The cast of DARK SHADOWS by The Clay Guy

More than a year ago, I shared a few links to DARK SHADOWS-themed sculptures created by a Chicago-based artist calling himself The Clay Guy. Coincidentally, Mr. Guy was one of the vendors present last weekend at MAD MONSTER PARTY, and he brought his friends from Collinsport with him. I snapped some photos of the characters, which were tucked in alongside sculptures of Buffy Summers, Herbert West, Jack Torrence, etc.

If you like his work, you can find him online at www.clayguy.com. Or jump straight to his DARK SHADOWS gallery by clicking HERE.

Artist Emily Christman finds comfort in DARK SHADOWS

In 2011, Emily Christman came down with chronic migraines and lived every day shut up in the house, subjected to constant blood tests, unable to take daylight.

“As a child, I had seen a little picture of Barnabas,” she said. “For some reason it struck a chord, and I had been determined to one day know what it was. I’m a big horror fan and I had heard somewhere about DARK SHADOWS, but knew little to nothing about it.”

Enter Netflix, which opened the world of Collinwood to her. The boxed collection of the entire original DARK SHADOWS series soon followed.

“During the little gaps of time I could actually see, I would watch the show in my darkened living room,” she said. “Then I got desperate to continue my art work, so I started carving little heads of the characters. Mostly, I did this during headaches and could barely see what I was doing."

Needless to say, these weren't optimal working conditions.

"I worked in poor light whenever I could bear it," Christman said. "Generally I'd get about two hours of relief a day, and 15 minutes or so where I really felt up to working." This narrow window of time meant she had to rush through many of the smaller pieces. Her vision gave her fewer problems at a distance, though, allowing her to struggle through an episode of two each day of DARK SHADOWS when she wasn't working.

Her doctor, she said, was familiar with the series.

"It actually worried me at first if watching the series was OK for me," she said. "But my doctor, who actually knew the show, thought it was the perfect little length to keep me sane and happy, without taxing me too much."

When she found herself feeling better, Christman decided to try her hand at creating a full-scale bust of a Dark Shadows actor. Grayson Hall, who played Dr. Julia Hoffman on the series, was her choice. In the beginning, Christman worked primarily from memory, sometimes using screenshots from the DVDs as references. Later, she drew from books and online images to help capture Hall's likeness when working on the full-scale bust.

"Watching her in motion also helps, just to give you a better sense of all her angles," she said. “I started by layering oil clay on a plastic skull, and instantly recognized a likeness in the basic face structure. Seeing these faces everyday for that year, and seeing little else, I became very fond of recreating them.”

With the help of her father, she created a urethane mold of Grayson Hall’s head and cast her in silicone. During this process, she started to recover and was accepted to art school in London.

“So I had to shove her in my backpack and take her with me to where I now am living,” she said. “So I’ve just been painting detailing, and working away in my spare time. It will probably be some time before I find the hair I need to finish the head, but I thought a good display method would be if I made her shoulders and arms, and had Julia in her I-ching trance.”

While it was Barnabas Collins that initially intrigued her, Christman said she slowly gravitated toward Dr. Hoffman as the series progressed.

"I have to say at first I wasn't sure what I thought of Hoffman, but she grew on my very quickly," she said. "I think she's my favorite character overall. I personally love the dysfunctional little family unit that is Barnabas, Willie, and Julia, and how it developed, most out of the whole series. I also really like the Sarah narrative; I wish they had done more with that."

She's hoping to revisit her Dark Shadows miniatures now that her vision has fully returned.
"My small heads were all made while I was having a migraine, so I could just barely see out of one eye," she said. "As a result, they are a little wonky. I can't say I'm terribly satisfied with the small pieces I have from before. Ever since I improved I've been really aching to create some little monster-model style kits of my favorite scenes and settings.”

She says she’s underwhelmed by the classic DARK SHADOWS models currently on the market.

