The Dark Shadows Daybook: AUGUST 31

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1970: Episode 1093

When David and Hallie prepare a new, sinister resident for the dollhouse, Sebastian confronts disturbing news about Maggie. Sebastian Shaw: Christopher Pennock. (Repeat; 30 min.)

There are stories that original audience members for the Universal FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA occasionally had to be carried out on stretchers. While I’m sure that some of It Came from the Universal Publicity Office, I’m just as sure that other people were that authentically frightened by what they saw. It seems like an alien concept, now. To modern eyes, FRANKENSTEIN is more of a sad movie than a frightening one. DRACULA faces the same struggle, another film cursed by quaint. It happens. DARK SHADOWS is a similar victim to our evolving sense of horror.

Even as a kid, DARK SHADOWS was never scary to me. Maybe if I’d been younger -- six or seven. But I was eleven, and it was no KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS. I loved it, though. If it wasn’t horror, it was its own genre, and whatever that genre was, I preferred it to anything not involving Klingons, barbarian women, or Jerry Reed driving at excessive velocities. Still, I always wondered what it would have been like to have been scared by DARK SHADOWS. In 2012, in broad daylight, I got the chance.

It’s the end of the prior episode, meaning it’s also at the beginning of this one, as David and Hallie look into the dollhouse of Rose Cottage. Their giant eyes loom over a vision of themselves sitting in the dollhouse in which Gerard intends to trap them forever. The juxtaposition was a disturbing, unexpected image. It has a strange, inexplicable logic which more closely approximates a dream than anything else I’ve seen on TV. That kind of citation is usually a cop-out, but there’s no other term for it. It’s a seemingly benign image with deeply, uncontrollably sinister implications. I know vampires don’t exist and I know that werewolves don’t exist. But dollhouses exist -- I used to build them. And what are dollhouses but an attempt to control a little world? That desire comes from somewhere. Thus, to see yourself -- not a doll of yourself, but yourself, hypnotically imprisoned in one as a willing victim? That’s a nightmare composed of elements all too familiar. It ties into why the pre-1840, Ragnarok sequence is so disturbing. It reeks of an inevitable doom knit partly out of the characters’ complicity in their own decay and partly out of their total inability to stop it. A vampire, you can stop. An invading ghost, you can stop. But a corruption like this to which you’re a willing participant? This is more quietly gothic than anything prowling around a graveyard in a cape and fangs by moonlight. This, for lack of a better term, is real.

Part of the almost repellant sadness in this sequence is the sense of very believable surrender by the characters. David and Hallie (and even the future dollhouse resident, Carolyn) are abandoned children. This is underlined by the frequent absence of Roger and Liz, who were, even at their best, dysfunctional parents who only occasionally made up for it with sentimental speeches and half-hearted hugs. Worst of all is Maggie, also decaying and dissolute. After seeing her successfully fight the man for so long, she, also, just seems to be giving up. This is the closest to the actual world as the show got. Real people can’t be expected to thrive for years under such relentless indifference and abandonment, not to mention constant threats to life and limb. This sequence is an ugly wake-up call to the fact that living in a spook house isn’t glamor and cool lighting. Perhaps that’s why many who love the show have such a tough time with it. I have a tough time with it. At the same time, I know that there is a deeper reality being exposed. It’s a memo that DARK SHADOWS isn’t fun and games. Childhood ends, even as we descend deeper and deeper into the dollhouse. The sixties would end. Camelot would end. Thus, we are perfectly staged for the necessity of the 1840 sequence. We have to examine our pasts. We have to forgive. We have to ask more of ourselves and each other if we are ever to rebuild and return. We have to be the Barnabas, absolving Angelique. We have to be Angelique, looking past the smoke and mirrors of our shortcut parlor tricks to take responsibility for who we must become. If all good things come to an end, so do all bad things. Moments like these give the real dark shadows meaning, and we must fight to earn them.

This episode was broadcast Sept. 2, 1970.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: August 17

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1967: Episode 309

Barnabas notes that his dosages are increasing and becomes violent when he hears that Burke is becoming suspicious about him. His mood sours further when Julia announces that he’s missed another appearance by Sarah. Later, Vicki cajoles Burke into apologizing to Barnabas. Julia reports more activity that she attributes to Sarah’s ghost. Barnabas convinces himself that he will be visited next.

The show is three months out from the (literally) history-making 1795 flashback. Given how far in advance the plot was mapped out, the finer points of the transition are all falling into place, and they rest on the shoulders of a young woman less than twelve years old. Barnabas is, as he has been since his introduction, obsessed with the past, but that obsession is less and less on Josette and instead centered on his actual true love (although not a romantic one): Sarah. Because of her age and the resume that (doesn’t) come with it, Sharon Smyth’s acting abilities were understandably limited. However, this didn’t slow down the program; the writers are too clever for that. Sometimes in drama, it can be more powerful to be talked about than seen. Sarah’s charm and influence profoundly affect her immediate community of adults, and seeing that in how they behave and reflect is the proper measure of her reach. Jonathan Frid shows us that with increasing frequency, and this episode solidly reintroduces the anguish that makes him the restrained vampire that he is, strangling Julia notwithstanding.

