Today’s cast includes a vampire, a wicked witch, two mad scientists, a Frankenstein’s monster, and an irritable housekeeper. The deadly menace turns out to be the housekeeper.
In a laboratory in a house by the sea, mad scientists Eric Lang and Julia Hoffman are trying to transfer recovering vampire Barnabas Collins’ “life force” into the body of the creature Lang has built for the purpose, a creature Barnabas has named Adam. In the drawing room of the great house atop Widow’s Hill, wicked witch Angelique disrupts that attempt by sticking a pin into a clay figure that she addresses as “Dr Lang.” It is unclear how Angelique attached the clay figure to Lang, though since it has roughly the same acting ability as Addison Powell the pairing seems natural enough.
Lang gasps for air. Julia helps both him and Barnabas. Barnabas gets up from the operating table and declares he will go to the great house and stop Angelique. Lang tries to tell Julia how to carry on his work, but keeps breaking down. While Julia is out of the room getting some heart medicine, Angelique removes the pin from the clay figure. During that moment of relief, Lang is alone in the lab. He turns on his tape recorder and says that if both Barnabas and Adam live, Barnabas will be free of the vampire curse. Adam will drain it from him, but will not suffer from its symptoms. If Adam dies, Barnabas will revert to active vampirism.
Angelique resumes tormenting Lang as Julia returns to the laboratory. Lang cannot keep his breath long enough to tell Julia his message or make it clear that she should listen to the tape. Angelique says that Lang has suffered enough for tonight, and that she will put the pin away. As she is about to do so, the door to the drawing room opens and housekeeper Mrs Johnson comes in. Mrs Johnson startles Angelique, who inadvertently drives the pin through the clay figure, killing Lang.
This is the second death to which Mrs Johnson has contributed. The two cases are very similar. She unknowingly gave undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins the information she needed to cast the spell that killed parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie. Guthrie resembled Lang not only in holding a terminal degree, studying the uncanny, and doing battle with an undead witch, but also in his use of a tape recorder. In #170 and #171, Guthrie recorded the audio of a séance; in #172, Laura erased the recording and replaced it with the sound of fire; and in #185, he was on his way to get his tape recorder to use at another séance when Laura cast the spell that killed him. Mrs Johnson is a menace to a very specific kind of person.
Barnabas comes to the great house and threatens Angelique, calling her by the name “Cassandra,” the alias under which she has married sarcastic dandy Roger Collins and found a place in the house. At first he says he will burn her if Lang dies. She pretends not to know what he’s talking about, and says that she will expose him as a madman. He looks at her neck and leans in, a sign that his vampire urges are coming back. The telephone rings, and Mrs Johnson enters. Angelique/ Cassandra explains their compromising position by claiming that she was fainting; with that, she shows that her threat to air her complaints is a bluff, since she could easily have demanded Mrs Johnson call the police.
Mrs Johnson says the call is for Barnabas. It is Julia reporting Lang’s death. Barnabas makes some grim remarks to Angelique/ Cassandra, then goes back to the laboratory and talks with Julia. She is distraught, but agrees to pick up where Lang left off.
We end with a dream sequence. Angelique has loosed a “Dream Curse” on the people of Collinsport. One after another, they have the same basic dream, in each case beginning with an appearance by the next person to have the dream beckoning them into a haunted house attraction and ending with a door opening to expose something the previous dreamers didn’t see. Julia’s dream begins with Mrs Johnson, telling us she will be the next up. It proceeds with her walking through a foggy room, including a clear shot of the fog machine. It ends with the sight of a skeleton wearing a wedding dress and the sound of Angelique’s distinctive laugh, telling us that the position Angelique has gained by marrying Roger is particularly dangerous to Julia. Since Julia lives in the same house as Angelique and they know all about each other, this is not exactly a major revelation.
The dream involves the beckoner’s voice reciting a little bit of doggerel. As it goes on, some beckoners say “through endless corridors by trial and error,” others say “through endless corridors of trial and error.” I prefer “of trial and error.” That implies that the corridors are themselves made up of decisions people have made and of the consequences of those decisions. Saying that the characters are moving through the corridors “by trial and error” means that the corridors exist whether anyone engages with them or not. We saw Angelique start the curse, so we know it isn’t something that has been out there in reality all along, and it expresses itself in dreams, not in anything that persists when people stop paying attention to it. Besides, the whole idea of drama is to show decisions and their consequences, so “of trial and error” is better on every front.
Mad scientists Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) and Eric Lang (Addison Powell) are conferring in Lang’s lab. Lang is putting the finishing touches on a Frankenstein’s monster into which he plans to transfer the “life force” of recovering vampire Barnabas Collins. Julia, Barnabas’ best friend, has been opposed to this experiment, but now has accepted that she can’t stop Barnabas and Lang from going through with it. She volunteers to assist.
Lang is having trouble concentrating because of a nightmare he had last night. Unknown to him, the nightmare was part of the Dream Curse, a dead end storyline about wicked witch Angelique sending a dream that each of a series of people will have. When the last person has the dream, Barnabas is supposed to revert to full-on vampirism.
Lang tells Julia about his nightmare. He says that she was in it. When he tells her that she did not speak, she smiles comfortably and says that that was proof that it was a dream. This is not only a genuinely funny line as Grayson Hall delivers it, but it is an extraordinary moment of self-awareness from Julia, a character who usually exists at the outer edge of heightened melodrama. It’s a shame that Addison Powell doesn’t know how to get out of Hall’s way for the half second it would take for it really to land with the audience.
Barnabas and his ex-blood thrall Willie are at home in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. Willie is smirking and Barnabas is rigid with embarrassment while the dogs howl outdoors. Willie laughs a little as he makes a remark about how Barnabas hasn’t changed as much as he thought he had. This exchange reminds us of the moment in #346 when Julia and well-meaning governess Vicki noticed that some fresh flowers Barnabas touched had died and shriveled up. Like the howling of the dogs when Barnabas feels bloodlust, the shriveling of the flowers was a consequence of his vampirism, effectively a bodily function that he cannot control. He squirmed when Julia and Vicki looked at him then, and he is stiff and flustered when Willie laughs at him now.
