live burial – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 863: Homecomings

In episodes #853-#856, Sorcerer Count Petofi (Thayer David) used his powers to force the devastatingly handsome Quentin Collins (David Selby) to trade bodies with him. Ever since, Quentin (Thayer David) has been trying to persuade someone to believe his story about Petofi (David Selby.) For the duration of the switch, I shall refer to Thayer David’s version of Quentin as P-Quentin, and David Selby’s version of Petofi as Q-Petofi.

Yesterday, P-Quentin persuaded his old friend and fellow Satanist, Evan Hanley, of what had happened. Evan agreed to conduct a ceremony to call upon their dark lord and ask for the transfer to be broken. They trick Q-Petofi into coming to Evan’s house and knock him out with chloroform. Then Evan begins an odd incantation:

Oh, Lucifer…

Great God of man and beast, look upon us with favor. Help us correct this evil which has been done in defiance of you.

Renew our bondage as your servants. Grant us the power we need this night, and we will be yours for eternity.

For Baal, who guides your mind.

For Beelzebub, who rules your spirit.

The robber of a soul must not be spared. The robbed must be avenged.

I exorcise thee.

Oh, impure spirit, who is the mind of the enemy, by the holy rite of Hecate, I conjure thee that thou do immediately hear and obey my command. Leave this man’s body, that he may return… Oh, yes, spirits of invisibility, I conjure and constrain thee herewith to consecrate this ceremony. So that surely and without trickery, thou may return each, to the body of [its] origin.

So be it.

Oh, Lucifer, so be it.

So be it…

I charge thee. I conjure thee. I command thee. Answer my demand.

Depart from these alien bodies and return to those from whence you came.

Depart.

So be it.

So be it.

So be it.

Oh, Lucifer, we give thee thanks.

Evan and P-Quentin seem to have the wrong guy. Whatever Satan’s powers may be, undoing evil, restoring property to its rightful owners, and enforcing justice are not exactly among the old fellow’s core competencies. Of course the ceremony fails. Q-Petofi wakes up from the chloroform, tells Evan he has made the greatest and last mistake of his life, and puts the zap on his brain. The next we see him, Evan is digging a grave, refusing P-Quentin’s offer to help him, and listening to Q-Petofi announce that he is about to be buried alive.

Q-Petofi’s announcement is the closing cliffhanger, suggesting that Evan has a somewhat longer life expectancy than we might have imagined when the ceremony fell apart. But once in a while cliffhangers really are resolved with the death of the character who is in peril, and that would seem to be a possibility in this case. Yesterday was Evan’s first appearance after an absence of more than eleven weeks, and he is not associated with any major loose ends in the plot. His alliance with the odious Gregory Trask, husband of Judith Collins Trask, may have given him a foothold now that Judith is back from her own long absence and is looking on Trask with suspicion, but yesterday he seemed to back off from siding with Trask in whatever fight might be coming up. So if the makers of the show are thinking it’s time for Q-Petofi to confirm his credentials as a major villain by killing a familiar character, Evan would be the obvious choice.

Judith confronts Trask today. He lies to her to cover up his misdeeds during the more than thirteen weeks she was confined to a mental hospital. She does not contradict all of his lies, and invites him to embrace her. He seems to think he has regained his control over her, but she tells him two things that make him uncomfortable. First, she says that she has persuaded his daughter to leave her apartment in the village and move back into the great house of Collinwood. When he protests that “She is not my daughter!,” Judith calmly replies that she is, closing the subject and leaving him looking like a petulant child. She also says that she hopes he has not bought or sold any stocks in her name lately, since she has revoked his power of attorney over her holdings. Again, he can say nothing in response.

Judith’s brother, the stuffy but lovable Edward, does not hear the details of this conversation. After Judith leaves the drawing room, Edward enters and tells Trask that he has won again. Trask perks up at this, and becomes his usual overbearing self. But he is just as quickly deflated when Edward tells him that he is looking into what he has been doing for the last thirteen weeks, and that when he finds out he will make a full report to Judith.

When Dark Shadows first became a costume drama set in 1897, Edward assumed he was to inherit the estate of Collinwood and all the family’s businesses. He was haughty and commanding, and Judith was a fragile spinster. But then their grandmother died, and the will left everything to Judith. She fell victim to Trask’s machinations and married him; he gaslighted her into the madhouse. Now that she has come home, Judith has found a new strength, sufficient to hold her own in the household if not to uphold justice and right on the scale which her position in the community would seem to demand. Edward’s dependent financial position, coupled with the many supernatural horrors he has witnessed, have gradually reduced him to a childlike state. In their scenes today, we see that the two of them have come to embody that signature dynamic of Dark Shadows, the relationship between Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother.

Episode 672: And it was my mother’s voice

Today, everyone has the memory of a goldfish. Heiress Carolyn receives a telepathic message from her mother, the apparently-dead Liz, urging her to go home to the great house of Collinwood and stay inside in order to escape a terrible danger. A few minutes later, she has apparently forgotten the content of this message, as she goes back outside to check on Liz in her coffin.

