About that CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS post ...

By WALLACE McBRIDE

For a few minutes last week, we got to imagine what it was like to have had a third DARK SHADOWS feature film from Dan Curtis.

It was equal parts hoax, practical joke and performance art, and required a level of commitment that bordered on mania. CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS wouldn't have been interesting if it was accompanied by an explanation, so it was published without one. People visited the website and were hit cold with a review of a 43-year-old movie that had no business existing.

If we did our jobs well, readers wouldn't be able to tell fantasy from fiction. Our phony review for CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS was accompanied by a feature story on the cover of Film Comment (a real magazine), as well as in a page from Monster-A-Go-Go (a fake magazine). To confuse matters even further, the Monster-A-Go-Go "review" was kind of a real thing, and was originally published on this website as part of a contest back in 2012.

And that faux review is where all of this began. Warner Bros. approached me that year about hosting a contest for the DVD releases of HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS and NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS. I thought a blind raffle was pretty boring, so readers were required to submit "elevator pitches" for a proposed third film in the series. WB was skeptical that anyone would take the bait, but Melissa Snyder stunned me (and impressed the PR people at WB) with her idea of a SUSPIRIA/"Jane Eyre" homage. She supplied a full summary of the film (in the form of a DVD review) and a poster.

Her pitch for CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS has intrigued me ever since. The plot feels like a natural extension of the DARK SHADOWS brand and played to Curtis' bleak cinematic sensibilities. HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS has been called an "American Giallo," a Hollywood counterpart to the gory murder mysteries of directors like Dario Argento. Merging gothic melodrama with SUSPIRIA (a movie that also featured Joan Bennett!) is a concept that borders on a fever dream.

As a form of creative calisthenics, I began to tinker with the idea of promotional materials for CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS late last year. What would newspaper ads have looked like? Foreign release posters? The novelization? I took a stab at some of these concepts, none of it really sticking. Part of it was a lack of purpose. It's hard to get fired up about creating something that nobody's ever going to see, and from there the larger idea was born.

With Melissa's summary in hand (and with her blessing) I asked Patrick McCray to handle the next piece of writing. My art still needed to be completed at that point in the project. And, truth be told, my schedule these days is so cramped that things might never get finished if left to me. A third voice also added more depth to the illusion ... when Patrick asked if I wanted a Starlog or Monster Serial-style review, it was clear he fully understood the concept.

He was asked not to write anything that intentionally contradicted Melissa's outline, but he had free reign to craft the film's imaginary "cultural history." He embellished a bit on the plot, but I think it turned out well. Christopher Pennock's “Anton Castille" was a perfect fit for the post ROSEMARY'S BABY occult boom of the decade and I wanted to see more of him.

The art was a mishmash of promotional images from the original DARK SHADOWS television show, as well as photos from other movies featuring the cast members. Alexandra Moltke gave up acting after leaving the show, which provided a pretty steep challenge. Expressionism (and Victoria's timeless trench coat) turned out to be my allies. Movie marketing in the 1970s was often a shell game, with posters and ads frequently selling movies much smaller than advertised. Exhibit A: Mark Hamill's Herculean physique on the original STAR WARS poster.

In lieu of photos of Moltke, it seemed appropriate to give the impression of the actress in my fake marketing materials, which pulled heavily on art from other books, movies and comics. One reader spotted artwork from an edition of Graham Masterson's 1976 novel, "The Manitou," but failed to spot Jerry Lacy's face superimposed over the monster's. Look carefully and you'll also see a still from SUSPIRIA, a track on the soundtrack titled "I Don't Understand" and Melissa's original plot summary used as the text on the Monster-A-Go-Go page.

I also liked the idea of a fictional narrative implied by these random images. Gone from the series were both Marilyn Ross and the Paperback Library Gothic books. The intent here was to show that, by 1973, a DARK SHADOWS movie could at least get the same kind of licensing push as RABID or THE WICKER MAN. After all, the occult was big, big business in the 1970s. (If you browse the movie listings in the image at the top of this post, you'll see why David Selby was unavailable for the sequel.)

Some people got the joke. Others didn't. Adam West has said that the dialogue on BATMAN only works when delivered with the seriousness of dropping a bomb, and that was my approach here. It appears to have worked: For about 24 hours, Melissa's original 2012 contest results for CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS was one of the best-read pages on the website thanks to people Googling the movie's title in search of answers. It felt cruel to ignore questions from people on social media, but it felt equally lame to clear away the fog before it had time to fully settle in.

Tone was also a concern, because I didn't want to come across as either apologetic or vain in my responses. The first would be untrue (I regret nothing) and the second ... well, I am kinda proud of this technological terror we've constructed.

(Note: You can see the original post HERE.)

MONSTER SERIAL: Child of Dark Shadows, 1973

By PATRICK McCRAY

Was it just me, or did CBS used to show movies opposite Carson? Or maybe Letterman? That’s where I saw scads of vital films. THE OMEGA MAN (the second time). THE LAST OF SHEILA. And this. Before I had any idea what DARK SHADOWS was, CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS sounded like some kind of documentary about runaways or drug abuse or something similarly instructional, but Snyder was a rerun, and so during those lazy, insomniac-by-choice summers of my misspent middleschoolism, it was the only game on the three channels we called choice back in the wilds of the early Eighties.

