The Dark Shadows Companion: 25th Anniversary Collection

by Kathryn Leigh Scott

  Other characters include Carlotta’s sinister nephew, Gerard Stiles (James Storm), and Quentin and Tracy’s writer friends, Alex and Claire Jenkins (John Karlen and Nancy Barrett). The ghost of Angélique moves to take over Quentin, re-invigorating his former personality of Charles - a most reprehensible creature. She even restores the scar on his face.

  Tracy, Alex, and Claire become very concerned. And with good reason. Only Carlotta seems happy with Quentin’s cold and arrogant attitude toward Tracy and his growing enchantment with Angélique. He even begins a painting of his ghostly former lover.

  The rest of the film consists of the deterioration of Quentin, his boorish treatment of Tracy, and the increasing endangerment of Tracy by the ghost of Angélique. The ever-concerned friends Claire and Alex come to the rescue, alerting Tracy that something is deeply wrong with Quentin. She does not need to be told this after he tries to drown her in the swimming pool.

  Claire and Alex attempt a seance to rid the house forever of the ghost of Angélique. Originally, there was to be a “real” seance in the film, headed by haunted house expert Hans Holzer. What remains of the seance sequence is rather standard fare with special effects involving luminous images and screaming people.

  The film proceeds with numerous distorted images of Tracy’s harassment by Angélique and Quentin’s further transformation into Charles. The change is not yet complete when Tracy is kidnapped by Gerard. During a struggle, Gerard is shot in the head.

  Near the close of the film, Quentin finally saves Tracy from Gerard, who meets his end falling off a railroad trestle. Carlotta jumps to her death from the top of Collinwood at Angélique’s beckoning.

  Quentin regains his senses but all is not yet victorious. Generations of brainless Gothic heroines have persisted in returning to haunted houses. It’s Quentin who returns this time, Tracy in tow, to rescue his paintings. Once inside the house, Angélique’s power is reestablished, and she’s victorious in transforming Quentin into Charles. As for Tracy? Charles advances menacingly and the last sight of our hapless heroine is a closeup of her face as she screams one long last “Nooooooo!”

  After the fadeout, a newswire teletype across the screen reveals that Claire and Alex have died in a car crash on their way out of Collinsport. A most unusual aspect of the accident is a witness report that some strange white mist seemed to fill the vehicle just before it crashed.

  It’s hard to pin down the source of the film’s problems. The cinematography manages to make Lyndhurst (used once again as Collinwood) look like an entirely different estate. There is a lighter, more intimate quality to this film, giving it the tint of a ghost story and not the remote, sinister air that House of Dark Shadows evoked.

  A film magazine complained that “The script, involving the misadventures of a troubled Quentin and a troublesome Angélique, is just plain awful. It’s not likely that the integrity-minded Mr Curtis will permit this kind of travesty to occur again!”

  Although many critics blamed the script, it’s clear on closer inspection that the problem lies elsewhere. The plot desecration happened after Night of Dark Shadows was filmed, during the editing process. Horror movies in 1970 were edited to a specific time formula: 90 minutes was considered the optimum running time, allowing for more showings at theaters, and exhibition on double-bills. (In fact, many drive-in theaters featured Night of Dark Shadows with House of Dark Shadows.) MGM decided that Night of Dark Shadows should not be an exception. The film was chopped up in the editing room, sacrificing much continuity.

  The original running time of the Night of Dark Shadows work print was over two hours, but the full version was never released. Some photographs of missing scenes survive, showing pieces which would have tied together the disjointed plot. The original draft of the script also contains numerous sequences that ended up on the cutting room floor. These include one in which Quentin and Tracy find Charles’ hidden coffin (his jealous brother, Gabriel, buried him alive). There is a picnic sequence that might have been a nice, gentle look at the marriage of Quentin and Tracy, in contrast to the disaster it became. Any scene that would have inspired some sympathy for the characters would have been commendable.