During her brief stay in Collinwood, Carolyn talked with permanent houseguest Julia. Julia keeps telling her that Liz is dead and that the dead cannot communicate with the living, suggesting that she too has become a goldfish. Julia is a doctor, and Liz is entombed because she mistakenly declared her dead. She had made the same mistake about her several weeks before, and learned nothing from that experience. But she has also attended several séances, built two Frankenstein’s monsters, seen a number of ghosts, and spent a year and a half carrying on a one-sided romance with recovering vampire Barnabas. She also knows that in #592 and #593, Carolyn herself died and came back to life. So it is bizarre that she goes on about the finality of death and the impossibility of communication between the living and the dead.

Carolyn goes back to her mother’s crypt and is attacked by a werewolf. Liz knew she would be buried alive, and so insisted her coffin be equipped with a button that would ring bells everyone at Collinwood could hear. While Carolyn is confronting the werewolf, Liz overcomes her paralysis sufficiently to push this button. That brings Barnabas and Julia.

The werewolf paused in his attack on Carolyn when he saw her silver bracelet; that gave Julia and Barnabas time to arrive while Carolyn was still alive. Barnabas strikes him with the silver head of his cane, causing him to run off. When Carolyn tells of the werewolf’s fascination with the bracelet, Barnabas mentions that the head of the cane is also silver; he grows very thoughtful, apparently realizing that silver has a power over the werewolf. Yet later, when he goes to hunt for the werewolf, he takes a gun but nearly leaves the cane behind. He finally takes it, but his long hesitation shows that he, too, is suffering from goldfishism.

While still in the crypt, Julia had looked at Liz’ body and insisted she was dead. She wrote off the ringing of the bells as a coincidence, perhaps caused by some jostling during Carolyn’s encounter with the werewolf. Later, Liz gets out of the coffin and goes home to Collinwood. There, Julia, Barnabas, and Carolyn are astonished to see her. Julia examines her. After she finds that Liz has what is in Collinsport English called a “pulsebeat,” she seems willing to concede that she might be alive. She then starts giving orders which everyone willingly follows, because she is such a good doctor.

Liz remembers. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz is the one character whose brain seems to be in working order today. She can remember that her trouble started when her brother Roger’s wife Cassandra cast a spell on her. Barnabas and Julia know that Cassandra was in fact a wicked witch named Angelique, and that Barnabas has just returned from a trip back in time during which he destroyed Angelique. They assure her that Cassandra will never return. They can’t tell her why they are sure of this, because they, like the producers of Dark Shadows, have decided that Liz must never know what is really happening around her, lest she become an active participant in the plot. So all they can say is that they just know, and she is of course unconvinced.

It is a relief to wrap up the “Liz will be buried alive” storyline; that was dull from the beginning, and just got duller as it went. It didn’t help that we have seen Liz immobilized by depression twice before. This isn’t even the first time she has been rendered catatonic as the result of a curse placed by an undead blonde fire witch.

It’s also encouraging that Julia and Barnabas have met the werewolf and are engaged with him. They are the show’s chief protagonists, and nothing can really move without their involvement. Now that they are involved with the werewolf, we can stop spinning our wheels.

Episode 671: We promised Maggie we’d be good children

An extraordinarily uneventful outing. In yesterday’s episode it looked like heiress Carolyn would go to visit Chris the werewolf as he is in the middle of a transformation and would be attacked. But she didn’t go. Governess Maggie did go to Chris’ cottage, and at the end of the episode it looked like she might be attacked. As we open today, she is there and he is about to change, but she leaves and gets home safely while he is still in human form.

It again looks like Carolyn might be attacked when she walks through the woods to visit the mausoleum where her mother, matriarch Liz, is entombed. Liz was alive when she was mistakenly buried and is still alive now. Liz is unable to move or speak, but she somehow shares the audience’s thought that Carolyn might possibly be attacked. We see her in her coffin and hear her interior monologue as she thinks about the “terrible danger” her daughter is in.

As it happens, Carolyn makes it home fine. Later she goes out again; we see the werewolf prowling nearby, again raising the theoretical possibility that she will be attacked. But Carolyn hears Liz’ voice in her head, a telepathic warning that she should hasten off. The werewolf also reacts as if he can hear Liz’ voice, and he goes off in another direction. The screen goes dark and the credits start rolling. The werewolf hasn’t attacked anyone and no one has learned anything about him.

It appears that the werewolf is trying to figure out where Liz’ voice is coming from.

It’s kind of interesting that Liz can transmit telepathic messages now. She could use a supernatural power or two if she’s going to get into the swing of things on the show. It’s also interesting that the werewolf seems to be able to overhear the messages Liz sends to Carolyn. Chris’ little sister Amy lives in the great house of Collinwood now, and along with strange and troubled boy David she is falling under the power of the evil ghost of Quentin Collins. Quentin communicated with Amy before he could get through to David. David was miffed by this, since “Quentin is my ancestor.” That suggested that Quentin will turn out to be Amy’s ancestor as well, making her and Chris members of the Collins family. If so, that might explain why Chris, even in his lupine form, was able to pick up a telepathic transmission Liz directed to her blood relatives.