Barnabas orders Willie to take a letter to matriarch Liz at the great house on the estate. It will explain that he is going away on a long trip, and that Adam Collins, a young cousin from England, will be coming to stay in the Old House. Willie is alarmed by this.
Willie asks what Barnabas will do if Liz won’t let him stay in the Old House when he is in the form of Adam. Barnabas is sure she will, and dismisses Willie’s doubts. This is an interesting sequence to regular viewers. The show has never made it clear whether Liz still owns the house or has signed it over to Barnabas. A whole year ago, in #223, Liz was talking to strange and troubled boy David as if the Old House and its contents were Barnabas’ legal property. Since then, there have been moments that tend to confirm that impression, as when Barnabas takes Liz’ keys to the house away from David and does not give them back to her, and other moments that conflict with it. Willie’s question and Barnabas’ response would seem to prove that the house still belongs to Liz.
Another question we might ask is why Barnabas doesn’t go to Liz himself. Certainly she will be unhappy that he went away without saying goodbye to her. Moreover, when he showed up at the great house in April 1967, Barnabas told Liz that he was the only survivor of the English branch of the family. Liz will be skeptical if another member of this imaginary branch presents himself and expects to take possession of a big mansion on her property. She has had unpleasant experiences with Willie, so much so that a letter he delivers seems unlikely to allay that skepticism.
When Willie gets to the great house, Angelique herself opens the door. She is living there under the name Cassandra. She has cast a spell on Liz’ brother, sarcastic dandy Roger, and married him so that she will have a residence at Collinwood while she works to restore Barnabas’ curse to its full potency. Showing his typical degree of strategic ability, Barnabas has not bothered to tell Willie about any of this.
Angelique/ Cassandra ushers Willie into the drawing room, sits him down, and chats with him. Willie answers her questions about Barnabas, not realizing that he has any more reason to be discreet with her than with anyone else. He tells her that Barnabas has been spending his days with Lang. Angelique/ Cassandra already knows that it was Lang who gave Barnabas the treatments that put his vampirism into remission and that Lang is preparing further treatments for him. Barnabas should know that she knows this, since she went to Lang’s house and tried to kill him. Willie also tells her that sometimes Barnabas doesn’t seem to have changed as much as you might expect. Angelique/ Cassandra’s reaction makes it clear this is new information to her, and that it might help her in her efforts.
The scene raises yet another question. Barnabas had expressed the hope that once the experiment was complete, Angelique would see that his old body was dead, would assume that meant that he no longer existed in any form, and that she would then go away and leave him alone. But he knows that she knows about Lang, and now he is planning to come back to Collinwood, where she lives, as another “cousin from England.” The question is this- how dumb does Barnabas think Angelique is?
Back in the lab, Lang and Julia are preparing for the experiment. Barnabas shows up. When he talks with the doctors, his face is reflected in the mirror above Lang’s creature. Not only does this suggest the idea of his personality moving into the creature’s body, it also reminds us that until Lang gave him his first course of treatment, Barnabas did not cast a reflection. The whole idea of Barnabas’ reflection will remind longtime viewers of #288, when Julia first confirmed her suspicion that Barnabas was a vampire by peeking at the mirror in her compact and not seeing him. That draws a contrast between Lang, whose initial success with Barnabas appears to be leading to disaster because his impersonal, hyper-masculine approach leaves him unable to recognize the threat Angelique poses, and Julia, whose own attempts to cure Barnabas of vampirism did not match Lang’s spectacular results, but whose femininity, as symbolized by the compact, represents a fighting chance against the forces that really govern this universe.
Barnabas takes his place on a bed. He tells Julia he is glad she is with him, and she smiles at him with the sad tenderness of someone saying a final farewell to a loved one. As with her self-deprecating joke in the opening part of the episode, this smile shows a new side of Julia. For a time in October 1967 she tried to launch a romance with Barnabas, and he rejected her. Hall played Julia’s unrequited love in the same larger-than-life style that the rest of her action called for. Her feelings seemed to be an outgrowth of despair- she was by that point so deeply entangled with Barnabas that there was little hope she could ever make a life with anyone else, so even though he was an active vampire, she had little to lose by committing herself to him. But this sweet little exchange is played so gently that it opens a window on a more complex inner life for Julia.
As Lang starts the experiment, we cut to Angelique in the drawing room at Collinwood. She is talking to a clay figure, calling it “Dr Lang,” and saying that it cannot overcome her powers, for they were a gift to her from the Devil himself. She jabs at the clay figure. In the lab, Lang writhes in pain, interrupting the experiment.
It was not until #450 that Dark Shadows let on that there might be anything to Christianity. In that episode, good witch Bathia Mapes held Barnabas at bay by showing him a cross. Up to that point, Barnabas had many times strolled comfortably through the old cemetery north of town, where half the grave markers are in the shape of the cross, and they hadn’t bothered him a bit. The only representatives of the faith who figured in the story were repressed spinster Abigail Collins and fanatical witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask, both of whom were fools whom Angelique easily twisted to her own purposes. Now we have a character named Adam, a New Adam through whom a resurrection is supposed to take place, and he is wearing a headpiece that is photographed to look like a crown of thorns. Angelique’s reference to the Devil suggests that she can be defeated only through the aid of a being more powerful than the Devil, and since we haven’t heard about Ahura-Mazda or any other non-Christian deities who represented a supreme principle of good pitted against an otherwise irresistible evil, it looks like we’re drifting Jesus-ward.
