Vampire Barnabas Collins joined the cast of Dark Shadows in April 1967. Barnabas introduced himself to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her family as their distant cousin from England. Soon, Liz had given him run of the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, and she was treating that house and its contents as though they were Barnabas’ property.
In May and June of 1967, Barnabas took Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, as his new victim. He did not merely want to drink Maggie’s blood. He wanted to erase her personality and overwrite it with that of his lost love Josette. At the climax of this plan, he would make her into a vampire like himself, and the two of them would go forth to prey upon the living.
Barnabas’ plan failed. Maggie recovered her will and escaped from Barnabas. She would have exposed him, had her psychiatrist Julia Hoffman not betrayed her and magically mind-wiped her memory of what Barnabas was and what he had done. Julia attached herself to Barnabas as his personal physician, making it possible for him to go long periods without biting anyone. Barnabas continued to make his home at the Old House and to pass as a live Englishman. In time, the relationship between Julia and Barnabas became the core of Dark Shadows, and its most important stories were their adventures.
With Barnabas’ introduction, the show became a hit. By the time 1968 turned into 1969, it was one of the major pop culture fads of the period. That gave executive producer Dan Curtis an opening to pitch a Dark Shadows feature film to Hollywood studios. The one that bought the idea was MGM, headed at that time by Kirk Kerkorian, a tycoon who was trying to get out of the movie business and put MGM’s brand and other resources in service of his chief goal in life, making himself the king of Las Vegas. Kerkorian still had contracts with distributors that obligated him to provide a certain number of features a year. Dark Shadows already had a fan base, so that a film version of it wouldn’t require as much spending on advertising and promotion as would a new product, and the show was done so cheaply that Curtis couldn’t very well argue that he needed a big budget for production. So Kerkorian saw a way to meet his legal obligations at minimal financial risk.
The movie that resulted from this business decision is slow-paced, confusing, and amateurishly shot. I love it.
Most of the events and characters are drawn from the first seven months Barnabas was on the show. There are lots of Easter eggs for fans of the show. Almost all of the music is recycled from the show, including a brief bit of one of the rock and roll numbers that often played on the jukebox at The Blue Whale tavern in the first year but that have rarely been heard since. Both Maggie, in the opening scenes, and the sheriff later on point flashlights directly into the camera. The sheriff and his deputies display the same clownish ineptitude that distinguished them on the show. My favorite example comes after a deputy has driven his car directly into a tree. The sheriff says that he wouldn’t have done that unless he saw something, prompting us to think that a Collinsport law enforcement officer probably would be more comfortable driving with his eyes closed.
The events do not take place in the same sequence as they did on the show, and some of the characters are jumbled as well. So in 1967, the governess in the great house was the well-meaning Victoria Winters and her boyfriend was dashing action hero-turned hopeless schlub Burke Devlin. Vicki and Burke were already past their peak of interest in April 1967, and have been gone and forgotten for years at this point. Maggie is the governess on the show now, and she is the governess in this version of Collinwood as well.
Maggie’s last steady boyfriend was hardworking fisherman Joe Haskell, who left the show when he was the victim of a vampire in 1968. So in this Collinwood, Maggie is engaged to Jeff Clark, who corresponds to the character who married Vicki after Burke was lost in a plane crash. Like his namesake on the show, this Jeff is played by the repellent Roger Davis. There is a costume party in the movie, as there was in the show. Jeff wears an eighteenth century naval uniform that was originally worn on television by Nathan Forbes, a character who, like Joe, was played by Joel Crothers. It is as if Curtis is acknowledging that we would rather see Maggie and Joe, but rubbing our faces in the fact that we’re getting more Roger Davis instead.
Julia is not Maggie’s psychiatrist in this universe. When Barnabas is freed from his coffin, she is already at Collinwood, researching the Collins family history. She claimed to be doing that as a cover story in 1967, but here it is apparently the truth, for some reason. She confirms that Barnabas is a vampire when she sees that he does not cast a reflection in the mirror in her compact, the same gimmick she used on the show. She makes her offer to cure Barnabas of vampirism 56 minutes into this 96 minute movie, after he has killed several people and thrown the whole area into an uproar. She falls in love with him shortly after, to his embarrassment. When the treatments misfire by causing him to age rapidly, as they did in the show, he deviates from the original by killing her.
That sets off the final crisis. Barnabas takes Maggie to his hiding place and tries to Josettify her. Several characters set out to hunt him. Jeff finds that Barnabas has killed some of them and turned them into vampires. He kills two of these, then finds Barnabas and destroys him just as he is about to turn Maggie into a vampire.
We had barely seen Jeff and Maggie together, and in their few shared scenes they had no chemistry at all. Nor has he been involved in any of the other action sequences. Indeed, he begins the climactic sequence by being woken and told that he has overslept, which serves to underline his peripheral position in the plot up to that point. So it is entirely unsatisfying that he comes out of the blue and is the rescuer in the grand finale.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that we have seen Maggie interact quite a bit with Roger Collins, brother to Liz and father of strange and troubled boy David. Roger also took an active part in the first destruction of a vampire, when his niece Carolyn was staked. So it would make sense for him to be the rescuer, and for Mr Davis’ character to be left out of the movie altogether. A romance between Roger and Maggie would hark back to the early days of the show, when there were a few hints that Vicki, a Jane Eyre analogue, might start dating Roger, whose position as father of her charge and whose very name recall Mr Rochester.
Fans often wonder what Barnabas’ long-term plan was in the Spring and Summer of 1967. Maggie was known to everyone and her disappearance was big news, so he could hardly have presented her to the family once she was Josettified. And his own operations as a vampire were an ongoing disaster that had everyone in the Collinsport area on edge. Add a second vampire to the household, and the situation would become entirely unsustainable.
The show indicated what would probably have happened had Barnabas succeeded, first in February 1969, and then in more depth in July 1970. In #694, the ghost of Quentin Collins takes control of the great house, forcing all of its residents to flee for their lives. In episodes #1061-#1070, Julia and Barnabas come unstuck in time and find themselves in the far-off future year 1995, where another ghost has taken control of Collinwood. The great house is in ruins, the grounds overgrown, and the residents of Collinsport are unwilling even to mention the estate, let alone go there. Surely those were the only surroundings in which Barnabas and a vampiric, Josettified Maggie could have gone on existing.
That’s very much the situation that is about to come into being at the end of this film. We don’t see the great house. Instead, Jeff encounters occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes on an island overgrown with weeds, finds that he has become a vampire, and destroys him. He then goes to a building in ruins, apparently located on the same island (though the scraps of film that make up this movie are so confusingly pieced together that you can never be quite sure where anyone is supposed to be at any time,) and finds Roger sitting on a sort of throne. Roger is also a vampire, and Jeff destroys him too. From there he goes to the Old House, probably, where he confronts Barnabas in a big space that is also in ruins. The structures we do see show us what would happen to the great house if Barnabas survived, and what may happen to it anyway. The only living members of the family are Liz, who was catatonic after she found out that her daughter had become a vampire and doesn’t seem likely to make much of a recovery, and David, who was already pretty screwy when the movie started. It’s hard to see how either of them is going to keep such a big place up.
Dark Shadows Commentary 