There is a wardrobe malfunction in this one of a type that showed up several times in the first year of the show. When Carolyn makes her first entrance, she walks down the stairs in the foyer. At each step, Nancy Barrett’s chest thrusts into her sweater with results that would probably not have made it on the air had anyone from the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices been watching the show. In the early days, they put the actresses into very form-fitting tops often enough that I thought they were challenging the audience to take an adult attitude towards female anatomy, and so I did my best to rise to that challenge by leaving it unremarked when we could see the exact shape of their breasts. But it’s a rare occurrence now, so I think we have to list it among production faults.

Episode 667: The idea of leaving Collinwood

Time-traveling fussbudget Barnabas Collins has completed the task he set for himself when he went to the year 1796, and has to find a way to return to 1969. He decides to deliberately subject himself to the process by which he was originally transferred from the 1790s to the 1960s. He is, at the moment, a vampire. He orders his servant Ben to chain him in a coffin hidden in the secret room in the back of the Collins family mausoleum, and hopes that he will be released from it in a period when he is human again.

On a sunny morning in 1969, Barnabas’ former blood thrall Willie and his best friend Julia have figured out his plan and gone to the secret room. Julia is a medical doctor; she is at once the best physician in the world, capable of assembling a human body from dead parts, bringing it to life, and thereby lifting the effects of the vampire curse from Barnabas, but simultaneously very unsteady on the question of whether any given patient she is examining is alive or dead. For example, matriarch Liz is entombed at the moment because Julia mistakenly declared her dead twice in a couple of months. Once he has opened the coffin, Willie demands Julia examine Barnabas’ body and tell him whether he is alive, and therefore human, or dead, and therefore condemned to rise at nightfall and prey upon the living. Before she can answer Willie’s question, Julia has to spend quite a bit of time going over Barnabas with a stethoscope, during which time we see his eyelids flutter and his chest move.

While Julia is trying to determine Barnabas if is alive, he sits up and starts talking. Julia and Willie urge him to lie back down, apparently concerned that if he is too active Julia won’t be able to arrive at a clear result. After a break, we see him out of the coffin, telling them about his experience in 1796. After quite a bit of back and forth, they arrive at the collective decision to continue the conversation back home, in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood.

Barnabas, Julia, and Willie have emerged from the secret room into the publicly known part of the mausoleum and are starting to close the panel behind them when they hear the voices of people approaching. One might expect them to finish closing the panel and to greet whoever is coming as fellow pilgrims paying homage at the graves of Joshua and Naomi Collins and their daughter Sarah. After all, everyone knows that Barnabas is a direct descendant of Joshua and Naomi, that Julia has a lively interest in the past of the Collins family, and that Willie is Barnabas’ servant. They have as much right to be there as anyone.

Instead, they scurry back into the secret room and shut themselves in. They are a bit too slow. Entering are heiress Carolyn and child Amy. Amy sees the panel swinging shut. Carolyn, behind her, did not see this happen, and dismisses Amy’s claim that she did. They tap on the panel, and Amy decides that it is so solid that she may have been mistaken. The mausoleum is so dim that one can imagine a trick of the light causing a person to believe that the wall had moved, so this reaction of hers is plausible enough.

Dimness is not an exclusive property of the outer part of the mausoleum. The trio hiding in the secret panel embody dimness as they do an outstanding imitation of the Three Stooges. Willie is Larry, the universal victim; Julia is Moe, the self-appointed leader who is as lost as either of the followers; and Barnabas is Curly, the chaos agent. Willie left his bag of tools perched precariously on the steps immediately behind the panel; after Amy and Carolyn tap, the bag falls and makes a sound. Julia does not address Willie as “ya porky-pine!” and poke him in both eyes, but it would fit with the flow of the action if she did.

Carolyn and Amy both hear the sound. They puzzle over it. Carolyn suggests that the wind must be blowing a limb from a nearby tree against the outer wall. Amy can’t think of anything else it could be, and accepts the suggestion. They leave, having placed flowers on the sarcophagi.

The flowers are themselves interesting to longtime viewers. Early in the episode, we saw Carolyn arranging them on the writing table in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. The last time we saw someone handling flowers over that table was in #346. Barnabas grabbed those flowers out of Julia’s hand. In those days he was still a vampire, and they were enemies. After a few seconds in his grip, the flowers died. When Julia and well-meaning governess Vicki saw this, Barnabas looked embarrassed, for all the world as if he had broken wind. The analogy tends to raise a laugh, but it is apt- when he was a vampire, it was a natural function of Barnabas’ body to do things like that, and he would be expected to control that function so that others would not be aware of it. So when they show us flowers on this spot, they are telling us we ought to be in suspense as to whether Barnabas will be a vampire again.