It is daring to take that direction, even if it is only for a little bit. Vampire legends are pretty obviously an inversion of the Christian story, in which a man comes back from the dead, not having destroyed the power of death once and for all, but only to die again every time the sun rises. While Jesus feeds us with his body and blood in the Eucharist and thereby invites us to share in his eternal life, the vampire feeds himself on our blood and thereby subjects us to his endlessly repeated death. That’s why Bram Stoker’s Dracula has all those crosses and communion wafers, because it is a religious story of the triumph of the promise of resurrection in Christ over the parody of that resurrection that the vampire has settled for. It also explains why Dark Shadows so studiously avoided Christian imagery for so long. Christianity is such a powerful part of the culture that once you let any of it in, it tends to take over the whole story.
There are many reasons the makers of the show would want to avoid that fate. Not least is the tendency of religions to fracture and stories based on their teachings to become sectarian. Dracula itself is an example of that; the vampire is a Hungarian nobleman from Transylvania, connected with the Szekely clan. There really was such a clan, and like other Hungarian nobles in Transylvania its members were Calvinists, supporters of the same version of Christianity that Abigail and Trask represented. Stoker was a Roman Catholic from Ireland, a country where most Protestants are Presbyterians, a tradition that grew out of Calvinism, and so his depiction of the vampire is clearly driven by sectarian animus. The Collinses have an Irish surname, settled in New England when that region was officially Calvinist, and did very well there. So it would be easy to present their troubles as a cautionary tale about Calvinism. That would seem to be a surefire way to shrink the audience drastically. Not only are there millions of Calvinists whom it would offend, there are billions of people to whom Calvinism means nothing at all, and they would be utterly bored by a denunciation of it.
The episode is daring in several other ways as well. When Barnabas and Willie were first on the show, ABC-TV’s office of Standards and Practices kept worrying that viewers might interpret their relationship, which was founded on Barnabas’ habit of sucking on Willie and swallowing his bodily fluids, as somehow homosexual. Not only is the scene between them at the Old House reminiscent of the scenes that attracted memos from that office in the spring and summer of 1967, but the whole idea of Barnabas draining his “life force” into the body of Adam would seem to invite the same concerns.
The experiment scene would only intensify such concerns. The experiment is a medical procedure that is supposed to bring a new life into the world, which by 1968 was how Americans usually thought of the process of birth. Barnabas is the patient, he is lying down, and the doctors sedate him. Thus he takes on all the medicalized marks of a mother-to-be. Julia asked Lang if the process would be painful for Barnabas; he does not disappoint, but ends the episode screaming in response to labor pains. Not only does turning Barnabas into Adam’s mother invert the expected gender performance, but it also introduces a homosexual side to Barnabas’ relationship with Lang, who is Adam’s other parent.
Somebody ought to be there telling Barnabas he’s doing great and urging him to push. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Christian imagery and gender-nonconformity would have been rather a queasy combination for most Americans in 1968. That’s unusual, in historical terms. Before modern times, Christians didn’t hesitate to discuss ways that familiar gender roles break down in the relationship of humans to Christ. The “Fathers of the Church,” the prominent Christian intellectuals of the fourth and fifth centuries, talked about that all the time, going into depth not just with the image of the Church as the Bride of Christ but of each human soul, whether male or female, as one of Jesus’ wives, and of the physical contact between humans and Jesus in the Eucharist as a consummation of their marriage.
For their part, Calvinists tended to be skeptical of the physical aspect of the sacraments, but that didn’t mean that they shied away from conjugal metaphors to describe the relationship between the soul and Jesus. John Donne, like most priests in the Church of England in the 16th and early 17th centuries, was basically a Calvinist, yet his sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” is one of the most vivid and uncompromising statements of the ancient idea of an erotic dimension to Christian life that transcends the binaries between masculine and feminine, male and female. That tradition makes today’s conjunction of Christian and homoerotic themes all the bolder- imagine if Dark Shadows wrote itself into a corner where they had no choice but to explain nuptial imagery and mystical eroticism in the writings of Saint Ambrose. The whole audience could fit into a seminar room.
Closing Miscellany
Lang and Julia wear white lab coats. This is the first time Julia has worn a white coat. Her previous lab coat was light blue, which looks white on the black and white TV sets most households had in 1968, but now that the show is being produced in color they are buying costumes and props for color televisions.
The idea of a machine that would cause a person to go to sleep in one body and wake up in another was a big deal on TV in the 1960s. Just today I saw this screenshot from The Avengers on Tumblr:
This episode marks the first appearance of Robert Rodan. When Adam was a nameless heap of flesh under a blanket, he was played by a stand-in named Duane Morris. Rodan had a few small parts on TV shows in 1963 and 1964 and was in a couple of commercials between 1964 and 1968. Adam was his first, and last, recurring role on a series. In 1969, he appeared in a little-seen feature film called The Minx, then spent the rest of his life selling real estate in Southern California.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins hopes that mad scientist Eric Lang will be able to free him of his curse once and for all. Since wicked witch Angelique, who put the curse on Barnabas in the first place, has come back to the great estate of Collinwood, Barnabas found a twelfth century Sicilian talisman with the power to protect against witches and gave it to Lang with instructions that he was to keep it on his person at all times. Several days ago, Angelique drove Lang to the point of death, and he survived only because he managed to touch the talisman at the last moment. Even so, Lang refuses to wear the talisman or even to keep track of it. Now Barnabas is with Lang in his study, whence they discover that the talisman has been stolen. Lang asks Barnabas if he can get another one for him. Barnabas looks at Lang as if he were the world’s stupidest man, and tells him that such objects are extremely rare.
The whole business with Lang and the talisman is a prime example of what Roger Ebert called Idiot Plot, in which the story would end immediately if the characters showed as much intelligence as the average member of the audience has. If Lang were played by a good actor, he might be able to hold our interest through a few of these inexplicable actions. Both Alexandra Moltke Isles, as well-meaning governess Vicki, and Dana Elcar, as Sheriff George Patterson, were cast as the Designated Dum-Dum in a number of episodes, and each managed to survive longer than one might have expected. Mrs Isles kept the audience on board for Vicki by making us wonder how anyone could absorb the torrent of bizarre information drowning her. Elcar made the sheriff watchable by making speculate he might only be pretending to be clueless. But as Lang, Addison Powell is just dismally bad. Not only does he not invent a way to make Lang seem like he might be secretly smarter than the script makes him out to be, he does not show any sign of ever having acquired even the most basic acting skills. When Lang seems to think Barnabas can take him to Talismans-Я-Us to replace the priceless object he has lost, the audience loses whatever patience it may have had with him.
