The Dark Shadows Daybook: November 7

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1967: Episode 361

When Julia Hoffman squares off against vengeful ghosts, will she find her only safety in madness? Julia: Grayson Hall. (Repeat; 30 min.)

After escaping the bleeding burial site of Sarah Collins, Julia finds herself isolated at Collinwood. There, the ghost of Dave Woodard torments her, mocking her on the phone.

Not counting the terrifying prospect of watching endless episodes about a missing pen, horror on Dark Shadows falls into two eras. More than once, I have heard that Dark Shadows was far scarier in its earlier days, and I agree. For me, that has to do with something far more than the evil days of Barnabas Collins or the fact that we tended to see the earlier episodes at younger, more impressionable ages. The difference is in the origin of the fear, itself. 361 epitomizes the earlier brand of horror on the series, and given where it falls in the run, the installment also sends it off shrieking. 1795 is swiftly approaching, and when it comes to terror on the program, there is everything before and everything after.

Prior to the first flashback, no one knew anything about what was haunting Collinwood. Boy, Vicki, you think YOU don’t understand? Even Barnabas was an unreliable witness, because it was always possible that he was lying, driven mad by his time in the coffin, or both. The residents of Collinwood were born into (or arrived at) a fog of rumors, family legends, inexplicable events, and the overwhelming sense of doom it all composed. Look at Sarah. Maybe she’s making blood spurt from her own tomb. But maybe it’s Dave Woodard or maybe it’s Maybelline. Either way, I can’t go on the record to say what’s going on or whose friend or enemy she might be. All I know is that there’s blood on my shoes and Brewster’s is closed at this hour. She’s a kid... kind of. And that is about the closest we get to explaining her mercurial weirdness. Clearly, she has more power than we usually see her wield. That brings us into Riddle of Epicurus country. Why doesn’t she use it more? If she won’t, that makes her just plain mean. If she can’t, then is some greater force exerting control? Or worse, it’s probably something that, like Vicki, we just can’t understand. The early months of the program are full of legends just barely invading the real world. There’s nothing to hang on to, but there are just enough self-closing doors and materializing objects to remind us that we’re hopelessly outgunned. This is the era of a truly haunted, existential show where the forces of memory and the past obviously want something as they scare the bejeezus out of us, but they won’t tell us what. I don’t even know if they’re having fun while doing it. Like the weather, it may be a force that occurs for a mix of seemingly random, but wildly macroscopic events. No matter how unpleasant Gerard is, he ultimately has a goal. He has a clear-if-strage strategy to achieve it. In this era, there are no experts. Even the so-called authorities are powerless. That sense of constant victimization to the caprice of mystery is a profoundly existential brand of horror, and it kept us tuning in.

Until it had to deliver. And then we kept tuning in, anyway.

Once Vicki goes back in time, she takes us as eyewitnesses, and we become a shared audience to what the hell is really going on. After that, everything has a cause. Everything has a solution. Everything has a name. And we often spend just as much time hanging out with the Enemy as we do our heroes. Defeating it all might not be easy, but we are finally insiders to an extent that even Liz, Roger, and Carolyn, growing up in that madness, never were… until we all were, together. What we lose in fear, we make up for in adventure and all-around fun. We get to name and index the evil to such an extent that we even see the Devil’s office chair at one point. Death shows up at a bar, and in this case, it’s not the beginning of a joke. That’s a wonderful, three year payoff for loyally putting up with the mystery of Collinwood. We are all Collinses at that point.

361 takes us to such a point of fright -- at least as witnesses -- that the show really can’t top itself. Grayson Hall delivers a bravura performance in what is almost a one-woman show as the unseen torments her. She needs answers or she’ll break. So will we. 

This episode was broadcast Nov. 13, 1967.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: NOVEMBER 7

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1969: Episode 889

Barnabas emerges from the Leviathan altar and gives a relieved Julia a chilly greeting, zealously protecting the Naga Box. However, she knows he’s lying about using the I Ching to return, and now she’s on the scent. That enticed nose leads her right to Eliot Stokes, whose meaty musk relaxes her into asking him to track down Charles Delaware-Tate, whose painting she now possesses. Secretly, she thinks it might help Chris Jennings, whose former lover, Sabrina, is now a patient of Stokes’. Stokes, naturally, is having success where all have failed. He is coaxing speech from her formerly frozen lips as easily as he could a passionate kiss. But Sabrina knows that Chris is the werewolf, and if that secret is revealed, his life will be in dire jeopardy.

For a storyline that arguably spelled the (temporary) creative decline of the series, the Leviathan sequence gets off to a cracking start. Starting with Barnabas’ return to Collinwood, you can feel the burst of creativity and risk that was surging through the production. From that stupid pen, three years earlier, to Barnabas stepping out of a pagan altar and reciting an apocalyptic incantation: DARK SHADOWS, we hardly knew ye. I think if the show had jumped over the interminable, embryonic stages and simply brought us to Jeb Hawkes, unfettered and in full career, perhaps things might have fared better. But that’s unfair. As I said, this story starts more dynamically than any other in the series. If you want a cruel and cold Barnabas, here you are. Whether he’s doing it to save Josette or not, to see him in the service of a larger evil is to see the writers giving both Jonathan Frid and the character license to not give a damn. When a relationship is tenuous, there is always that fear that a long journey will somehow change a friend or lover, and Julia contends with a bit of both, here.  Instead of seeing her heartbroken, we see her galvanized into action. How refreshing and appropriate. But the entire episode is propulsive, and instead of each sequence being about fitting three minutes of story progression into ten minutes of dialogue, the moments here advance the plot and characters at a rate that matches any nighttime program. Chris Jennings has had it with the padded room and Stokes’ mojo takes Sabrina Stuart where no Hoffman has gone before. Speaking of which, how long are they going to keep Eliot in the dark? Why don’t Julia and Barnabas just bring him in on secrets like Chris Jennings? Clearly, he’s not going to run for the silver bullets. 

On this day in 1969, authorities were unable to stop Yoko Ono and John Lennon from releasing their second album in the UK.