Carolyn and Amy go back to the great house, where strange and troubled boy David is sulking. Again, longtime viewers might find this suspenseful. David found his way into the secret room in #311 and in #334 tried to show it to some adults. Barnabas had locked the panel, so they disbelieved him. If Amy tells David what she saw, he may well put two and two together and revive the stories that were in progress in those days.

But Amy doesn’t breathe a word of it, and David isn’t interested. He is preoccupied with the evil spirit of the evil Quentin Collins, who is gradually and evilly taking possession of him and Amy and, evil as he is, driving them to do something or other that has not yet been explained, but which will undoubtedly turn out to be evil. Quentin is still confined to a small room hidden in the long-deserted west wing of the house, and can only take full control of one child at a time. Today it is David who is acting as his agent; Amy flatly refuses when David tells her that Quentin wants them to “play the game.” In response, he twists her arm. Carolyn walks in on that act of violence, and orders David to go to his room and stay there for the rest of the day.

Amy speaks up for David and even asks to go to his room with him, but Carolyn stands her ground. She does leave the children alone together while she goes to tell housekeeper Mrs Johnson to take David’s meals to him on a tray.

David fumes and tells Amy that it is her fault that they won’t be able to “play the game” today. He is declaring his intention to “get even with Carolyn!” when Barnabas appears in the doorway.

Evidently David’s declaration did not bother Barnabas, because his only response is “Why so serious?” Barnabas has been pushing a plan to send David and Amy to boarding schools in Boston. Under Quentin’s influence, they have tried to thwart this plan by pretending to be all for it but secretly hanging clothes in the wrong closets. This apparently foolproof method has somehow failed, so they resort to another expedient. They tell Barnabas they would rather not go. He says that’s fine with him, and drops the whole thing.

Alone in his room, David looks angry. He throws a book to the floor. Carolyn comes in, and David tells her that he is sorry and she is right to punish him. She sees immediately that he is lying, and tells him so. The resulting brief scene is far and away the best of the episode.

Later, Amy slips in, and finds David sitting in a chair in a dark corner. In their post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri point out that the effect of this shot of David is a bit different on an audience now than it would have been before 1972, since it makes David look very much like Don Vito Corleone in the opening scene of The Godfather.

“Shouldn’t I be holding a cat?” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David is still furious about the whole situation. He tells Amy that they will “play the game” after all, and that Carolyn will play with them. The ominous music on the soundtrack is enough to tell us that this means they will try to kill Carolyn.

This episode shows something about the importance of directors in television drama. Actor Joel Crothers appeared on Dark Shadows for the last time yesterday; in an interview he gave to a fan magazine shortly after leaving the show, he complained that the directors had become so busy managing the special effects and practical effects that they didn’t have time to work with actors. Furthermore, the show never had more than three writers on staff, so scripts were sometimes delivered too close to taping for the actors to do much rehearsal on their own.

Today, each actor finds a note and sticks with it, but few performances mesh with each other sufficiently to seem to be part of the same scene. Denise Nickerson is calm and relaxed even when Amy’s arm is being twisted, David Henesy is angry and confrontational even when Barnabas is falling for David’s pretense that everything is normal, and Nancy Barrett is stern and impatient even when Carolyn is taking Amy’s claim to have seen the panel move seriously. Each of these performances is good, and Mr Henesy stands out when he gets to play “creepy.” But clearly no one gave them an idea of what they should work together to get across to the audience.

Aside from the scene where Carolyn sees that David is lying, there are just two exceptions, and they don’t really help. Committed fans may find it endearing to see the preposterous threesome hiding in the secret room of the mausoleum, but first-time viewers are likely to be put off by that scene of low comedy in the midst of an otherwise heavy and somber melodrama. Jonathan Frid is warm and inviting with the children, which does make sense when Barnabas is talking with the relaxed Amy, but their two-scene about whether he will ask Carolyn to let David out of his room is such a low stakes affair that unexcited actors cannot hope to hold our attention.

The director today was executive producer Dan Curtis. Curtis was a titanic personality and would later direct many TV movies and some features, but he seems never to have directed as much as a school play when he first took the helm of Dark Shadows for a week in 1968. This stretch of episodes marks his second time in the director’s chair. His extreme inexperience as a director of actors may well explain why the cast does not come together more cohesively.

Episode 665: Burn, witch, burn!

Vampire Barnabas Collins has traveled back in time to the year 1796 in order to save well-meaning governess Vicki Winters from being hanged. To his disappointment, she was hanged yesterday, and now appears to be dead. The audience knows that wicked witch Angelique intervened so that Vicki would survive the hanging and appear to be dead so that she can be buried alive. Angelique explains at the beginning of today’s episode that she will lift the spell once Vicki is in the ground so that she can die a slow, painful, terrifying death.

When Barnabas left 1969 on his mission of mercy, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard had been dealing with the effects of a curse Angelique cast on her in 1968 that caused her to be obsessed with a fear of being buried alive. In fact, Liz appeared to have died, and was in a coffin. That story was unexciting when it was introduced, and had been dragging on for months and months.