Lang’s assistant, a former mental patient named Peter who insists on being called “Jeff,” is quitting after months of helping Lang steal body parts from fresh graves. Peter/ Jeff tells Barnabas that he will be staying in town. That’s bad news for Barnabas, but much worse news for the audience. Peter/ Jeff is played by Roger Davis, who is a far more skilled actor than Addison Powell but, if anything, even less pleasant to watch. His characters are either full of rage or insufferably smug, he often manhandles his scene partners, and when he raises his voice he projects, not from the muscles of his pelvic floor, but from his anal sphincters, causing him to sound like he is suffering from severe constipation.
Lang tells Barnabas he needs a new assistant as soon as possible. Barnabas says he knows just the man. He is Willie Loomis. As Peter/ Jeff was a patient in an institution for the criminally insane when Lang found him, Willie is a patient in such an institution now. Willie was Barnabas’ servant for the first months he was in the 1960s, when Barnabas was a vampire rampaging through the village of Collinsport. Barnabas eventually took the heat off himself by pinning some of his crimes on Willie, packing him off to the mental hospital.
Willie was a fan favorite. Largely this was because actor John Karlen was as capable as Addison Powell was inept and as likable as Roger Davis is repellent. But the writers, too, always found fresh ways to make Barnabas’ conversations with Willie interesting, and when mad scientist Julia Hoffman teamed up with Barnabas she and Willie were great fun to watch together. The idea of Willie replacing Peter/ Jeff, in whatever capacity, is something to cheer for.
We cut to the cottage where Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, lives with her father Sam. Maggie is wearing a pair of trousers which may well be the weirdest things ever shown on Dark Shadows. According to a blog called 1630 Revello Drive,* they are based on an article of women’s clothing traditional in India called a gharara. Surely no one in India ever made such things out of this brightly colored floral quilt. If this garment can exist, we would be foolhardy to rule out the possibility of ghosts or vampires or time travel or witches or anything else.
Maggie answers a knock on the door and finds Peter/ Jeff. Vicki had arranged for him to rent a room at the Evans cottage. Shortly after he arrives, Vicki comes. Peter/ Jeff tells her she doesn’t know much about him, and asks what she will do if it turns out he is someone she hates.
The next thing we see after that question is Peter/ Jeff with his shoe, a shoe he wears while robbing graves, on Maggie and Sam’s coffee table. Anyone who saw that might well conclude that Peter/ Jeff is such a clod that any civilized person would be tempted to hate him.
That isn’t an ottoman, buddy.
Again, there are actors who specialize in playing men who are compelling to watch when they do unpleasant things. Dark Shadows hit the jackpot in this regard when it cast Jonathan Frid as the vampire Barnabas. It narrowly missed doing so on other occasions. In the first year of the show, future movie stars Harvey Keitel (in #33) and Frederic Forrest (in #137) showed up as background players. Surely they would have taken speaking parts on the show at this point in their careers, and either of them could have made Peter/ Jeff almost as much of an asset as John Karlen made Willie, even if he did wantonly ruin people’s furniture.
Dr Julia Hoffman is in the front parlor of the house of her fellow mad scientist, Eric Lang. She is on the telephone, asking the operator to connect her with the police. Even though she has lived in the Collinsport area for months now, she is still surprised that the sheriff’s office doesn’t have an emergency number.
Julia locked the door to the parlor; Lang is outside it with a gun, and recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is knocking and calling her name. They want to stop her reporting to the police that Lang is building a Frankenstein’s monster with body parts retrieved from the cemetery, and that he was planning to cut a living man’s head off to use as the last piece of the creature. Lang plans to bring the body to life by draining Barnabas’ “life-force” into it. Barnabas hopes this will free him of the vampire curse once and for all, and is desperate to complete the experiment.
Barnabas shouts that Julia should remember “someone.” When he can’t come up with the name, Lang prompts him with a yell of “Dave Woodard!” Barnabas and Julia killed local physician Dave Woodard in #341; Julia hangs up the phone, realizing that if the operator ever does manage to find a police officer any investigation of Lang would likely expose her as a murderer.
Barnabas has told Lang a great deal about himself. For example, in #467, Lang was the first person Barnabas told that his vampirism was the result of a curse placed on him by wicked witch Angelique. So returning viewers can believe that Barnabas might have confided in Lang about the murder of Dr Woodard. But it would be strange for him to have done so off-screen. And just Friday, Barnabas explained to Lang that the reason he thinks Julia can be trusted with the secret of the experiment is that she has a crush on him.* He hasn’t had much time to share more information with Lang since then, and if Lang had already known that Julia couldn’t call the cops without exposing herself to a murder charge Barnabas wouldn’t have needed to mention her crush on him. The likeliest explanation is that the loud and clear exclamation of “Dave Woodard!” is not Lang prompting Barnabas at all; rather, it was Addison Powell prompting Jonathan Frid. The result is a blooper that seriously confuses the relationships among Lang, Barnabas, and Julia. It’s early enough in the episode that it really is odd they didn’t stop tape and start over.
At any rate, they never mention Woodard again. He was introduced early in the vampire storyline. He was the counterpart to Dr John Seward, the physician in Dracula who realizes that all the patients who are suddenly showing up with puncture wounds on their necks and massive blood loss need care he is not trained to provide, and calls in his old med professor, Dr Van Helsing. Julia was the Van Helsing analogue, but she wound up siding with the vampire and killing her onetime friend. It is appropriate that the last reference to Woodard comes in this, the second episode of Dark Shadows with no cast members introduced before Barnabas. From now on, the daylight world Woodard represented and tried to restore is no longer present even as a memory.