When I ended up watching the show, the film was so different that it took two years and a fresh Fangoria to explain that, yes, Virginia, this was the third DARK SHADOWS film. Not that I was dissatisfied with it. Schoolgirls in panic! Haunted portraits. The I Ching. Occult heroes. It was all there. By Jove, I was a fool not to have put the pieces together myself. If anything, I kept waiting for the TV show to get like the movie. Where was Anton Castille when Collinsport needed him?

By 1973, Dan Curtis was in an odd position. The name DARK SHADOWS still had bankability, but you have to give the audience some, you know, DARK SHADOWS. If NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS taught what was left of Team Curtis anything, it was that. Unfortunately, with Jonathan Frid and David Selby gone, it was going to be an uphill battle. He was wise to very carefully sift through what was left to give the audience as much familiarity as he could. No, Julia Hoffman is dead, but there’s Joanna Hoffman. Sure. Just trade the tweed for a pantsuit. Check. Jerry Lacy as a failed televangelist Trask, desperately trying to start his own campus in Collinsport. The important question was, “Is he still an asshole? Yes? Then it’s DARK SHADOWS.”

Were Nancy Barrett and Alexandra Isles a bit, um, august to be playing high school girls? Yes, but who cares? We never see any classes other than those run by hottie hipster, Jason Kane (John Karlen), and that’s “figure modeling,” so maybe it’s a finishing school. I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters. The crucial thing is that Curtis and Hall were doing what they did best — reconfiguring other works of horror into their own narrative.

Left, the 1984 home video release by MGM. Right, the novelization by David Gerrold.

By doing this, they gave the audiences of 1973 everything they wanted then. It was almost as if DARK SHADOWS, the television version, worked from the literature of the past. Now, we have the literature of the present, and Curtis was in the thick of 1970’s neo-pagan-christian-mysticism with several audacious twists. (Roger’s snarling, driverless Jaguar is a personal favorite.) The smartest thing that I think Curtis pulled off was to return to the familiar turn of time travel, but with a twist he’d never done, and with a strange moral inversion that caused bad behavior for years to come in junior highs across America.

Yes, hauntings and deaths and an old portrait. Got it. There were girls dropping like flies at the school and the word “poltergeist” was invoked in cinema for the first time to my knowledge without bothering to google it. It’s clear early on that Joanna Hoffman and Isiah Trask are in cahoots in their bizarre scheme to begin the End Times. This was a dash of Hal Lindsey that needed a send-up, and by having Grayson Hall and Lacy pair up over ceremonies based on the forbidden “Third Testament,” we not only get great storytelling/satire, but we also get to see what Spielberg totally ripped off for the climax of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

Front and back cover art for Robert Cobert's soundtrack.

Smarter still was the idea that, if DARK SHADOWS were to continue as a franchise, it would need a new, continuing central character. Enter Christopher Pennock, as the Avanti-driving, kickass, good-guy Satanist (!), “Anton Castille,” cousin to the late Tracy Collins (Kate Jackson), there to investigate her death. Thanks to his own set of I Ching wands (and a helpful trance or two), we learn that the Victoria from the painting found in the Old House is not an ancestor ...  it really is Victoria. The footage of her trip back to 1738 is still missing, but the film cuts around it nicely. I would have enjoyed seeing her go back to that era to burn the Third Testament when it’s fresh off the boat, but the way they handled it was just as clever. The seance and the monologue that Isles delivers in it finally justifies the faith I had that she really could understand things. That she would (so the stunning monologue tells us) go back to 1738, die at the hands of Bishop Trask, only to come back and haunt Collinwood to stop his descendant was maybe the only ghost gag that Hall and Curtis had not tried. When the sniveling Trask begs Castille to perform the exorcism and he refuses, knowing that the Right Reverend is the ultimate target of the spectral attacks? That gave me no end of ammo in religious debates with my mother for years to come.

Italian one-sheet poster for CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS, 1974.

Is it a mess of a movie? Yeah, but it’s never dull, and you can’t say that for NIGHT. It was banned in Little Rock, and you have to love that. Of course, MGM shit its pants at the idea of a continuing series of DARK SHADOWS films with Pennock as Castille, battling black magic with even blacker magic, so CHILD truly was the end of that phase of DARK SHADOWS. A shame, because Pennock shows genuine star power in the part, finally taking on the mantle of male lead with Barnabas and Quentin written out. Would audiences have supported the film more had the advertising made Dan Curtis’ new direction more evident? Of course. (I’m not so sure about DARK SHADOWS fans getting behind someone not a Collins… yet.) Thankfully, MGM had no real power over the novelization and the four successful print sequels, all of which focused on Castille, a man we eventually learn is, of course, a Collins.

Of course, he’s a Collins. It took three books to get there, but come on. This really is DARK SHADOWS.

Melissa Snyder's 2012 DVD review of CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS, from Monster-a-Go-Go Magazine.