Regular viewers may sigh when they see that Angelique is still hung up on the idea of live burial, but this time the whole thing moves very swiftly. Angelique goes to Barnabas in the tower room of the great house of Collinwood. She tells him Vicki is still alive and that if he goes away with her she will save her. He disbelieves her, and signals his servant Ben to rush in with a burning torch and immolate Angelique. Lara Parker enjoys the part of the burning Angelique so hugely that I laughed out loud watching it, but that didn’t detract from the episode. On the contrary, the joy Parker took in performance was one of the most appealing things about her.

Angelique’s dying screams attract the attention of a long-term guest in the house, the Countess DuPrés. The countess goes to the tower room to investigate, and catches sight of Barnabas. The countess had seen Barnabas die, and is shocked that he appears to be alive. She talks with perpetually confused heiress Millicent Collins, who has also seen Barnabas and who has discussed him with her husband, roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes. The countess gathers from what Millicent says that Barnabas is a vampire. This doesn’t quite fit with the previously established continuity- Barnabas returned to a night sometime after the events of episodes 449-451, when the countess helped Barnabas’ father Joshua in an effort to free Barnabas of his curse. It seems rather unlikely that it would slip the countess’ mind that Barnabas is a vampire. At any rate, this time she vows to destroy him at the first opportunity.

When Angelique is destroyed, her spell is broken and Vicki revives. Barnabas goes to the drawing room of the great house and is astounded that Vicki is alive. We may wonder if he would have gone away with Angelique had he known she was telling the truth when she said Vicki was not really dead. He urges Vicki and her boyfriend, the irksome Peter Bradford, to go away as quickly as possible, as far as possible. Vicki asks for a few seconds alone with Barnabas; Peter leaves them, and she tells Barnabas that she will always feel close to him. She gives him a little kiss, and rushes off. Barnabas was hung up on Vicki for a long time; his facial expression as he watches her leave with another man suggests that he has for the first time managed to perform a selfless act. It’s a lovely moment. I only wish Vicki had been played by Alexandra Moltke Isles, who played the part for the first 126 weeks of Dark Shadows, instead of Carolyn Groves. Miss Groves wasn’t a bad actress, but if the goal is to give the character some kind of closure it is unsatisfying to see her as someone who only had the part for three episodes as opposed to the person who was there in 335.

Barnabas sees that the time has come to return to 1969. Ben does not know that Barnabas has traveled through time; as far as he knows, he was there all along. But when Barnabas announces he will be leaving, Ben insists on following him. Ben stands by and watches while Barnabas stands in a graveyard and calls out to his friend Julia. Ben does not know who Julia is, any more than he knows that Barnabas was standing on this same spot in #661 when he left 1969. Neither he nor Barnabas knows that the countess and Millicent are spying on them from the bushes.

Barnabas keeps calling out to Julia, but nothing happens. Barnabas decides that he will have to make the trip to the 1960s the same way he did before- as a vampire chained in a coffin hidden in the secret room of the Collins family mausoleum. He takes Ben to that room, and tells him to chain the coffin up after dawn. He tells him they will never see each other again. In its own way, this farewell is as poignant as the one Barnabas shared with Vicki. It is also shadowed with menace, as we see the countess and Millicent still watching.

The next morning, the countess comes to the mausoleum with Nathan. It is a bit puzzling to see Nathan. The night before, Barnabas bit Nathan and forced him to confess to many serious crimes; we last saw him in gaol. Yet here he is, not only free but wearing his federal coat with officer’s braid. The countess says that she got him out of gaol to stake Barnabas. Even in Soap Opera Land, this is a bit of a stretch. It’s an even bigger stretch that, having been under Barnabas’ power, Nathan is now able to stake him.

Nathan is holding the stake over Barnabas’ heart and raising the hammer when the lights go down. We hear a loud bang, and the episode ends.

In his post about this one at the Collinsport Historical Society, Patrick McCray outlines its slam-bang plot, full of sudden reversals and poignant farewells. Patrick does such a great job of capturing the verve and joy of this Genuinely Good Episode that I wondered whether I should even bother writing a post about it. At the opposite extreme, Danny Horn’s post on Dark Shadows Every Day was so full of irritable complaints about continuity problems and other imperfections in Ron Sproat’s script that I was inclined to write a long and impassioned defense.

But I will leave the debate to the two of them. I’ll just say that if anyone is curious about what Dark Shadows is like and wants to watch a single episode to get the flavor of the thing, this would be as good a choice as any.