  Night of Dark Shadows might have been a beautifully-crafted ghost story. “If you could find the original script, it really was something quite wonderful,” remarked Grayson Hall. As it was, Night of Dark Shadows did only fair box office business.

  The Last Days at Collinwood

  After the disastrous Leviathan sequence, which resulted in a ratings drop, the writers had to come up with something to win back the numbers they had enjoyed only the year before. The characters’ sojourns through time had always been extremely popular. Thus far, the characters had traveled back in time twice. In 1795, Victoria Winters had accidentally been thrown back into the past of Barnabas Collins. In 1897, Barnabas had gone back in time to save the life of David Collins.

  Curtis & Co. decided to try a new twist on the old reliable trip through time. Rather than moving sequentially forward or backward, this time it was decided to go sideways, into “parallel time.”

  The concept of alternate universes had been popular in science fiction since the 1940s. The first possibilities of quantum mechanics suggested the concept of alternate potentials creating parallel worlds, and the idea thereafter became a science fiction favorite. In the 1960s, with the new physics and the burgeoning theories of such cutting-edge theoreticians as Princeton’s John Wheeler and his Black Hole theory, the idea of alternate universes was given new credence.

  Dark Shadows decided to play with this concept in “Parallel Time.” If the main time is considered to be the center lane of a multi-lane highway, then parallel times are the other, alternate lanes on the same highway. In main time, the characters keep to the same lane, going in one direction. In parallel time, the characters take the same highway but choose to go in alternate directions. Therefore, in parallel time, duplicates of the main characters lead different lives, due to the different choices they have made.

  It is established that there is a door in Collinwood’s east wing which serves as a portal into an alternate universe. Whatever happens in Collinwood-Present triggers parallel, opposite events in the Parallel Collinwood. If all of the above seems confusing to an adult, one can understand the reaction of the faithful young viewer.

  For instance, Dr Julia Hoffman of 1970 Present Time was Barnabas’ ally; in 1970 Parallel Time, the Collinwood housekeeper (named Julia Hoffman and played by Grayson Hall), was a nefarious friend of Angelique. Despite the differences in these parallel worlds, two things remained constant: Angélique was always evil, and the parallel time counterpart characters always looked like the present time characters. Even if the spirit ran counter, the flesh was always uniform. Parallel Time provided the actors with an opportunity to create new characters. In the first parallel time storyline,1970 Parallel Time, the counterpart to Barnabas Collins had lived and died in the 18th century. This gave the writers the opportunity to take Barnabas on another adventure where he would again be called upon to play the hero.

  Parallel time was first introduced when various characters opened the East Wing door and saw their counterparts carrying on conversations that clearly stemmed from another world, another Collinwood that existed within the margins of their own. With the able assistance of Professor T. Eliot Stokes and Dr Julia Hoffman, Barnabas deduces that the mysterious door leads into a parallel time. After all, Stokes was an expert in parapsychology who could be relied upon to produce of metaphysical theories about tools, such as the I Ching, which would be used for time travel. In the case of parallel time, in certain instances the “walls” between the two worlds thinned and passage was possible, which was why they could occasionally see into the parallel Collinwood.

  Barnabas, seeing he had no counterpart in the parallel Collinwood, wondered: were he to enter this alternate world, would he be cured of vampirism?

  In an ironic twist, shortly after Barnabas enters parallel time, he
is captured by alcoholic writer William H. Loomis (John Karlen). This parallel Loomis has written a biography of parallel time’s 18th-century Barnabas Collins (the 1795 Barnabas’ parallel counterpart, who didn’t become a vampire and who lived out a normal life). Holding the present time Barnabas captive, Loomis forces the vampire to tell his own story, which the author then intends to market as an early Interview with the Vampire. This plot twist is a clever reversal of the previous Willie/Barnabas relationship in Present Time, in which Willie Loomis is a captive of the vampire.