In Barnabas, we appreciate the monster created by Josette and Angelique, but who was he before that? It could be argued that this, in 309, is the real Barnabas. It’s astounding to think that the man we see played by Frid is only supposed to be twenty-five. That means that Sarah was in his life for almost half of it. Yes, he’s close to his uncle and Ben Stokes, but beyond that, the Barnabas we meet in 1795 is arguably isolated from the world of swagger. Other than the time he spent swingin’ in Martinique, Barnabas seems to have grown up isolated in Maine, diligently toiling in his father’s shadow and mold... although somewhat undercooked compared to the turgid, copralithic pater noster. When we first meet Young Collins in Vicki’s flashback, he seems like an angelic cross between Buster Brown and Eddie Haskell. Pretty naive.

Pretty, pretty naive.

In this episode, in the present, Barnabas reacts with shock and deep pain to the fact that Sarah appears to everyone but him. He knows it’s a punishment -- maybe the cruelest. He also knows why. He loved Sarah more than any other because, as the snare that catches so many others, she was someone who needed him. And up until Angelique, he was able to be there for her. It can be an enslaving thing, but there is something magnetic to knowing that you are both needed by someone and can make them truly happy. Beyond Jeremiah -- a man just as busy out on the town -- and Ben -- whose friendship (and maybe the law) was forbidden thanks to social class -- we know of no other companions for Barnabas. Although we don’t see it, we can infer that his connection with Sarah came from an intensely bonded relationship, somewhere between siblings and parent/child. He could protect Josette only to a certain extent, and the limit of his responsibility came from respect; she’s a responsible adult, after all. However, Sarah’s youth and naivete demanded his protection. And not just in danger. If Barnabas felt isolated, imagine how Sarah must have felt? No fleeting moments with Jeremiah. No Ben Stokes at her side. A remote father simply looking for a human prop, and a mother ten years too old to be dealing with yet another child. Sarah’s only company? Just the insanity of Abigail.

And Barnabas. Human compassion alone explains his fealty to her. She had been let down by fate and the birth order. She wasn’t going to be let down by him. Jonathan Frid explores the truth of Barnabas’ failure with mournful sensitivity, and along with his early monologue of Josette’s death by the sea, the character’s memories have wound the propeller for 1795 to take off and soar.

309 is also delightful. Burke explores his future as a hectored husband when Vicki nags him into apologizing to Barnabas for suspecting him of nogoodnikness, and Barnabas earns the right to ask one of the paranoid’s favorite questions -- about the innocence (or lack thereof) of Vicki’s suspicions towards him. He even gets a believably honest acquittal from her. Then, the curl up with the family history.

Even Barnabas gets a good day now and then. Part of one, anyway.

This episode was broadcast Aug. 31, 1967.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: AUGUST 31

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1970: Episode 1093.

Gazing within the dollhouse, Hallie and David see themselves. It is Gerard’s message that it will be their eventual and eternal home. Carolyn almost finds them outside the playroom, herself finally hearing the music, but David distracts her. Later, Hallie announces Gerard’s command that they make a third doll, this one a blonde female named Leticia. Meanwhile, Sebastian visits and tells an unusually unconcerned David that he can’t finish his horoscope. Later, Sebastian is told that Maggie’s condition is worsening. She is apparently the victim of an animal bite, which he finds significant. As the evening wears on, Carolyn finds herself humming the playroom carousel’s tune, and quickly discovers herself able to enter the playroom.

For me, there are three types of nightmares. One involves people who refuse to pronounce the final ‘i’ in ‘poinsettia.’ The second is reserved for those who feel that tomatoes are appropriate in jambalaya. The third, however, has to do with real nightmares. Nightmares ‘work’ because they involve one very real and dangerous thing completely unsupported by context or causality. That’s at the root of so much of the Ragnarok storyline. Characters are compelled toward doomed decisions with no real reason, and yet the inexplicable draw is there. It is similar to that strange pull which exists behind addictions and compulsive behaviors, and that’s deeply, deeply frightening. Because we have known them for so long, we give these people a lot of credibility, making their actions all the more disturbing. Ragnarok (1995-”Destruction of Collinwood”) is a woeful, sustained note, reflecting the entropy of the time. Gerard’s pull toward the children is like that of a cult leader’s -- a Manson in Collinsport. The overall inability of the adults to stop events that should be preventable, if not understandable, feels like a discussion of the Vietnam war. And you thought STAR TREK was about its time? It was… certainly, intellectually. DARK SHADOWS is about the era, emotionally. Together, they are a magnificent take on the Zeitgeist through the lens of their genres. This episode is a study in that, beginning with one of the series greatest, WTF scares in its history.

Quiet day in the news, but a great day for birthdays. We got some James Coburn, William Saroyan, Richard Basehart, Edwin Moses, Buddy Hackett, Richard Gere, Jack Thompson, and your host, Caligula. THAT’S a party!