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 538: Usually without reason

Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert on the occult, finds himself laboring under the direction of Julia Hoffman, MD. Stokes does not understand why Julia insisted on leaving the long abandoned shack where a very tall, very mysterious man named Adam seemed to be suffocating, he does not understand why Julia has buried her friend Barnabas Collins in an unmarked grave in the woods, and does not understand why Julia has concluded that Barnabas is alive and they must dig him up. Julia tells Stokes she will answer his questions when the exhumation is complete. Stokes keeps digging. They reach a coffin. They open it to find Barnabas. Julia detects a faint “pulsebeat” in his wrist. Before Stokes can raise his questions, Julia says she wants to be alone with Barnabas and reminds Stokes that Adam needs attention.

Gravedigger in a three piece suit. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back in the shack, Stokes finds heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard with Adam. Earlier, Carolyn was distraught, unable to find a “pulsebeat” in Adam’s wrist, but now he is up and moving, apparently quite well. Stokes says that Julia is on her way, and Adam becomes agitated. He hates Julia and Barnabas, but has never explained to Stokes or Carolyn why. Carolyn decides to hide him in the long-deserted west wing of her family’s home, the great house of Collinwood. Stokes sees many drawbacks to this plan, but can suggest no alternative.

Only Stokes is still in the shack when Julia comes. He will not tell her where Adam has gone, and she will not answer any of his questions. With a smile, he tells her that he looks forward to understanding Barnabas’ secret. At this, she looks uneasy, clearly not welcoming that prospect.

Barnabas was, for 172 years, a vampire. His curse went into remission earlier in 1968, and he has been virtually human since #490, when he took part in an experiment that brought Adam to life as a Frankenstein’s monster. Julia ordered Barnabas’ servant Willie to bury him the other day, because she was afraid he was about to become a vampire again, but yesterday she figured out that Adam’s existence was keeping that from happening.

When Barnabas is unearthed, he is afraid that he has reverted to vampirism. Julia shows him his reflection in her compact mirror, proving to him that he is still human. The first time they did the vampire/ mirror bit was in #288, when Julia saw that Barnabas did not cast a reflection in a compact mirror and thereby confirmed her suspicion that Barnabas was a vampire. That led him to try to kill her. Now they are fast friends, and the same gimmick, with the opposite result, brings them a moment of shared joy.

Barnabas goes to the great house, and sees wicked witch Angelique/ Cassandra standing on the terrace. She was the one who cast the spell that prompted Julia and Willie to think they ought to bury him, and Julia had told her that he was dead. She is rather surprised when he shows up. He taunts her with the failure of her attack on him, she pretends not to know what he is talking about, and he goes along his merry way. Alone, she vows that she will soon regain her power over Barnabas.

Episode 537: Reason to stay

Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is dead, and this time it seems like he might stay that way. At least it seems so to his friend Julia Hoffman, MD, and his servant Willie Loomis; they’ve buried him, and are talking about what to do next. Julia decides they should tell people Barnabas went on a long trip, and that they themselves should leave the area before dawn. They will go to a sanitarium called Windcliff. Julia will resume her duties as its chief, while Willie will take a job there doing whatever he can handle.

Julia orders Willie to pack his things; he asks if he should pack Barnabas’ things also. Julia is impressed that Willie thinks of this. Perhaps he is remembering his onetime friend Jason McGuire, whom Barnabas killed in #275. Jason was hated by all and was under orders from the sheriff to leave town when he fell afoul of Barnabas, and so it was easy for everyone to assume he had simply gone away. Still, in #277, sarcastic dandy Roger wondered why Jason hadn’t taken his clothes or his shaving kit. No one ever tried to tie up that loose end, but perhaps Willie learned of the problem and made a note of it for the next time he had to conspire to conceal a death.

Willie goes directly from Barnabas’ freshly dug grave to Maggie Evans’ house. Willie has an unwholesome preoccupation with Maggie. Longtime viewers will remember Willie’s menacing approach to her in #202 and #207, before Barnabas got hold of him and turned him from a dangerously unstable ruffian into a sorely bedraggled blood thrall; those who are mindful of the period when Dark Shadows first became a hit will remember May and June of 1967, when Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner and Willie tried desperately to lessen her suffering; and first time viewers will be startled by the beginning of the scene, when we see Willie peeking through the window at Maggie. When Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission, his former victims tended to return to the personalities they had before he bit them. Willie has not quite become the rapey goon he was in his first two weeks on the show, but neither is he the first man a woman would choose to be alone with.

Since she is The Nicest Girl in Town, Maggie has long since forgiven Willie what he did when he first came to Collinsport. And Julia used a magical version of hypnosis on Maggie to induce amnesia covering the whole period of her involvement with Barnabas and to leave her with warm feelings of goodwill for him. But it’s late at night, so when Willie knocks, she is reluctant to let him in. He insists, and she relents.

Willie tells her he will be going away soon to take an exciting new job. Maggie says that she is sure everyone will miss him. At first he repeats the story that Barnabas is going away on a long trip, but then he starts crying. When Maggie asks why, he tells her Barnabas has died. He asks her to keep this secret, but the most she will agree to do is to wait until he leaves town to start talking about it.

Meanwhile, Julia has gone to the great house of Collinwood, where she has been a houseguest for about a year. Before she goes upstairs to pack, she stops and tells Roger’s wife Cassandra that Barnabas is dead.