  Loomis keeps Barnabas chained in his coffin while he works on his manuscript with feverish intensity, becoming a virtual hermit. Thereby, both characters were offscreen for about six weeks (long enough for Frid and Karlen to film House of Dark Shadows).

  Various other devices were used to spirit off the other actors—Parallel time’s Maggie had a fight with parallel time husband Quentin, so that Kathryn Leigh Scott could leave; Grayson Hall’s character, Hoffman the housekeeper, was off visiting a relative. Although the film was shot in tandem with the production of the television series, this hiatus for the actors allowed them to make the film without having to work on the series at the same time.

  However, this left David Selby, Lara Parker, Christopher Pennock, Lisa Richards and Michael Stroka to carry the television plotline, which all too often remained static during the filming of the movie.

  The TV plotline was a retread of Rebecca and was very similar to the plotline of the second Dark Shadows film. This alternate Quentin had the most violent temper of any of the Quentins. Maggie, his new bride, suspects he’d rather be married to his first wife, the dead Angélique, instead of to her. Nothing she can do measures up. Grayson plays Hoffman, the Mrs Danvers role, doing her best to make sure Maggie makes every possible error in her role as Quentin’s new wife.

  Lara Parker plays a dual role in this storyline. She is first seen as Alexis Stokes, Angélique’s twin sister. This ploy allows them to spend an interminable period of time on the question: Is Alexis really Angélique, returned from the dead? Although Alexis turns out not to be Angélique, the one and only does return from the dead later on. In true Angélique fashion, she murders her twin sister.

  The subplot at this time was a version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with Christopher Pennock playing Cyrus Longworth, mild-mannered scientist immersed in his experiments to chemically isolate the good in human nature—and instead finding himself hopelessly addicted to his own potions, which have the opposite effect. As his brawling alter-ego, the sinister John Yaeger, he carouses around town, molesting women and creating mayhem.

  Those plots were wearing thin by the time Jonathan Frid and the rest of the cast of House of Dark Shadows returned from Tarrytown to their regular posts. Barnabas was released from his coffin at last. Dr Julia Hoffman and Hoffman the housekeeper resurfaced in the storyline. And all the other familiar faces of Collinwood Present and Collinwood Parallel returned.

  The ratings were on a gentle slide and the newly-completed film needed a hype from the series to attract an audience. Curtis and Co. knew a fresh story was required, one which would return to its strongest roots and most popular characters. Barnabas, it was decided, must have a new love.

  The Josette storyline seemed finally finished. Kitty Soames, Josette’s reincarnation, had died in the 1897 storyline. Barnabas had had one fleeting encounter with Josette’s ghost in the Leviathan storyline, in which she gave him his freedom and asked that she be able to rest in peace. No longer would Barnabas mourn for his lost love.

  The character of Roxanne Drew (Donna Wandrey) would mark a departure for the series. Roxanne Drew would combine traits that had formerly remained diametrically opposed in the Dark Shadows storyline: the female supernatural figure and the heroic figure. Roxanne is a psychometrist, a psychic-sensitive who receives impressions from inanimate objects. Before this, all female occult figures (with the exception of ghosts) had been primarily evil, but Roxanne used her powers to assist Barnabas and the forces for good.

  When Roxanne is first seen, she is only a literal sleeping beauty, a woman in a coma. Timothy Stokes—in this parallel version a mad scientist—is using her life-force to keep his daughter Angélique alive. By this time, Dr Julia Hoffman has made the passage successfully into parallel time. Although Julia is undeniably needed in that time to keep Barnabas out of trouble, there remain the mechanical problem of the Evil Hoffman, Julia’s parallel self who exist in that parallel time. That quandary was solved when Hoffman tries to kill Barnabas, and to protect him, Julia has to kill Hoffman. Julia once more joins forces with Barnabas, and they determine that Roxanne must die. Roxanne’s death also destroys Angélique, who is always Barnabas’ sworn enemy, no matter what the time frame.