“I'd love to do some moody little set-ups of Quentin's dusty room,” she said. “Or the mausoleum, intricate little set ups with the characters lurking in the shadows, Lara in flames, Vicky at the gallows, maybe a nice juicy staking. I have yet to try small scale in full health and proper light, and I'm wondering if I could get a refined likeness if I tried again.”

She said she hasn’t ruled out the idea of a more elaborate art project.

“Some crazy little portion of me wants to do some wax museum type affair,” Christman said. “Full-scale outlandish scenes, but it would be sometime before I could find a place to put it.”

Christman later met Lara Parker and Kathryn Leigh Scott at the Monsterpalooza convention, but decided against showing them her work.

“I was too embarrassed to show them,” she said.

Visit Emily Christman's online portfolio at  emilychristman.net. Below is a video she created to illustrate her discovery of DARK SHADOWS titled DARK YEAR. It's well worth watching.

Collinsport Cooking: Devil's Chicken and the Two Julias

Good morning, sports fans! I'm Future Mrs. Cousin Barnabas, and I'm here to talk about French cooking!

<sounds of crickets>

Yeah, that's the weird thing, isn't it? There's no food in Dark Shadows! (Unless you count the unrealistic number of hookers down at the Blue Whale who keep getting turned into vampire chow. How many prostitutes can a small Maine fishing town possibly support?) I know there's no food in Dark Shadows because when I asked Cousin Barnabas what I should cook to guest blog Julia Child's 100^thbirthday he couldn't think of anything anybody ever ate in that dank old house. He finally saw the dining room rewatching Episode 5, but they must have repurposed it to make other sets after that because these people spent the next thousand episodes living off dry ice and the occasional fly.

So, I flipped through my copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and decided that Poulets Grilles a la Diable sounded enough like the devil's chicken for my purposes, and for sides we'll go full Julia and have Champignons Sautes au Berre and Haricots Verts a la Crème, which are Frenchy ways of saying “let's take some perfectly good vegetables and dump butter and cream on them until somebody from the American Heart Association comes and kicks us in the face.” I also went by the local wine store and asked the oldest guy there for some authentic '60's housewife wine, aka, WWDDD, AFCC? (What Would Don Draper Drink, Aside From Canadian Club?) and he gave me something that “drinks just like Chablis” and suggested that, for accuracy's sake, I also pick up a bottle of sherry and drink it in silly little glasses with my lady friends. Coincidentally, I've been to the TioPepe winery (sherrery?) in Spain, where for a tasting they give each four-top table five almost full sized bottles of sherry. Cousin Barnabas' Future Mother-in-Law left that place with her arms around a woman she had met two hours beforehand on the tour bus, so I guess the wine store guy knows his stuff.

Give me a few glasses of this period-accurate dry sherry and I'm sure I could come up with a good post-feminist analysis of what it all means that only the vampires and monsters ever get to eat on this show, but I don't think I'd be asked back if I did that (and plus, it probably only means that the prop department couldn't afford plates.) Honestly, I think it's very interesting that this is a show where the primary movers are all female, but nobody cooks or eats or, er, takes anything inside their bodies that's nourishing in the generally accepted non-type-O sense. (It's about sex, isn't it? I bet it's about sex.) But let's talk about culture, escapism and aspiration, instead.

Volume 1 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out in 1961, just before the revised version of The Joy of Cooking that everybody's mom has. They were both amazingly popular best-sellers, both very well rounded cookbooks with excellent diagrams and sufficiently detailed directions that any cook from the neophyte to the expert could use them and get good results. The thing is, your mom probably used The Joy of Cooking (or that Better Homes and Gardens thing) on a weekly basis, but she only pulled out Mastering the Art of French Cooking on special occasions, if at all. It's the cookbook version of A Brief History of Time - often bought, seldom read. The other cookbooks of the day are evidence that the '60's were the world's most boring MMORPG - craft two different condensed soups with a can of chicken to make Wednesday Night, ready or not! Julia Child with her co-writers was doing her best to tell the Betty Drapers of the world that you don't have to eat Tuna Surprise if you don't want to - you can totally learn to make your own French bread, even if it takes 12 freaking pages for her to show you how! (No, really. It's 12 pages. That's in Volume 2.)