Julia knows that Cassandra is actually Angelique, the wicked witch responsible for Barnabas’ woes. It would seem that the whole point of covering up Barnabas’ death would be to keep Angelique/ Cassandra from finding out about it. Yet Julia not only goes out of her way to tell her, she also declares to her that she will continue to fight against her.

Angelique/ Cassandra spits out that Julia is in love with Barnabas, to which Julia replies “Not nearly as much as you are.” For some time, the show has been developing the theme that Julia would like Barnabas to be her lover. In their post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John Scoleri said “So Julia’s true feelings are finally on the table.” To which Christine Scoleri replied, “Where have you been? Julia’s feelings have been on the table, the wall, the floor…pretty much everywhere for a long time.”

Willie’s visit to Maggie and Julia’s to Angelique/ Cassandra mark a difference between the first year of Dark Shadows and its later phases. When the show started, the characters were too good at keeping secrets, with the result that very little happened. They took this to such an extreme that one of the two principal storylines with which the show began- well-meaning governess Vicki’s attempt to find out who her parents were- died out altogether because reclusive matriarch Liz and her lawyers, the only characters who knew anything about it, would never talk.

Now, the characters involved in the action don’t keep secrets from each other at all, with the result that events comes thick and fast, but it is hard to build complex alliances or to explore nuanced relationships. They still conceal information from Vicki, Liz, Roger, and other characters left over from the early days, rendering them background figures with little to contribute to the story. Video game enthusiasts might call them “NPCs”- non-player characters.

Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, occult expert, enters. Stokes tells Julia that a man named Adam appears to be dead. Julia goes with him to an abandoned shack in the woods where she examines Adam’s body and pronounces him dead. When Stokes tells her that Adam exhibited sharp pains in his neck starting at about 11 PM, that he called out for Barnabas, that his strength appeared to ebb for no apparent reason, and that he then died, Julia’s eyes widen. Suddenly Adam comes back to life. He starts gasping for air and miming a struggle against an invisible barrier just above his face. Julia tells Stokes she will have to go. He protests that she must stay with her patient. What she says next doesn’t mean much to Stokes, and would mean less to a first-time viewer:

JULIA: He is suffocating- I may know why. No, it’s impossible! But it may be that they are the same. Experiment- perhaps Adam is why-

STOKES: What are you talking about?

JULIA: Barnabas- I buried him- alive!

Regular viewers know that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment begun by mad scientist Eric Lang. Shortly before he died of wounds inflicted by Angelique/ Cassandra, Lang recorded an audiotape in which he explained that as long as Adam lives, Barnabas’ vampirism will remain in remission. Julia has not heard that tape, but the audience has, time without number. We also know that when Barnabas was sealed up in a wall from #512 to #516, Adam experienced the pains that Barnabas suffered. In these lines, we see Julia for the first time beginning to understand the true nature of the connection between Adam and Barnabas.

Stokes’ approach to Julia is as indiscreet in its own way as were Willie’s to Maggie and Julia’s to Angelique/ Cassandra. Adam hates Julia and Barnabas, because they abused him shockingly in his first weeks of life, and forbade Stokes to bring her. Julia’s closing outburst is also an extreme indiscretion, as Stokes is basically a law-abiding person who could not be expected to help Julia and Willie cover up their many crimes. Again, we have come a long way from the days when the show would drop a major story rather than have a recurring character breach attorney-client privilege.

Like the Scoleris, Danny Horn was in good form when blogging about this part of the show. His post on Dark Shadows Every Day about this episode makes a number of penetrating observations about the connections between Julia and Willie’s opening scene at the grave and absurdist plays like Waiting for Godot and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Episode 396: The doll and the pins

Well-meaning governess Vicki is wrongly suspected of witchcraft and needs a place to hide. Young gentleman Barnabas takes her into his house. In her gratitude, Vicki tells Barnabas the truth about herself. She is a time-traveler, yanked back to this year 1795 from her native 1967 by forces she does not understand. Indentured servant Ben enters the room and Vicki leaves. Mystified by her story, Barnabas asks Ben if he thinks Vicki might be a witch after all.

It is exciting when Vicki starts confiding in Barnabas. She has utterly failed to adapt to her new environment, and has none of the abilities she would need to scam her way into a secure place there. She has ended up as an obstacle to story development and an irritating screen presence. If Vicki isn’t going to lie competently, she may as well tell the truth. But that turns out to be a dead end as well- there is no use for Barnabas to make of the information she has given him.

Barnabas doesn’t repeat Vicki’s story to Ben- he just reports that she said something utterly bizarre. What Barnabas does not know, but Ben does, is that there really is a witch in the house- it is Barnabas’ bride-to-be Angelique. Angelique has enslaved Ben, so if he found out Vicki’s secret she would as well, and would be able to use it against her as she frames Vicki for all of her own crimes. Ben proclaims to Barnabas his absolute certainty that Vicki is not a witch, but since he can’t tell anyone about Angelique, this only puzzles Barnabas. Barnabas is further baffled when Ben says he hopes that Barnabas’ marriage to Angelique brings an end to his troubles.

