Tag: edgar allan poe

Episode 795: My little puppeteer

A MacGuffin day today, as everyone is busy trying to get hold of the magical Hand of Count Petofi. Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi stole the Hand, which incidentally is a literal severed hand, from Romani chieftain/ organized crime boss King Johnny Romana. She hoped to use it to cure handsome rake Quentin Collins of the werewolf curse she placed on him, but found that she was unable to master its powers. Several people have stolen it from each other since then; at the beginning of the episode it is in the possession of wicked witch Angelique, who is also unable to figure out how to use it to solve Quentin’s problem.

Today, a man named Aristide is holding Quentin prisoner. He straps Quentin to a table under a descending pendulum with what we are supposed to imagine is a razor sharp blade. He goes to Angelique and tells her that Quentin will die in minutes unless she gives him the hand. Since Angelique can’t see Quentin and Aristide doesn’t even describe the predicament, it isn’t clear why Aristide went to all this trouble, but it does create a memorable image and a nice homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. It would also warm the hearts of viewers mourning the end of the Batman TV series.

Holy Toledo! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, a small and pretty young woman named Julianka has told Quentin’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins that she can cure Quentin if she has the Hand. He gets it from Angelique and takes it back to his house, where Julianka is waiting. She pulls a knife on him and declares that she is an emissary of King Johnny. She will not cure Quentin, and will stab Barnabas if he does not surrender the Hand. Barnabas calmly offers her money and the Hand if she will cure Quentin before she goes, but she refuses. He gives her the Hand. After she goes, we hear his thoughts as he is feeling sorry for her.

In the woods, Julianka hears a squeaking bat. She reacts with horror as the bat turns into Barnabas in front of her. She asks what he is; he tells her that he believes she knows what he is. He does not bite her, but she does become docile. It seems that Barnabas is using the “Look into my eyes!” vampiric power that he only recently acquired. It also seems that, while Julianka was lying when she originally claimed she had come to Collinwood to cure Quentin, she was telling the truth when she said that she was able to do so.

The Hand recently disfigured Quentin’s face, as it had a few days before disfigured the face of Quentin’s onetime friend Evan Hanley. Evan’s good looks returned after a while, and we have not been told why. Today Quentin’s do as well, and when he asks Aristide for an explanation the best he can do is to suggest it may just be luck. They spent quite a bit of time showing Evan’s efforts to cure himself, and even more time showing Quentin feeling sorry for himself, so this is not at all a satisfactory payoff.

In an original cast panel at a Dark Shadows convention in the 80s or 90s, David Selby reminisced about today’s scene between Quentin and Aristede. He said that when the cameras started rolling, he knew what actions he and Michael Stroka were supposed to perform, that he was supposed to end up tied to the table, and that it was supposed to take a certain number of minutes and seconds. He also knew that there was some dialogue they were to speak in the midst of all that, but he couldn’t remember any of it. The teleprompter was out of view. He looked at Stroka, hoping to see something in his face to jog his memory, and what he actually saw was the same blankness he was himself experiencing. So the two of them improvised their way through it. When they were done, they looked at the clock and saw that they had filled exactly the allotted time. But not a word of what they said was in the script. The resulting scene includes some awkward lines, but it has a great energy to it, just the sort of thing that gets you hooked on live theater.

Episode 709: You are the ghost

Vampire Barnabas Collins has traveled back in time to the year 1897 where he hopes to prevent his distant cousin, libertine Quentin, from becoming a ghost who will ruin things for everyone in 1969. Barnabas knows that if events play out as they did originally, Quentin will die soon. He tells him today that it is his understanding that people become ghosts when they leave unfinished business behind them. He does not know what business Quentin originally left unfinished, or how he can keep him from dying without finishing it on this iteration of the timeline. So you might think that his first priority would be to get as close as possible to Quentin and learn as much as he can about what he wants.

Instead of doing this, Barnabas has gone out of his way to antagonize Quentin by accusing him of stealing his grandmother Edith’s will. Quentin and his siblings are all frenziedly searching for the will, but it is of no concern to Barnabas. Edith cannot possibly have left him any money, and he knows that the original timeline worked out so that the Collins family assets wound up in the hands of people who were oblivious to his sinister nature and happy to let him make his home on their estate. Showing interest in the will can do nothing but raise suspicions as to who this stranger really is and why he showed up when he did.

Barnabas confronts Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin did in fact steal the will. Edith’s ghost may be at work in the house- her glove mysteriously shows up in the corridor near Quentin’s room, the furniture in the room is turned upside down, and before the end of the episode Quentin alone can hear the pounding of an enormously amplified heartbeat emanating from the walls of his room. But Quentin accuses Barnabas of planting the glove and disordering his room, and in #538 we saw that Barnabas is capable of making people with guilty consciences have hallucinations of just this kind. Barnabas is also frequently seen reading, and it is certainly possible he might have read Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” and decided to make it come to life. He may not even have needed to read the story- we saw in #442 that in 1796, early in his career as a vampire, he bricked up an enemy of his in the style Poe would describe in his 1846 story “The Cask of Amontillado.” Evidently his imagination and Poe’s ran along similar lines.