Julia lets Barnabas and Lang into the parlor, and asks Lang to promise that he won’t kill anyone. He gives such a promise. She is unconvinced, but agrees not to call the police. She also tells Lang she will continue to oppose the experiment.
On the terrace of the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas and Julia talk about Lang’s experiment. Angelique, wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra, lives in the house as the wife of sarcastic dandy Roger, and the terrace is surrounded by trees, fences, and other prime screens for eavesdroppers. Barnabas and Julia know this well, as each of them has eavesdropped on important conversations here themselves.
Of course Angelique/ Cassandra comes by and hears everything. Barnabas does catch her, grab her, call her by her right name, and vow that she won’t stop him. After he lets her go, he moans to Julia that it was foolish of them to discuss their plans there. That underlines the foolishness of an idea key to the plan, that after Lang’s creature has been animated Angelique will never realize that Barnabas is dwelling within it and place a fresh curse on it. Barnabas assumes that Angelique, who has transcended time itself to pursue him, will just give up and go away once she sees that his original body is dead, and won’t have any questions about the new guy living at his doctor’s house.
Angelique summons her new cat’s paw, lawyer Tony Peterson. Jerry Lacy plays Tony. From #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that phase of the show, Mr Lacy played the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical witchfinder who inadvertently gave Angelique a great deal of assistance in her campaign to destroy the Collins family and those close to them. Most of the characters in the 1790s segment represent a commentary of some kind on the characters the same actors play in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. Tony and Trask have seemed to be an exception. In 1967, Tony was introduced through his profession and served mainly as an instance of Mr Lacy’s famous Humphrey Bogart imitation. Trask did end up functioning as a lawyer in a witchcraft trial, and his lunatic shouting about “THE ALMIGHTY!!” and “THE DE-VILLLL!!!!” were occasionally suggestive of what Bogart might have ended up doing if Captain Queeg’s testimony before the court-martial in The Caine Mutiny had gone on for nineteen weeks. Otherwise, there didn’t seem to be any fruitful points of comparison between the two.
Angelique tells Tony that the reason she chose him as her servant was that he reminded her of Trask. She orders him to go to Lang’s and steal a talisman that can guard against witches. At that, Tony shouts “Against you!,” and he sounds very much like Trask. Perhaps we are to think that a secular education and a steady diet of Hollywood movies could have turned the farcically warped Trask into a basically reasonable fellow like Tony, but that there is no strength in those things to stand up to a force like Angelique.
The talisman was a gift to Lang from Barnabas. Lang refuses to keep it on his person, even though it saved his life to clutch it when Angelique was making his heart beat so fast it was about to burst. Lang shows up at Barnabas’ house, under the false impression he received a telephone call from Barnabas. Barnabas, who has no telephone in his house, explains to Lang that Angelique has lured him away. When he learns that Lang has left the talisman in his desk drawer at home, he insists on accompanying him back there.
It is too late. Tony has already stolen the talisman and delivered it to Angelique. She looks at it and says that Lang will not be able to save either Barnabas or himself. Presumably, not even by reminding him of his lines.
Mad scientist Eric Lang has been building a Frankenstein’s monster out of body parts his assistant, a man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff, has dug up out of the cemetery. Once the body is completed, Lang will “drain the life-force” from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins into it, bringing it to life and freeing Barnabas of vampirism once and for all. The time has come to fasten a head on the creature. Barnabas and Lang decided the other day to cut Peter/ Jeff’s head off and use it. When Peter/ Jeff found out about this, he irritated Lang with a lot of small-minded objections. When Barnabas realized that his friend Vicki was in love with Peter/ Jeff, he had second thoughts and stopped Lang from proceeding with the decapitation.
Lang pulls a gun on Barnabas, leading to several minutes of rather tedious business. Lang finally capitulates to Barnabas’ insistence that they call in a second mad scientist. Barnabas assures Lang that Dr Julia Hoffman can be trusted to keep their secrets. Julia, Barnabas says, “cares for me,” and will be discreet for his sake. He telephones her.
Julia is a permanent houseguest in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. We see her there carrying on a friendly conversation with the newest member of the household. Like Peter/ Jeff, this person has two names. She is Angelique, the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire in the first place. She has been telling everyone that her name is Cassandra, and has made her way into the house by marrying sarcastic dandy Roger Collins.
Julia smiles at Cassandra/ Angelique, agrees with everything she says, and talks in a soft, warm voice. She praises her for her honesty, and tells her that honesty is a quality she admires in people. With this, returning viewers have no doubt that Julia knows exactly who she is dealing with. Honesty is a quality Julia finds difficult to tolerate; several times we have seen her having conversations with the scrupulously ingenuous Vicki, and she could barely wait for Vicki to look away from her before she rolled her eyes, squirmed, and showed evidence of physical pain. When Barnabas was still an active vampire Julia once went to him after a conversation with Vicki and offered herself to him as his next victim, apparently a desirable fate if the alternative was having another conversation with Vicki. Angelique/ Cassandra hasn’t known Julia long, but her puzzled facial expressions do hint that she might suspect that her pliant manner and conventional words are an act put on to deceive an enemy.
The telephone rings; as a houseguest, Julia steps aside and lets Angelique/ Cassandra, a member of the family, answer it. We see the grimace on Barnabas’ face when he hears the voice of his bête-noire answer. He asks for Julia. Angelique/ Cassandra hands her the phone, and Barnabas orders her simply to do as he says. She replies, still speaking in the sweet, quiet tone she had been using with Angelique/ Cassandra, “all right.” This is so much unlike her usual self that it can only be an act she puts on when she is in the presence of an extremely deadly foe. Barnabas commands that she come to Lang’s and bring the medallion she uses to perform stupendous feats of hypnosis.