The other day, Angelique tried to solve a problem of her own by raising a corpse from its grave. This was the late Jeremiah Collins, uncle of Barnabas and his best friend until, under the influence of Angelique’s spell, he and Barnabas’ fiancée Josette eloped together. Barnabas responded to that by challenging Jeremiah to a duel. Conscience-stricken, Jeremiah decided to let Barnabas kill him and told Josette that she would be free to marry Barnabas once he was dead.

Angelique had ordered Jeremiah to plague Josette and Barnabas with angry demands that they stay apart. We could interpret that simply as puppetry on Angelique’s part. But today, Jeremiah is harassing Angelique and refusing her repeated commands to go back to his grave. He says he was at peace in the earth until Angelique disturbed him. He was content with his decision to forfeit his life, but now he has become something he didn’t bargain for. Maybe it’s the indignity of that change that accounts for his change of personality, or maybe he’s just cranky because he can’t get back to sleep.

Regular viewers will think of a third possibility. In the segments of Dark Shadows set in 1966 and 1967, we saw other supernatural beings, such as undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins and the ghosts of Josette and of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah. These beings looked at first glance like humans, but the more we learned about them the clearer it became that each was in fact a complex of multiple entities, some of which operated independently of and occasionally at cross-purposes with others. As a witch, Angelique might also be a composite being. Perhaps each time she casts a spell, she breaks off a little piece of herself and deposits it within the person she is trying to control. If so, the creature she is trying to send away is not simply Jeremiah, but the body of Jeremiah animated by a chunk of the spirit of Angelique. That would explain why the actions of the risen Jeremiah are characterized by three traits that were alien to the living man, but that Angelique has in abundance- single-mindedness, vengefulness, and ineffectiveness.

Barnabas, Ben, and a clergyman are in the front parlor, ready for the wedding. Angelique takes a long time to come downstairs. Barnabas goes up to her room to see what is keeping her. He finds her terribly upset, insisting that they have the ceremony somewhere else. Barnabas looks in her suitcase, which had a moment before held the clothes she removed to put on her bridal gown. Those clothes have vanished, and in their place Barnabas finds a doll belonging to his little sister Sarah and some pins. Had Barnabas ever seen a horror movie, he would know to interpret this as a clue from Jeremiah that Angelique had caused a recent illness of Sarah’s by sticking pins in her doll, but people didn’t get to the cinema in 1795, so it’s another dead end.

Angelique composes herself and says she will be right down for the wedding. Barnabas leaves the room. The door closes itself, and Angelique cannot open it. Jeremiah enters and tells Angelique she must be punished for disturbing the dead. He takes her to his grave, which is open. Angelique raised Jeremiah some days ago- if the grave has been open this whole time, you’d think someone would have noticed and people would be talking about it. Anyway, he puts her in the grave, and from her point of view we see him throwing dirt into it.

Jeremiah dropping dirt onto Angelique, from her point of view. Screenshot by

This is the first live burial we’ve seen on Dark Shadows. It’s true that the POV shot from inside the grave echoes a moment in #248 when Barnabas, who is in 1967 a vampire, shuts his prisoner Maggie Evans in a coffin and we see him through her eyes, but that coffin wasn’t in the ground.

Barnabas shuts Maggie in a coffin in #248. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Harking back as it does to that shocking moment from Barnabas’ early days on the show, the image of the reanimated Jeremiah dropping dirt in the grave invites us to make a comparison between Jeremiah and Barnabas. In life Jeremiah was a mild-mannered, good-hearted fellow, as is the living Barnabas. The destructive behavior he has exhibited since Angelique raised him from the dead is not only typical of her, but also of what we saw from the vampire Barnabas in 1967. Again, we wonder if the fate that awaits Barnabas is not only something Angelique will do to him, but if everything we saw of him in the months between April and November was what Angelique was doing disguised as him.

Closing Miscellany

Angelique’s repeated commands to Jeremiah today to “Go back to your grave!” find an echo in one of the great moments in the history of Dark Shadows conventions, when Lara Parker used that line to explain the Dark Shadows house style of acting:

“Go back to your grave!!!!!”

When Vicki tells Barnabas the truth about herself, the camerawork makes Alexandra Moltke Isles’ strabismus impossible to miss. Previously they had taken great care to photograph her from angles that would obscure this condition, but we’re going to get another clear look at it on Thursday. Combined with the lousy lines the scripts have given Vicki since the beginning of the 1795 segment, it is hard not to suspect that there was some kind of deliberate effort behind the scenes to push Mrs Isles aside.

Vicki and Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This was the first episode of Dark Shadows broadcast in 1968. The copyright date printed on the screen at the end still says 1967. They were several months late before they stopped putting “1966” there, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised they didn’t update it for an episode shown on New Year’s Day.