wicked witch Angelique cursed her husband Barnabas Collins. In the first stage of the curse, a bat bit Barnabas on the neck. Barnabas lost a great deal of blood, and now has a high fever. If he dies, he will rise as a vampire. Angelique regrets placing the curse and is trying to undo it.

At the top of today’s episode, Angelique is fussing over a large bloodstain on the floor of the front parlor. With a word, she can turn Barnabas into a vampire. Earlier, she turned his father Joshua into a cat one day and back into a human another day. She made Barnabas’ true love, the gracious Josette, conceive a mad passion for his uncle, Jeremiah, made Jeremiah reciprocate it, and drove the two of them to elope. She enthralled Barnabas’ devoted friend, much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, and forced him to assist her in her evil plans. She could sicken Barnabas’ little sister Sarah and kill her or heal her as she chose. She made bewildered time traveler Vicki suffer hallucinations that led her to incriminate herself as the witch. Yet for all her powers over humans, she is utterly stumped by the stain on the floor. She stares at it and talks to herself for a minute or two, helplessly rubs it with a dry cloth, then stands up, defeated. Considering that she was a lady’s maid until she married Barnabas, you might think that the first thing she would have learned when she took up black magic would be spells to help with the house-cleaning, but evidently not.

“Out, out, damn spot!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Unlike the blood on Lady MacBeth’s hands, the stain on the floor is visible to everyone. Barnabas’ mother Naomi sees it when she has come to the house and asked to see her son. Angelique denies that he is there. We cut back and forth between the women in the front parlor and Barnabas in his sick room. When Naomi notices the bloodstain on the floor, Angelique claims that it is a wine stain. Naomi is a serious alcoholic, so she probably knows the difference between a wine stain and a bloodstain. The ailing Barnabas makes noises that Naomi hears, and Angelique claims that they are just the sounds of the house. Naomi lived in the house until she gave it to Barnabas a couple of weeks before, so she probably knows the house’s noises well enough that this won’t fool her either. Even after Angelique has resorted to these two very ill-chosen lies, Naomi gives up and goes away. It is fun to watch Angelique struggle to find a way out of an awkward situation with her mother-in-law, and touching to see that Naomi is so determined to believe the best about Barnabas and his new wife that she decides to accept Angelique’s explanations.

Angelique goes upstairs and gives Barnabas a potion meant to cure him of her curse. She is terribly upset when it doesn’t work. We’ve seen Angelique regret her spells before, and in #377 we heard her thinking about the fact that she can’t control their effects once she has cast them. But this is the first time we have seen her go so far in an effort to undo her evil deeds. When she offers to bring Josette to Barnabas, there is enough desperation on her face that it seems plausible that she sincerely intends to let her rival try to help him.

In the great house, Naomi and Joshua quarrel about Barnabas and Angelique. Joshua claims that he has not the slightest concern about Barnabas; as soon as Naomi leaves the room to answer the door, we see a haunted look on his face that shows this to be a lie. It’s a wonderful touch, and sets up an expectation that Joshua will soon relent in his hostility to Barnabas.

Naomi opens the door to find Josette and her aunt, the Countess DuPrés. When the bat attacked Barnabas, Josette and the countess were many miles away from Collinwood, yet Josette not only sensed that something terrible was happening, streams of blood appeared on her neck at the same spots where they appeared on Barnabas’ neck. After this experience, they hastened back to Collinwood.

While Josette and the countess were in the inn far away, a bat appeared outside their window. Though Angelique has been dispatching bats to do her bidding, she did not then know and still does not know where Josette and the countess were at that time. Regular viewers of Dark Shadows should be ready for this. The show’s first supernatural menace, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was introduced in December 1966 as an assortment of related but autonomous phenomena, and we saw in 1967 that the ghost of Sarah was also made up of several parts, not all of which were aware of each other or working towards the same goals. So the bat that spies on Barnabas, the bat that bites Barnabas, and the bat that hangs around Josette and the countess may all be parts of the complex known as “Angelique,” but that need not mean that they are all under the control of the woman we know by that name or that she is even aware of them.

Josette is determined to help Barnabas and says that she and her aunt will be going to the Old House to ask Angelique where he is. Naomi is sure Angelique does not know, but Josette and the countess insist on going to the Old House anyway.