At Lang’s, Julia asks what’s going on. When Barnabas and Lang give her a cover story about Peter/ Jeff having paranoid delusions, she has her back to them and her face to the camera when she assures them that she is accepting their version of events. Again, we can see that she is far too savvy for these two guys to hoodwink.
Julia, unconvinced by the story Barnabas and Lang have given her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Lang escorts Julia to the room where the sedated Peter/ Jeff is tied up on a bed. Julia orders Lang out of the room. Peter/ Jeff regains consciousness; Julia identifies herself as a friend of Vicki’s come to help him, and he tells her all about the experiment and Lang’s attempt to murder him. After she hypnotizes him into forgetting the preceding five hours, she goes to the laboratory, finds the creature, and confirms Peter/ Jeff’s story. At the sight of the creature, she can’t help but scream.
Grayson Hall’s performance up to this point in the episode has been so masterful that the scream is a terrible letdown. Hall had asthma, and as a result she could not control the quality of her voice when she screamed. This was a major disability for an actress on Dark Shadows.
Julia’s scream brings Lang and Barnabas. Barnabas makes it clear that he is still determined to go through with the experiment. He just wants to make sure the person they decapitate isn’t close to Vicki. Julia staggers out of the lab. She is in the foyer when we hear her interior monologue. She tells herself she cannot be a party to another murder, not even for Barnabas’ sake. She goes into Lang’s front parlor and picks up the telephone to call the police. Lang and Barnabas come to the door of the parlor, find it locked, and pound on it. Lang draws his gun again.
This is the first episode without any cast members who were on Dark Shadows before Barnabas was introduced in #211. This one is so much focused on Julia that faces which would remind regular viewers of what the show was like in those first 42 weeks would just be a distraction, so it’s logical to leave them all out.
Mad scientist Dr Lang is building a Frankenstein’s monster in the laboratory hidden in his house. Once the body is complete, he will drain the personality of recovering vampire Barnabas Collins into it. That is supposed to bring the creature to life and free Barnabas from vampirism forever.
As we open, Lang is preparing to harvest a head for the creature from the body of the man who had dug up the graves to supply the other parts. This man is, at the moment, still alive. His name is Peter, though for reasons of his own he wants to be called Jeff. Peter/ Jeff keeps waking up and complaining about his impending decapitation, to Lang’s surprisingly mild irritation.
Barnabas comes to the lab. He is afraid of a relapse into vampirism, but is having second thoughts about killing Peter/ Jeff. Lang works hard to talk him back into going along with his evil scheme. He asks Barnabas if he loves well-meaning governess Vicki. Barnabas says yes. First time viewers may be surprised that he doesn’t put much enthusiasm in that response; regular viewers, knowing that Barnabas has never shown any sign of being attracted to Vicki, will not. Lang says that if Peter/ Jeff goes free he will marry Vicki and they will live “a life of unending happiness!” Faced with this horrifying prospect, Barnabas agrees to let Lang butcher Peter/ Jeff.
Barnabas leaves the room and sees Vicki letting herself into Lang’s house. He hides from her, then sneaks back to the lab to tell Lang she is there. Lang goes to get rid of her. Barnabas eavesdrops on their conversation. We see the conflict on his face. He goes back to the lab, stands next to the table where the unconscious Peter/ Jeff is restrained, tells himself that Vicki will always love Peter/ Jeff, and studies one of Lang’s scalpels. For a moment it looks as if he will kill Peter/ Jeff himself, but instead he releases the restraints.
Lang comes back, and Barnabas quarrels with him. When Lang says that they can’t let Peter/ Jeff go knowing what he knows about them, Barnabas tells Lang that Julia Hoffman, the other mad scientist in town, has such potent abilities as a hypnotist that she can erase Peter/ Jeff’s memories. Lang refuses to involve Julia, and pulls a gun on Barnabas. After so many long years as an undead abomination, Barnabas sadly tells Lang that an ordinary bullet is no threat to him. Lang declares that, on the contrary, he is now sufficiently human to die of gunshot wounds.
Soap operas usually have multiple more or less independent storylines going simultaneously. Dark Shadows had trouble keeping that up, usually having an A story with all the action and a B story that never got off the ground and eventually dried up altogether. Now, in the spring of 1968, they have several equally dynamic arcs going at once. As a result, today’s episode is a bit of a jumble, as we catch glimpses of several loosely related events.
For the nineteen weeks stretching from #365 to #461, well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself trapped in the 1790s. In that period, she met many people, among them gracious lady Josette and wicked witch Angelique. In the 1960s, one of Vicki’s closest friends is Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Like Maggie, Josette is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. When Vicki saw Josette, she realized that Maggie had some kind of metaphysical connection to her. This was a daring move on the part of the show, since it means that vampire Barnabas was onto something in the summer of 1967 when he abducted Maggie and tried to brainwash her so that her personality would vanish and Josette’s would appear in its place.
Angelique has followed Vicki to 1968. She calls herself Cassandra, wears a black wig, and has married sarcastic dandy Roger, thereby securing residence in the great house of Collinwood. Vicki and Barnabas recognize Angelique/ Cassandra, and each knows that she is a deadly threat to everyone in and around the estate. For her part, Vicki is trying to hide her knowledge from Angelique; Barnabas has taken a different tack, and the other day let Angelique into his house where he proceeded to give her all the information she could possibly need to realize her evil intentions towards him. This is not because Barnabas cannot keep a secret. Vicki has tried to enlist him in the battle against Angelique, but he, now in recovery from the vampire curse Angelique placed on him in the 1790s, does not want Vicki to know the truth about him, and so he will not cooperate with her in any way. It’s only his enemies with whom Barnabas compulsively shares damaging intelligence.
Maggie comes to the great house to have a tea party with Vicki today. Angelique/ Cassandra opens the door, and cannot hide her shock at Maggie’s resemblance to Josette. She so blatantly stares at her that she has to admit that she is unnerved because Maggie looks very much like someone she knew a long time ago.
