Dark Shadows showed its first exorcism in #400. At that point the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s. The fanatical Rev’d Mr Trask was convinced that time-traveling governess Victoria Winters was a witch and that she was hiding in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. He stood outside that house with a forked stick. He set the points of the stick on fire and shouted commands for the forces of darkness to come out.
Vicki was indeed hiding in the house, but she was not alone there. The actual witch, the wicked Angelique, set a fire of her own. She built a house of cards and burned it to cast a spell that caused Vicki to see flames in her room and respond by running out into Trask’s clutches. What surrounded Vicki were special effects superimposed on the screen, but what was in Angelique’s room was real fire, and it flared alarmingly close to actress Lara Parker’s lovely face. You’d think they’d have learned from #191, when an on-camera fire went out of control and nearly killed the entire cast, or perhaps from #290, when an off-camera electrical mishap led to fire extinguisher noise almost drowning out some dialogue. But apparently the prevailing philosophy was no injuries, no problem, so they went right on playing with fire.
Today we have another unsuccessful exorcism, and its failure leads them to make another attempt to burn down the set. Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes is informed that the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins is haunting the great house of Collinwood and taking possession of strange and troubled boy David Collins. Stokes follows Trask’s rubric of standing outside the house, pointing a forked stick at it, and shouting inhospitable remarks at the spirits, but he doesn’t set fire to the points of the stick as Trask had done. There is a lot of excitement while he is performing the ritual, and once he finishes all of it dies down. Unsure of the outcome, he arranges to stay the night; while he is getting ready for bed, the curtains in his room catch fire. These are not special effects images; the curtains are really on fire, they are burning rapidly, and they are putting out a lot of smoke. The little building at 442 West 54th Street where Dark Shadows was made was packed with sets made of plywood and crammed with props, many of them highly flammable. Several sets were draped with huge fake cobwebs; I’m not sure what those were made of, but I doubt it was anything that would make a fire marshal very happy. It’s just amazing anyone who worked on the show lived to see 1971.
There is a lot of very good stuff in this one. All of the acting is top-notch. David Henesy and Thayer David had scenes together as several characters, first as David Collins and crazed handyman Matthew Morgan in 1966, then as young Daniel Collins and much put upon indentured servant Ben Stokes when the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s, and now in 1969 as Ben’s descendant Professor Stokes and David. Those scenes all crackled, and today when Stokes catches David hiding behind the secret panel in the drawing room, demands he tells him the truth about what is happening to him, tricks him into admitting that he is afraid of Quentin, and warns him of the dangers ahead, the two make the exchange work magnificently.
There is also a scene in the drawing room between David Collins, his cousin Carolyn Collins Stoddard, and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman while Stokes is performing the exorcism. He has to shout and writhe around a lot during this scene, very difficult things for child actors to do convincingly. But Mr Henesy had been acting professionally for four years before he joined the cast of the show in 1966, at the age of nine, and had studied acting under several distinguished teachers, among them Uta Hagen.
That background pays off; violent as the symptoms of the incipient possession are, Mr Henesy does not overplay them. It helps that he has support from Grayson Hall and Nancy Barrett; Hall plays Julia as firmly in control of herself, but obviously uneasy with the situation, while Miss Barrett shows Carolyn’s anxieties mounting until she shouts that David might be in real trouble. Since he is in convulsions and the crepuscular sound of the creaky old waltz that plays when Quentin is exercising power is emanating from the walls of the house, it would seem obvious that David is in real trouble. The line shows that Carolyn is starting to panic. When we see that neither the determinedly calm Julia nor the increasingly anxious Carolyn is having any particular influence on David’s emotions, we know that they are coming from someplace far removed from his visible surroundings.