When Naomi came to visit, Angelique had to be pleasant. Naomi is Barnabas’ mother, and she is the only ally Angelique can hope to have in the family. But she doesn’t have any need to be nice to Josette or the countess. She keeps telling them to get out of her house, and they keep refusing. Finally they are on their way to the door when they hear Barnabas’ voice crying out “Josette!” At that, there’s no stopping Josette from rushing up the staircase to his room. The countess holds Angelique back, and Josette finds Barnabas bleeding and delirious. He keeps calling her name, unable to recognize that she is with him. He staggers past her. His back to her, he leans out into the hallway and calls “Josette! Josette!” It’s a poignant image of a man who has never fully appreciated anything he had, and who has now lost everything.

“Josette! Josette!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 406: Cursed with eternal life

Through the first eight weeks of the part of Dark Shadows set in the year 1795, it seemed likely that wicked witch Angelique would not be on the show when it returned to the 1960s. Her narcissistic personality and consistent record of failure in her evil schemes overlapped so much with what we saw from vampire Barnabas Collins in 1967 that it would be hard to have them on the show at the same time, while her hyper-intense personality and the fast pace of the action she has generated would seem to be signs that she is not meant to stay on a daytime serial for the duration.

That starts to change today. Barnabas is not yet a vampire, but a living being and a gallant gentleman, albeit a deeply selfish and alarmingly violent one. He married Angelique, not knowing that she was a witch until too late. He has tried to kill her three times in the last few days. That was one attempt too many for Angelique, who in her irritation put a curse on him. A bat bit his throat, leaving him with heavy blood loss and a high fever. Today, Angelique tells escaped convict Ben Stokes, who is Barnabas’ loyal friend and her wretched thrall, that if Barnabas dies he will become “the living dead.”

Barney and friends. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When she is telling Ben what will happen if Barnabas dies, Angelique says that “I am responsible” for the situation. That is a phrase Barnabas never uttered in 1967. Angelique also tells Ben that she must keep Barnabas alive to prevent fulfillment of the curse, and that she will try to lift it altogether when she is stronger. That is another difference from vampire Barnabas- when one of his plans failed, he didn’t try to cure his victim. What failure with one person meant to him was that it was time to kill that one and start over with another. So we can see that the overlap between Angelique’s personality and the one Barnabas will have as a vampire is not total, and that it may be possible to construct plots involving both of them.

Episode 405: To love anyone

Gallant gentleman Barnabas Collins discovered that his wife, Angelique, was a wicked witch and a deadly threat to his true love, the gracious Josette. He did not tell anyone what he knew about Angelique, but did persuade Josette to flee. Today, Angelique discovers that Josette is beyond the range of her powers.

In her rage, Angelique takes a doll belonging to Barnabas’ little sister Sarah. She sticks pins in it; Barnabas has learned that this causes Sarah to become ill. Angelique is about to stick a pin into the doll’s heart when Barnabas takes a dueling pistol and shoots Angelique.

Angelique drops the doll; Barnabas takes the pins from it. Angelique presses her hand to her shoulder while delivering a long, bombastic speech. Barnabas has plenty of time to reload the pistol and shoot her again, but chooses just to stand there and listen to her. This turns out to be a bad decision when she ends the speech by placing a curse on him. He will spend all eternity unable to rest, and everyone who loves him will die. Having completed her death scene, she ostentatiously collapses.

We hear a window smashing. A bat appears. It approaches Barnabas. He yells at it, flails his arms, and walks backward. This is an echo of #330, which ended with strange and troubled boy David Collins reacting the same way when the same puppet appeared in his bedroom. David was a neurotic and isolated pre-teen who had been through a lot of trauma, so that was an effective scene. Barnabas is a grown man who has been trying to function as an action hero. Seeing him as the equivalent of a cartoon lady standing on a chair screaming because she saw a mouse rather undercuts this. Anyway, the bat bites Barnabas on the neck, so now he’s going to be a vampire.

The bite. Not Barnabas’ cloak in the background, playing the role of The Grim Reaper. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In #330, it was Barnabas who sent the bat against David. This is one of many indications that the vampire Barnabas we knew from April to November of 1967 was not only under Angelique’s curse, but that he was in some sense a manifestation of Angelique. Maybe when she casts a spell, she breaks off a chunk of herself and that chunk goes about the world pursuing its own objectives. The image of a supernatural being as a complex of vaguely related but independent phenomena has been standard in Dark Shadows since undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins first appeared on the show in December of 1966, so regular viewers are prepared to learn that the vampiric Barnabas is a subcategory of the syndrome known as “Angelique.”