Vicki comes in, and Angelique/ Cassandra asks her, not in her usual mid-Atlantic accent, but in Lara Parker’s sweetly musical Tennessee voice, if she and Maggie are planning to use the drawing room. Vicki at once offers to use a different space, not only as would be correct for a member of the household staff speaking to one of the family, but in a relaxed and friendly way that betrays nothing of her knowledge of Angelique/ Cassandra’s true identity. While returning viewers know that Angelique/ Cassandra remembers Vicki from the 1790s, the Southern accent is so much more natural than her usual way of speaking that it suggests Vicki has managed to get her to let her guard down to some degree.
While Vicki and Maggie settle into the drawing room, Angelique/ Cassandra goes to a portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house and delivers a speech to it. She tells the portrait that Maggie is the very image of Josette, and will therefore be the first victim of her latest evil plan. She is going to spam people’s dreams with a series of nightmares, and when the last person has had the nightmare Barnabas will be a vampire again. Evidently the dreamers of Collinsport didn’t have anti-virus programs installed in their brains, because Angelique/ Cassandra expects them all to be helpless before this morphean malware.
In the drawing room, Maggie is too preoccupied with Angelique/ Cassandra’s strange reaction to her to hear when Vicki asks her how she takes her tea. When she tells Vicki that Angelique/ Cassandra was shocked by the sight of her, Vicki amazes her by saying that she is sure she did react that way, and giving her the details of the reaction before Maggie reports them. Maggie asks Vicki to explain how she knew and what it means. Vicki explains nothing.
This is something of a reversal. In #1, Vicki met Maggie. Vicki had just arrived in Collinsport, and went to the diner where Maggie was the waitress. While Maggie served Vicki, she told her that Collinwood was haunted and that it was unwise to go there. Vicki did not at that time believe in ghosts and told Maggie so. Now, Vicki is the one serving the tea, and she is the one who knows far more about the supernatural than does Maggie. At least, far more than is in Maggie’s conscious mind- she has amnesia about her experience as Barnabas’ victim.
Vicki and Maggie’s tea party
Maggie is far more upset by Angelique/ Cassandra’s reaction to her than circumstances would appear to warrant. Vicki’s reticence is understandable, given the extreme complexity and improbability of her story, but she has always been so forthcoming with her friends that when Maggie asks why she is being so mysterious it seems quite likely that Vicki will tell her everything. Together, these two facts suggest to regular viewers that Maggie will eventually hear herself compared to Josette, that the comparison will jar loose the memory of what Barnabas did to her, and that she will go to the authorities. As an audience, we hope Barnabas will get away with his crimes, because the show is most fun to watch when he does. Now that Angelique has come to 1968, we have a morally defensible in-universe reason for this hope. Angelique is even more evil than Barnabas is, and without his active participation there is no hope she can be stopped.
Vicki’s reticence brings up another question. In the months before her journey to the past, she saw a great deal of evidence that Barnabas was a vampire. While in the eighteenth century, she saw so much more that upon her return Barnabas was certain she must have figured out his secret, and bit her to keep her quiet. When his vampirism responded to medical treatment, the symptoms of his bite went away. We wonder what Vicki knew at each stage of the story, and what she remembers now.
One possibility is that she has known everything all along. That would put Vicki in an intriguing position if Maggie’s memory does come back. Vicki originally represented the audience’s point of view; if she turns out to have been aware of Barnabas’ crimes from the beginning, she will put us in the uncomfortable position of wondering what it tells us about ourselves that we are consistently on the vampire’s side.
Vicki changes the subject to her boyfriend, a man named Peter. Vicki met Peter in the 1790s, and like Angelique he has followed her into her own time. Also like Angelique, he keeps insisting that he has a different name. He wants to be called Jeff. Unlike Angelique, Peter/ Jeff is amnesiac, is under the control of mad scientist Dr Lang, and brings the show to a screeching halt every time he is on screen. Vicki asks if Peter/ Jeff can rent the spare room in the cottage Maggie shares with her father. Maggie has never met or heard of Peter/ Jeff, and wants more information before she commits to living with him. Vicki doesn’t have anything to tell her, inflaming Maggie’s curiosity to the point where she exclaims “I can’t stand it!”
Peter/ Jeff telephones from Lang’s laboratory, and Vicki gets Maggie to agree to meet him at her house in an hour. Unknown to Vicki, Lang is building a Frankenstein’s monster, and plans to download Barnabas’ personality into the body once it is completed. Peter/ Jeff has dug up graves and fetched body parts for Lang to use, but is tired of that sort of work and is eager to make a fresh start. Unfortunately for him, Barnabas requested that the body look like Peter/ Jeff. So Lang persuades Peter/ Jeff to call Vicki back to say he won’t be available to meet her and Maggie today after all. He then gives Peter/ Jeff a shot to knock him out, straps him to a table, and sets about cutting his head off. Peter/ Jeff comes to and complains about this; Lang, irritated, tells him he can’t very well have expected him to let him live, knowing what he knows.
Maggie has the dream Angelique has sent. It begins with Peter/ Jeff calling on her. Since they went out of their way to tell us Maggie has never seen Peter/ Jeff, this tells first time viewers that this sequence, as is typical of dream sequences on Dark Shadows, comes not from the character’s mind, but is the product of a supernatural agency. In the course of the dream, Maggie hears the sound of Josette’s music box; Barnabas made her listen to this when he was holding her prisoner. This again raises the prospect that Maggie’s memory will return. The rest of the dream is a concerto for fog machine. Technical director Lou Marchand is credited today; presumably he was the soloist. The fog immerses everything so completely that it is anyone’s guess what exactly Miss Scott is doing for most of the sequence.