  However, Barnabas is entranced by Roxanne’s great beauty and refuses to kill her. (One supposes that if pretty little Roxanne had been homely, she would have been a goner). Instead he persuades Julia to revive her. Luckily, Roxanne’s resuscitation has the same effect her death would have - Angélique is destroyed.

  Donna Wandrey recalls auditioning for the role: “It was the first real thing I did on TV that lasted longer than 60 seconds. There were two blonde women with gorgeous long hair to my left, and two dark-haired women on my right. And here was this short-haired redheaded thing in the middle. After we had read, we were asked why we should get the part. I thought, well, I can’t just say I want to work. I went to school. I hadn’t done really anything that was important. And everyone else said very serious things. I thought, OK, you’ve blown it by now, you might as well go for it—and I said ‘Because I have short hair and there aren’t many short-haired women working in TV.’ I was cast the next day.”

  With dreams of at least a year’s steady work ahead of her, Wandrey opened the script one day to find the phrase every Dark Shadows regular feared—at least when it happened to them for the first time—“Barnabas bites Roxanne.” To put it mildly, Wandrey was alarmed.

  “Dark Shadows was my first big-time job, and I knew what happens when you get bitten. I knew I was going to be killed. In any other soap this is horrifying and I was very concerned... But Grayson looked at me like I was an idiot to be worried. She came over to me and said, ‘Honey, you’re going to come back as a ghost.’ It happens all the time, she told me. ‘Look, if they don’t do it naturally, I just bring you back in the lab. I’ve fixed them up before!’”

  By summer, 1970, the parallel time gimmick had stepped up the pace of the story, as the producers had intended. But there was an unintended corollary: if the viewer missed an episode or two, he was in real danger of losing the thread of the plot. This was one of the significant factors that eventually led to Dark Shadows’ decline. Many fans started to make daily records of the plotline just to keep track of what was happening.

  All things must pass, and the parallel time plotlines were resolved. Cyrus Longworth/John Yaeger dies, a victim of his own experiment. Quentin and Maggie are reconciled. Barnabas and Julia make plans to return to present time.

  But there’s one bit of unfinished business. Barnabas wants Roxanne to return to his world with him. But the evil Timothy Stokes kidnaps Roxanne and sets fire to Collinwood. A wall of flame separates the lovers. The time warp flares at that moment, and the room changes, whisking Barnabas and Julia back to the undamaged East Wing room. But this room, which should be very familiar to them, is subtly changed...

  Leaving the parallel time storyline, Dark Shadows took yet another departure from tradition, but one which was in sympathy with what had previously pleased those faithful fans outside the studio. Rather than moving backward in time, Barnabas and Julia took a jaunt to the future.

  The flash-forward was one of the series’ highlights during its final year, and it lasted two weeks. Sy Tomashoff and the crew had a ball “destroying” the sets—their delight enhanced by the fact that it was only temporary. But in the meantime, the set was sheathed in undergrowth that protrudes through cracked walls and shattered windows, wit
h huge dusty beams tipped across the debris-littered floor. Cobwebs and dirt encrusted the furnishings.

  On escaping from Parallel Time, Barnabas and Julia are flung forward to a Collinwood in the white powder of its own ruin. The year is 1995. The Collins family’s only survivors are Carolyn and Quentin, and both of them are insane. Barnabas and Julia encounter the half-dead Mrs Johnson, who shudders in fear at the very mention of the name “Collins.” She remembers clearly and speaks unafraid of the name of the warlock, Judah Zachery. With nothing more than these cryptic clues, and the appearance of a shadowy ghost who makes various threatening overtures, Barnabas and Julia return to their own time of 1970.

  In the summer of 1970, Dark Shadows introduced two dark-haired ghosts—Daphne Harridge and Gerard Stiles. Gerard was played by actor James Storm who, with his younger brother Michael, was to become a staple on daytime TV in various serials. Daphne was portrayed by a young Birmingham, Alabama, native whose only other experience before a camera was in a handful of commercials. Her name was Kate Jackson.