There are two ongoing narrative threads in this part of Dark Shadows. One is the story of mysterious drifter Chris Jennings. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman knows Chris to be a werewolf and she is trying to help him. The other is the story of Quentin Collins, a ghost who is gradually gaining power and planning to drive everyone away from the great estate of Collinwood so that he can have the place to himself. Chris’ story had been the fast-paced A plot that kept expanding to involve more and more characters, while Quentin’s was the slow-paced B plot that consistently involved only Chris’ nine year old sister Amy, strange and troubled boy David Collins, and their governess Maggie Evans, with intermittent small parts for other established characters and the occasional chance for a day player to act a death scene. That changed yesterday, when Quentin decided that he had grown so strong he no longer needed to conceal himself from matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard or the other adults in the great house. Quentin’s story is now the main topic, and Chris is the secondary feature.
We open today with Liz telling Julia what happened the night before. Julia tells Liz that she and old world gentleman Barnabas Collins had suspected that an evil ghost was at work in the house, and that they have seen another spirit that seems to be opposed to it. Liz says she has called occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes arrives and questions everyone.
Liz is alone at the desk in the drawing room when a secret panel leading to a passage to the long-deserted west wing opens. A cutout meant to suggest a disembodied hand appears on the screen. It picks up a letter opener from the desk and is about to stab her when Stokes enters.
Stokes shouts. The hand drops the letter opener and vanishes. He tells Liz what he saw. He notices the panel is open, and asks Liz about it. She says that it leads to the west wing, but that, as far as she knows, no one has used it in years. That answers a question that has been on the audience’s minds since October 1966. In that month, we saw Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, use the panel to play a dirty trick on well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. The panel was not seen or mentioned again until David and Amy started using it to do Quentin’s bidding several weeks ago. This line is our first confirmation that Liz knows that the panel and the passage behind it exist. Stokes asks Liz’ permission to perform an exorcism.
Meanwhile, Julia gets a telephone call from Chris. Liz’ daughter, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, has taken a fancy to Chris and installed him in a cottage on the estate. Chris tells her that he is facing an emergency. Someone has come to the village of Collinsport who might know his secret.
In the cottage, Chris tells Julia that an unpleasant man named Ned Stuart has brought his sister Sabrina to the village and that he is demanding Chris meet with Sabrina. Chris had assumed Sabrina was dead, because she was in the room with him one night two years before when he underwent the transformation into his lupine form. Ned had told Julia and Barnabas that he was looking for Chris because he wanted to know what happened to his sister; he had always referred to Sabrina in the past tense, leading them to assume she was dead. Now Chris is in a panic, convinced that Sabrina will tell the police about him and that he will be punished for the many, many homicides he has committed as the werewolf.
Julia points out that if Sabrina were going to do that, she could have done so at any time. He would already have been arrested. Sabrina must not have told Ned or anyone else what she saw, and Ned must be telling the truth when he says he does not know what happened the last time Chris and Sabrina were together. She persuades Chris to go to visit the Stuarts in their suite at the Collinsport Inn.
Julia accompanies Chris on the visit. Ned is irritated that Chris did not come alone. His remarks are uncomfortable to hear, chiefly because of actor Roger Davis’ habit of clenching his anal sphincters when he raises his voice, making him sound like he is suffering from agonizing constipation.
After Ned makes this fingernails-on-a-blackboard noise for a couple of minutes, he lets Chris and Julia into Sabrina’s room. She is in a catatonic state. Her hair is white, and her face is tinged with light blue makeup. The makeup makes her look haggard in color, but most TV sets in the USA in the 1960s received only in black and white. In black and white, the makeup is not very effective.
Ned says that Sabrina was like that when he found her, the morning after she paid her last visit to Chris’ apartment. Several takes of a framed copy of actress Lisa Blake Richards’ professional headshot invite us to imagine the before-and-after. Ned calls Sabrina’s attention to Chris; she rises from her chair, starts towards him, and collapses.
Roger Collins is on the telephone in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. He is assuring the caller that it will be fine if Maggie, whom returning viewers know to be The Nicest Girl in Town, comes to stay. He says that he and Cassandra will be glad to have her for as long as she wants to be with them, and that he is sure Liz will approve. First time viewers thus learn that Roger has a wife named Cassandra, and that they live as guests in a house belonging to someone called Liz. A moment later, Liz enters, and is too distracted to hear anything Roger says to her.