In his laboratory, mad scientist Eric Lang tries to persuade his patient, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, to let him drain his “life force” into the body of a Frankenstein’s monster he is creating. Barnabas worries that once in the new body, he might be as helpless as a newborn. Lang assures Barnabas that he will not be helpless at all, but “a mature and intelligent man.” Lang also tells Barnabas that he can decide what the creature’s face will look like. Since Lang is building the creature from parts of corpses, this sounds like an offer to kill the person of Barnabas’ choice and sew that person’s face on the front of the creature’s head. One wonders what a phrase like “mature and intelligent man” signifies to either of these two.
In the gazebo on the grounds of the great estate of Collinwood, Barnabas seeks a second opinion from another mad scientist, Julia Hoffman. Having pledged to keep Lang’s secret, he will not describe the particulars of the experiment to Julia. He wants her to tell him whether Lang has a reputation for trustworthiness. Considering the circumstances, a reputation for maniacal sadism might be a better recommendation. Julia is unhappy about the whole situation. She confirms that Lang is a gifted surgeon, but urges Barnabas not to involve himself any more deeply with him.
Barnabas and Julia scurry off and hide when another pair come to the gazebo. They are well-meaning governess Vicki and her sometime boyfriend Peter. Vicki met Peter when she was visiting the late eighteenth century. By the end of her sojourn in the past, Vicki was on the gallows, about to hang for her many crimes. She was returned to 1968 with so little time to spare that there were rope burns on her neck. On the night scheduled for Vicki’s execution, Peter, himself awaiting hanging, vowed that he too would transcend time and would come to her in 1968.
Peter has kept that promise, but now he has amnesia and goes around shouting that his name is Jeff. Lang took Peter/ Jeff out of an institution for the criminally insane and is blackmailing him into digging up fresh corpses. After Barnabas left the lab, we saw Lang and Peter/ Jeff in the graveyard arguing about this situation. Lang tells Peter/ Jeff he was found on the waterfront at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with a rope in his pocket that matched the marks on the necks of two women who had been strangled nearby. The reference to rope reminded my wife, Mrs Acilius, of Vicki’s rope burns; were Peter/ Jeff to tell Vicki that he was found with rope, doubtless it would add to the already abundant evidence she has that Peter and Jeff are one and the same.
Peter/ Jeff’s waterfront murders may remind us of someone else. When he first became a vampire, Barnabas used to go to the docks and bite prostitutes. When he was done sucking their blood, he would strangle them, perhaps to prevent them rising as vampires themselves. Vicki is fascinated with Barnabas and has thrown herself at him several times in the year they have known each other. So if Peter/ Jeff did indeed use the rope he salvaged from his own hanging to commit the murders Lang describes, he’d be just Vicki’s type.
Peter and Vicki have a sweet little conversation, at the end of which they kiss. Barnabas sees this, and goes back to Lang’s lab. He tells him that he has decided to go through with the experiment, and that he wants a face like Peter/ Jeff’s. Lang says he will do better- he will give him Peter/ Jeff’s actual face. The two smile at each other over this explicit promise to murder Peter/ Jeff.
Barnabas’ attitude towards Vicki is ambivalent. His enthusiasm for killing her boyfriend is one of many things you might interpret as a sign of desire for her, but time and again he has made it clear he is not attracted to Vicki physically, and lately he can barely bring himself to listen to her talk for more than a few seconds at a time. Last Wednesday he claimed to be disappointed that she was unwilling to marry him, then rejected every action that makes up a marriage as he kept turning away from her and putting objects in her way when she pressed herself towards him, confided in him, and showed that she could help with his most important project.
As a beautiful young woman who has made herself available to Barnabas, Vicki seems to represent something that might have been, a life he might have lived had things gone differently. Even though he may not want to live that life now, and certainly does not want to live it with her, he cannot quite let go of her as a symbol of possibility. In his imagination, she is as unfinished and undetermined as is the partially fabricated body Lang is showing him. It is when Vicki displays her fully developed personality that he disengages from her. If, at the end of Lang’s project, Barnabas really is a mature and intelligent man, it will make quite a change.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins receives a visitor in his home, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes agrees to lend Barnabas a twelfth century Sicilian talisman to ward off the power of a witch, and makes it clear he will not rest until he finds out why Barnabas needs it.
This scene is a tour de force for Thayer David as Stokes. I’ve already quoted Danny Horn’s remark in his post about it that David “plays to the balcony. Not this balcony, naturally; I mean the balcony in the theater next door.” David’s style works brilliantly in this context.
The rest of the episode is marred by some bad writing. When wicked witch Angelique, pretending her name is Cassandra, comes to call on Barnabas, he immediately calls her by her right name and tells her everything she could want to know in her campaign to restore his vampirism. This is a pattern of Barnabas’; he withholds information from people who would use it to help him, and blabs without inhibition to his deadliest enemies.
Barnabas takes the talisman to Dr Eric Lang, the mad scientist who has freed him of the symptoms of Angelique’s curse. Lang knows that Barnabas has been a vampire and knows that a curse made him one, but scoffs at the idea of witchcraft and refuses to touch the talisman. Jonathan Frid is a good enough actor that we can wonder if Barnabas has a reason for disclosing all his secrets to Angelique, but Addison Powell plays Lang so ineptly that there is nowhere to hide the fact that his skepticism makes no sense.
Angelique shows up in Lang’s office and casts a spell on him that is about to cause his heart to burst. He staggers to the desk, touches the talisman, and quickly recovers. He will not let her take it from him.
Barnabas comes back and asks Lang if he now believes that he must carry the talisman to protect himself from Angelique. He says he does not want to believe, and again walks off leaving the talisman on his desk.
Barnabas presses Lang for information on the final stage of the treatment that is supposed to end the curse once and for all. Lang takes him to the secret laboratory in his home. There, amid a lot of flashy equipment, is a partially assembled Frankenstein’s monster. Lang says that he will drain the “life-force” from Barnabas’ body and use it to animate the creature once it is completed. Barnabas’ old body will be dead, and Angelique will presumably believe that he no longer exists. But he will live in the new body.
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.
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.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 