Barnabas meets governess Rachel Drummond. He is immediately attracted to Rachel, unsurprising since she is played by the lovely Kathryn Leigh Scott. He tells Rachel that she strongly resembles the portrait of Josette Collins, and he relates some facts about Josette’s life and death that did not make it into the family history. Indeed, Miss Scott played Josette in the part of Dark Shadows set in the 1790s.

Yesterday, Barnabas met unethical lawyer Evan Hanley, played by Humbert Allen Astredo. His reaction to Evan was not inappropriate, but the same reaction would also have been fitting had Barnabas thought Evan was Astredo’s previous character, warlock Nicholas Blair. This may have reminded longtime viewers of the 1790s segment, when time-traveling governess Vicki alienated the audience by time and again telling the characters that they were being played by actors who had other parts in the first 73 weeks of the show. Do the characters not look alike to Barnabas, or does he simply have the presence of mind not to waste everyone’s time with tedious drivel about who used to be who? We now know that in Rachel’s case, at least, it is the latter.

Quentin has a scene with his sister Judith in which he tells her that he did not like to play with her when they were children, because she was a “scaredy-cat.” Joan Bennett was 31 years old when David Selby was born, a fact of which the original audience would have been well aware since she was already a major star of motion pictures at the time. Indeed, her father Richard Bennett had been so big on Broadway that her birth was announced on the front pages of the New York papers, so that she never bothered to be coy about her age. But she and Mr Selby are such strong actors that it doesn’t raise an eyebrow when we hear that Judith and Quentin were children together.

Not everyone we see today merits such high praise, alas. Executive producer Dan Curtis was friendly with a man called Roger Davis, and he often let Mr Davis come on the set of Dark Shadows and assault the actors while they were trying to work. Unfortunately this happens today. Mr Davis is usually presented as if he were himself an actor playing a part. His idea of acting is simple enough. For example, he was once supposed to play a character named Jeff Clark, and his approach involved shouting “My name is Jeff Clark!” every episode or two. More recently, he was credited with a role called Ned Stuart, and he went around saying “My name is Ned Stuart!” That’s one way of attempting characterization, I suppose.

Today he is supposed to be someone named Dirk Wilkins. Regular viewers keep waiting for him to yell “My name is Dirk Wilkins!,” but he neglects to do so. He has a mustache, perhaps he thought that was sufficient. He finds Terry Crawford playing maidservant Beth Chavez, grabs her and yells in her face. Mr Selby interrupts this encounter. In character as Quentin, he makes some flip remarks and walks away, and Mr Davis resumes abusing Ms Crawford. Later he finds Ms Crawford on another set and grabs her again. Finally he walks into the set representing Quentin’s room while David Selby is trying to show us Quentin’s panicked response to the sound of the heartbeat. Mr Davis makes some nasty remarks, and when Mr Selby tries to involve him in the scene by tussling with him as Quentin might under those circumstances, it looks like Mr Davis gives him a real punch in the midsection. Mr Selby goes on acting, but the assault takes the audience out of the story. The ABC network really should have posted security guards outside the studio to keep this sort of thing from happening.

Episode 577: I imagined we would discuss Freud

Heiress Carolyn came running when her mother, matriarch Liz, woke her with her screams. Liz was having a nightmare about being buried alive. She tries Carolyn’s patience and ours with her obsession that this will in fact happen to her.

Liz tries to call her lawyer, Richard Garner. Whoever answers the phone tells Liz that Garner is not available, hardly surprising since it is the middle of the night. She responds that if he doesn’t call back within the hour, he need never call again. Since we last saw Garner in #246, and his name hasn’t been mentioned since #271, it seems like he may as well get some sleep.

Liz then calls Tony, a young lawyer in town who used to date Carolyn. Tony comes over and Liz hires him to help with some changes to her will. She dictates excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial” by way of a codicil protecting her from being buried alive, and he tells her he thinks she’s being weird.

The most prominent reference to Poe on Dark Shadows up to this point was in #442, when vampire Barnabas reenacted the plot of “The Cask of Amontillado” by bricking the fanatical Rev’d Mr Trask up in an alcove in his basement. Like Tony, Trask was played by Jerry Lacy, so it is possible that the writers hope the audience will recognize the connection.