Roger ends the phone call, and follows Liz into the drawing room. She stares out the window and makes a gloomy remark about death. He says he understands she must be very upset about Sam Evans. Returning viewers know that Sam was Maggie’s father, and that he died in yesterday’s episode. Roger goes on about how it is natural to be grieved at the loss of a friend like Sam, but soon learns that Liz’ mood has nothing to do with Sam’s demise- it’s news to her that he is dead.
Roger’s lines will startle longtime viewers. For the first 40 weeks of the show, Roger and Sam were united by a deep and abiding mutual hatred, and since then they have had no contact at all. Roger’s words about Sam as a family friend are so far from what we have previously seen that they should be considered a retcon.
Liz and Roger spend several minutes in the drawing room. She keeps going on about the all-pervasive reality of death, and he keeps urging her to see a doctor. There isn’t much to their lines, but Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds were such extraordinary screen performers that it’s always fun to watch them together. This scene might be a particular pleasure to longtime viewers, who have rarely seen Roger as the responsible adult in any encounter.
We dissolve to a bedroom where a young woman in a black wig is sifting through some powders, looking directly into the camera, and telling Liz that her obsession with death will become even worse than it already is and will have dire consequences. Liz will believe that she is someone else, a woman who lived and died in another century, and may die by the same poison that killed that person.
There is a knock at the door. It is Roger. The woman hides her powders and lets him in. He addresses her as Cassandra and asks why the door was locked. Thus first-time viewers learn that she is his wife, that this is their room, that she is a witch, and that Liz’ problem is the result of a spell she has cast.
Cassandra tells Roger that she locked the door because David kept pestering her about Sam’s death and she wanted a moment to herself. With that, first-time viewers find out that David is Roger’s son, that Cassandra is his stepmother, and that she expects Roger to consider locking him out of the room an appropriate response to his grief about Sam.
Roger does not so consider it, and is bewildered by what Cassandra tells him. He tells Cassandra that Liz is in a bad way, and he is worried about her. Cassandra says she did not know that Roger was so concerned about his family. Baffled by this, Roger says that of course he is concerned, Liz is his sister. This tells first time viewers both what Roger’s relationship to Liz is, and that Cassandra has so little sense of family that she cannot imagine how other people feel.
Regular viewers will learn more. In the first year of the show, Roger’s keynote was his lack of loyalty to the family. That has now been set aside once and for all, and his normal attachment to his son and his sister provide a contrast with Cassandra’s apparently sociopathic coldness. Further, we saw a great deal of Cassandra from November 1967 through March 1968, when the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s and she was called Angelique. We saw then that Angelique had no conception of family or friendship, and that her idea of love begins and ends with her control over a person.
Cassandra promises to join Roger downstairs for a game of bridge in half an hour. He leaves, and she gets back to work spellcasting. As she does so, a figure in a black cassock materializes behind her. She turns, and the figure vanishes. In a quizzical tone, she says Roger’s name, revealing that she did not see the figure or realize that it is a supernatural presence. Together with her locking the door, scrambling to hide her magical paraphernalia when Roger knocked, lying to cover what she was doing, and failing to understand what a person with a reasonable amount of human empathy would consider acceptable behavior, her puzzlement shows that whatever her powers may be, they have definite limits.
Back in the foyer, another young woman with black hair lets a man into the house. She calls him Joe, and he calls her Vicki. Joe and Vicki talk about Sam’s death and about Maggie. Joe says that he wants to marry Maggie as soon as possible and to move away. Vicki is all for their marriage, but does not want them to go. Joe talks about how close he and Sam were. Longtime viewers will remember that when Sam and Roger were enemies, Sam was the town drunk. Even then, Joe was always happy to help him in whatever way he could, and did not see his condition as any obstacle to marrying Maggie.