This episode explains how a couple of the more important props got to be in the places we are used to seeing them. Early in the episode, Barnabas gives Josette a music box. This music box figured heavily in the story from May to August 1967 as a symbol of Josette and as a vehicle for some kind of magic spell that was supposed to turn other people into her. A bit later, we see that Barnabas has hung the portrait of Josette over the mantle in the front parlor of the Old House. It was there when we first saw the Old House in #70, and was the focus of all supernatural phenomena on the show from then until Barnabas reclaimed the Old House in #212.

Episode 403: Eyes to follow him wherever he goes

In April 1967, Dark Shadows had the smallest audience of any of the 13 daytime serials on the three major broadcast networks in the USA. With cancellation looming and nothing to lose, the show introduced vampire Barnabas Collins to its cast of characters, and quickly jumped in the ratings, becoming the first genuine hit of any kind on ABC’s daytime schedule. Since Barnabas was the show’s one selling point, there were long stretches when he was in every episode, and almost every scene.

In November, the show went back in time to the year 1795, when Barnabas was alive and kindly. When the 1795 segment began, Barnabas was close to his uncle, the equally kindly Jeremiah Collins. Jeremiah was cleverer than Barnabas. So, while Barnabas merely showed a benign politeness to bewildered time-traveler Vicki, Jeremiah caught on that she was radically out of place and tried to coach her in the con games she would have to master to survive in her new surroundings. Even so, Jeremiah was dull, and were it not for our knowledge of what he was doomed to become, the living Barnabas would have been even duller. While in 1795, Dark Shadows has to explain not only how Barnabas falls under his curse, but also show how he becomes interesting.

Yesterday, we saw Barnabas in one of the modes in which he was most consistently interesting in 1967, that of comic villain. He’d found out that his wife Angelique was a witch and that by her evil spells she is the source of all the misery that has recently engulfed the great estate of Collinwood, and his response to that information was to make a series of farcically unsuccessful attempts to murder her. At the top of today’s episode, Angelique makes it clear that she is peeved with him about this, and she insists that he stop. She also makes it clear that she will use her magical powers to force him to spend the rest of his life being a dutiful husband, however much he hates her.

Outside the great house on the estate, feather-headed heiress Millicent is talking with caddish naval officer Nathan. It is late and Millicent is worried about the impropriety of being alone with Nathan. It is a charming scene, not least to regular viewers who remember the first months of the show, when the same actors were trapped in a pointless storyline as a couple who were so bored with each other they couldn’t muster the energy to break up. Millicent and Nathan, by contrast, are attracted to each other, zestful, and full of ideas. Millicent’s ideas are mostly silly and old-fashioned, while Nathan’s are mostly concerned with getting his hands on her money. Nancy Barrett and Joel Crothers make the most of these roles. As Nathan, Crothers plays a man who is pretending to be dashing and heroic, but who time and again betrays signs that he is cowardly and venal. As Millicent, Miss Barrett adopts an unmistakably stagy diction, articulating each word with great distinctness. Thus she tells us that Millicent has derived her ideas about life from watching melodramatic plays.

Barnabas comes upon Nathan and Millicent. Seeing him, Millicent exclaims “I’m ruined!” Neither man even acknowledges that she has said this. This is a laugh-out-loud moment, but Millicent is onto something- she really is a character in a melodrama.

Barnabas asks Millicent to help him meet Josette while Nathan and the Countess look on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas is desperate to confer with the gracious Josette. He was engaged to marry Josette until Angelique’s spell put them asunder. Josette’s aunt, the Countess DuPrés, is furious with Barnabas for trying to see her. He tells her that Josette is in great danger and will be safe only if she leaves Collinwood tonight. He refuses to explain the nature of the danger. It’s true Angelique threatened to kill Josette if Barnabas exposed her as the witch, but the warning he is already giving would by itself seem to be enough to provoke that. He might as well tell everything he knows- at least then there would be a chance he would persuade the countess and enlist her as an ally.

Again, regular viewers will see something in the exchange between Barnabas and the countess that those watching the show for the first time may miss. The countess is played by Grayson Hall, who in some of the parts of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century plays mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia knows that Barnabas is a vampire, has made herself complicit in some of his crimes, and wants to be close to him. When we see Barnabas failing to make a connection with the countess, we are reminded that one of the most interesting things about him in 1967 was his relationship with Julia.

They didn’t have camera drones in 1795, so Angelique comes up with the next best thing- she casts a spell that causes a bat to watch Barnabas. The bat isn’t subtle- the sight of it alarms Barnabas and terrifies Millicent. But perhaps that’s the point- Angelique wants Barnabas to know he cannot escape her.