Poe wrote punchy little short stories each of which leaves the reader with a single horrifying image. “The Cask of Amontillado” worked well as the basis for an episode, and the bricking up of Trask is one of the most enduring images in all of Dark Shadows. “The Premature Burial” could have made for the same kind of success, had Liz’ obsession begun and ended within one episode. But it has already gone on longer than that, and there is no end in sight. Each time we come back to it, the situation becomes more familiar and less urgent.

Meanwhile, Carolyn takes a glass of milk and a sandwich to Adam, a Frankenstein’s monster she is hiding in the long-deserted west wing of the house. Adam has little to do but read, and he has become quite intellectual. He is playing both sides of a game of chess when Carolyn arrives, pretending that she is his opponent. When she comes, he attempts a joke, pretending she has left him alone so long he does not remember her name. She is distressed about Liz’ obsessive fear of being buried alive, and so does not recognize that he is joking.

Carolyn looks at the chessboard and asks Adam who he is playing. He says that he is pretending to play her. He is smiling and relaxed when he admits this, and he starts joking again as he tells her about their imaginary games. Adam’s pretending that he did not remember Carolyn’s name was a weak joke, but he is actually pretty funny when he tells her that when he pretends they are playing, she doesn’t do as well as he does. She still does not realize that he is kidding, and reacts with horror. She says she doesn’t play chess; in #357, her uncle Roger mentioned that she does, but that she usually loses to him. Perhaps in the 44 weeks since then, she has given up the game altogether.

Adam wants Carolyn to play with him for real. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Adam shows Carolyn the book he has been reading, a volume of Sigmund Freud’s works, and is disappointed she has not already read it. When she tells him she is worried because of Liz’ condition, he invites her to sit down and says “Tell me about your mother,” suggesting that he is ready to set up shop as a psychoanalyst. Adam is being serious now, but this part of the exchange is hilarious.

Carolyn goes out to the terrace and looks at the night sky, wondering if Freud could help her understand what is happening with her mother. I live in the year 2024, and so I have difficulty imagining how people could ever have taken Freud seriously. But he was very very big in the 1960s, and in its first year Dark Shadows gave us a lot of heavy-handed Freudian symbolism and a number of storylines with obvious psychoanalytic themes. Longtime viewers will find it a reassuring sign of continuity that Freud is still around as the thinker “every twentieth century man should read.”

Tony joins Carolyn on the terrace. He greets her and sees that she has a book about Freud. “I don’t have to ask why you’re reading him,” he remarks. Carolyn asks if he is referring to her mother, and Tony’s response is so indiscreet he may as well spinning his finger around his temple and saying “Cuckoo, cuckoo!” It is clear enough that the concept of “confidential communication” is alien to the lawyers in Soap Opera Land, and now we see that “basic respect” is also very much on the optional list. Carolyn tells Tony to do whatever Liz asks, and starts crying.

I was startled by Carolyn’s crying turn, because it is the first time in the two hundred or so episodes she has appeared in thus far Nancy Barrett has given a subpar performance. The actors all had to work under virtually impossible conditions, so I rarely mention it when one of those who usually does well has a bad day at the office, but the 20 seconds or so she spends very obviously not crying in this scene mark the end of an extraordinary streak.

Tony embraces Carolyn and kisses her. Adam’s room in the west wing overlooks the terrace, and he spies on them while they kiss. After Carolyn excuses herself and goes back into the house, Adam comes up behind Tony, grabs him, forbids him to touch Carolyn, and throws him to the ground.

Episode 512: A jury of the dead!

For nineteen weeks from November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. Among the more interesting characters introduced in that period were fanatical witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask; roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes; fast-talking con artist Suki Forbes; and streetwalkers Ruby Tate and Maude Browning. All five of these characters were murdered by vampire Barnabas Collins, and all five of them are among those who return today for an impromptu trial of Barnabas.

Barnabas killed Trask by luring him to his basement and bricking him up in an alcove, as Montresor did to Fortunato in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1846 story “The Cask of Amontillado.” Some other characters invited themselves to the basement yesterday and held a séance there. As a result of the séance, the bricks fell away and Trask came back to life. Now, Trask has confined Barnabas to the same alcove. He declares that he will give him a trial before he bricks him up.

In the eighteenth century, Trask was the prosecutor in the trial of time traveling governess Vicki Winters. Victoria was convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death. Vicki’s trip from the 1960s to the 1790s inverted Barnabas’ displacement in time; as Vicki’s witchcraft trial was so chaotic it did not seem to follow rules of any kind, neither does the murder trial Trask improvises for Barnabas fit any conceivable model of procedure. Vicki’s trial stretched over two weeks, from #427 to #437; Barnabas’ begins and ends today, during the second half of the episode.