Liz enters and angrily addresses Joe as “Lieutenant Forbes.” Joe has never heard of Lieutenant Forbes, and cannot understand why Liz, who knows him well, would not recognize him. Vicki clearly does know who Liz is talking about, and manages to calm her down. After Liz apologizes and hastens away, Vicki answers Joe’s questions only by saying that Forbes is someone from “the past.” Since we heard Cassandra talk about Liz taking on the personality of someone who lived in “another century,” this suggests that Vicki, too, has an unnatural familiarity with that same century.
Joe wants to go upstairs to the room where Maggie is sleeping so that he will be the first person she sees when she wakes up. Vicki is about to lead him to Maggie when Cassandra insists she join her in the drawing room to talk about David. Vicki tells Joe which door to open, and complies with Cassandra’s directions. This shows that Vicki is a member of the household staff whose responsibilities have to do with David. Regular viewers know that she is his governess, and that they are very close.
Cassandra tells Vicki that David has been asking about Sam’s last words. Vicki says that he addressed them to Maggie, not to her, and implies that she did not hear them. When Cassandra continues probing, Vicki protests. She asks if Cassandra can’t see that she is upset. Considering how clueless Cassandra was about human feelings in her conversation with Roger, it is entirely possible that she cannot. Vicki tells her that Liz is deeply depressed; Cassandra feigns ignorance. Vicki says in a cold voice, “You wouldn’t know anything about that,” then leaves.
Longtime viewers know that it was Vicki who came unstuck in time in #365 and took us with her to the 1790s. During her nineteen weeks in the past, Vicki came to know not only Forbes, but Angelique. She knows perfectly well that Angelique and Cassandra are the same person, that she is a witch, and that she is a deadly menace to everyone. She likely suspects that Liz’ depression is the consequence of one of Cassandra’s spells, and the tone of her parting remark would suggest that she does. Further, those who saw the show yesterday know that Vicki is lying about Sam’s last words. They were addressed to her, and she heard them clearly. She is choosing not to repeat them to Cassandra lest Cassandra use them for her nefarious purposes.
Cassandra is alone in the drawing room for only a few seconds. She is joined there by the same figure who had appeared in her room. This time she sees him. He confronts her.
Regular viewers know that the figure is the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical witchfinder who mistook Vicki for the witch in the 1790s and sent her to the gallows. He tells Cassandra that he now has the opportunity to correct that error. He shows her a cross, from which she recoils. We cut to a scene in the woods. Trask has tied Cassandra to a tree and performs an exorcism on her. This is Trask’s go-to technique; he tied Vicki to a tree in #385 and performed an exorcism on her in #386. Since Cassandra actually is in league with the devil (or as Trask would say, THE DE-VILLL!!!,) he has more success this time. Cassandra vanishes and leaves the ropes hanging on the tree.
A first-time viewer might take this climax as an indication that Dark Shadows is a Christian show and Trask is its hero. Not only is Trask going after the right target, he is clearly making some headway. He says all the right things about casting the evil out of Cassandra and saving whatever good is left in her. His delivery of his lines is so fervent that Mrs Acilius, a vigorous Christian, cheered him on. In fact, Trask’s wild incompetence throughout the 1790s segment led to one disaster after another, and was of a piece with the show’s light regard for religion. Not until #450 did a cross provoke a reaction from a monster; that was the first suggestion the show gave that there might be anything to Christianity, and the scenes between Cassandra and Trask today are the second.
Dark Shadows borrows story points freely from all sorts of books, plays, movies, and folklore. So far, it has steered clear of Christianity as a source. For obvious reasons- most of the audience is at least nominally Christian, and Christianity is, in one way or another, a live option for the rest. So it’s a topic that can take over very quickly once it is introduced. I suppose a specifically Christian version of Dark Shadows could have worked, but I can’t imagine that the staff they had would have been particularly interested in making a show like that. So when it looks like they are going to let Trask have even a temporary win, we see the show running one of its boldest risks yet.
Dark Shadows Commentary 