Trask conjures up Nathan, Suki, Ruby, Maude, and Barnabas’ first homicide victim, his uncle Jeremiah, to serve as a jury; he conjures up a man named Ezra Simpson, of whom we have never previously heard, to act as judge. Trask is the prosecutor, and Nathan is his sole witness. This court of “the damned!,” as Trask calls them, recalls the rogues who confront Jabez Stone as jurors and judge in Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1936 story “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Unlike Jabez Stone, however, Barnabas does not have a right to counsel.

Court is in session. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Trask asks Nathan how he died. After Nathan says that Barnabas strangled him, Trask asks him how Suki died. Barnabas objects that Nathan shouldn’t be allowed to speak for others; regular viewers sympathize with this, since Suki, played today as she was originally by Jane Draper, was sensational every second she was on screen, and when we saw Miss Draper again we were happy to think that she would have another chance to show what she could do. Barnabas also shouts at one point that he is innocent; this is less likely to attract the audience’s sympathy. Mrs Acilius and I certainly got a good laugh from it.

Barnabas asks to be allowed to present a defense. Trask invites him to question Nathan. He is about to do so when Nathan smiles at him, turns around, and vanishes. Trask explains that Nathan has already said all that needs to be said. Later, Trask looks at the recompleted wall and laughs with vicious glee, delighted at what is behind it.

Barnabas has neither the powers nor the limitations of a vampire now. The effects of the curse went into remission when mad scientists Eric Lang and Julia Hoffman created a man from parts scavenged from the cemetery and connected Barnabas to him as they electrified him and brought him to life. Barnabas named this man Adam.

Now Adam has escaped from the horribly abusive home Barnabas and Julia provided for him. He has found a friend in Sam Evans, an artist who was blinded when Barnabas enlisted him in one of his hare-brained schemes. Sam is teaching Adam to speak, and is so impressed with his ability to learn that he wonders aloud if he will be able to teach him to paint professionally.

Adam develops a sudden pain in his wrists. He moans “Barnabas! Hurt!” A shot of Barnabas hanging by his wrists in the basement alcove is laid over a closeup of Adam. Evidently the bond between them is such that Adam can sense Barnabas’ pain, even though they are miles apart. Apparently it is mid-1840s day on Dark Shadows; the scene in Barnabas’ house recalls “The Cask of Amontillado,” and the scene at Sam’s house is based on Alexandre Dumas’ 1846 novella The Corsican Brothers. “The Devil and Daniel Webster” was set in that decade or a bit earlier, and while Frankenstein was written in 1818 many adaptations of it, including the one Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis would make in 1973, are set in the 1840s.

Adam becomes agitated. He cannot explain what is happening to him, no matter how patiently Sam asks. Sam’s son-in-law-to-be Joe Haskell comes in; Adam brushes against Joe as he runs out the door. Though Joe is a tall and sturdy man, Adam is so tremendously strong that this casual contact sends him flying.

It dawns on Joe that Adam is the man who abducted heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and then fell from the cliff on Widows’ Hill. Sam calmly replies that he had already figured that out. Joe is shocked that Sam hasn’t called the police; Sam replies that Adam is as disabled as he is, and that he means no one any harm. Joe is not at all convinced of the second of these points, and worries that “Barnabas! Hurt!” might not have reflected a fear that Barnabas is hurt, as Sam thinks it does, but might rather express Adam’s resolution to hurt Barnabas. Joel Crothers and David Ford bring out the full comic value of this scene; Mrs Acilius laughed at the blandness with which Ford’s Sam confirms that he knows who Adam is.

Joe goes to Barnabas’ house to warn him, but finds it locked and apparently empty. Later, Julia goes there too. She has a key, and lets herself in. She doesn’t see any evidence that Barnabas is or has been home; she goes downstairs, and is mystified to see that the alcove wall, which was broken when she was there for the séance, is now bricked up again.

Several times, Dark Shadows has contrasted Barnabas’ home, the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, with the Evans cottage, a working class residence in the village of Collinsport. Today they draw this contrast in sharp relief. The basement of the Old House is always dark, but even the upstairs is lit by candles today; the scenes in the Evans cottage, taking place at the same time, are sunlit. The basement is the most haunted part of the most haunted house on the haunted estate, and eight characters in costume dress materialize from thin air there; the Evans cottage is a part of the modern world where Sam and Joe can use reason to arrive at agreement about facts, even if they make different judgments about the significance of those facts. When Julia and Joe go to the Old House, each wanders about alone, finding no one to talk to; at the Evans cottage, even Adam is able to have a conversation, and while there he can receive a message from Barnabas by some mysterious means. Trask seizes control of the basement of the Old House to make a parody of the criminal justice system and enact his vengeance on Barnabas; in the Evans cottage, Sam refuses to call the sheriff because he wants to shield Adam from punishment for the crimes he inadvertently committed.

Episode 442: For the love of God, Montresor!

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

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

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

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

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

Closing Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

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