In other words, Mastering the Art of French Cooking is aspirational, like real estate photographs and... oh yeah, soap operas! Americans don't want to watch shows about people like themselves doing the sorts of things they do (drinkin' sherry, writin' blog posts with big slobbery dog on lap) - they want to see genteely land-poor people have extremely slow-moving conversations with vampires! Okay, most soaps don't have the vampire part, but they do have rich or aristocratic people doing exciting, emotionally thrilling things (like, and here the analogy breaks down, boning a duck, stuffing it full of weird meatloaf stuff, and then sewing it back up again. Or, hey, going back into time and boning your own grandmother. Whatevs, I'm not here to judge you.)

And then you've got Julia's TV show, The French Chef, which started airing in 1963. Let's say it had a certain Dark Shadows aesthetic. By which I mean that they didn't have any money for retakes, so if Julia set something on fire it was damned well going to stay on fire and let's hope she can put it out and rescue the dish. That glass of wine she drinks from to look more French? In the first few seasons they couldn't even afford wine, so that's water with Kitchen Bouquet in it. And she smiles when she drinks it. Can you even imagine somebody like her getting on TV these days? A great clumsy woman over six feet tall who talks like the nanny on Duckula? But there she was drinking gravy mix and trying to show America that seriously, y'all, you really can cook this shit! Put down the condensed soup and walk away! Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, all our modern food pioneers - they all owe everything to daffy old Julia, who took those gloomy fuckers at Collinwood from not-eating condensed soup Chicken Ohgodnotagain to not-eating stuff that tastes good and gives you a heart attack from the fat instead of the salt. (Is it possible we can thank her for the increasingly exuberant weirdness in Dark Shadows as the show goes forward?) We all owe her!

So let's get cooking! First off, I have a confession to make. There's a really long and stupid story about why I'm using boneless skinless chicken breasts rather than bone-in skin-ugh-full chicken pieces, but it's really boring and you don't care. Suffice it to say that I wanted bone-in pieces but I couldn't get them at the nice butcher shop and I didn't want to go anywhere else. (I didn't want skin, though - what kind of pervert likes chicken skin? Sorry, Julia. You know I love you, but that stuff is naaaasty.)

(But Future Mrs. Cousin Barnabas, you say, wouldn't a real baller just buy a whole chicken and cut it up? Yeah, asshole, but FMCB is tired. She spent a perfectly good day off folding paper wedding flowers because some dumb broad a few months ago decided that paper flowers were just the cutest idea. The fact that that dumb broad is me does not make me any less inclined to take one of those handy Collinwood staircases into the past to punch her in the face.)

So anyway, here's all the crap you need to make your devilish chicken, which I have never made before so this should be a barrel of laughs. Your first step is, you forgot to stale up your bread for bread crumbs so you hurriedly throw some slices in the oven for a few minutes and food process them a bit and you know they're really too wet but you just figure it will be okay, and this is in no way foreshadowing.

Yes, weird-ass butcher store that doesn't sell meat or anything wraps its chicken up like the world's grossest bon-bons. (Also hiding the fact that they're double breasts, which is fine except that strip of fat in the middle wigs me out. We all have our issues.) So anyway, you take your broiler pan and take off the top part and you dry your chicken bits and put them in there - but not until you've brushed some of that butter and oil mixture all over them bad boys, because this is Julia Child up in the house and America's dairy farmers are giving her some scratch under the table. (Why butter and oil? Julia doesn't tell you but I will - butter has a low smoke point, so you add the oil to keep everything from burning at too low a temp.) Throw that under the broiler for ten minutes a side, basting at the 5 minute mark. (Basting with what? The recipe doesn't tell you, so I figured, hell, more butter.)

My broiler scares the living crap out of me, by the way. There is fire all over my oven and it is on purpose!

When you've got both sides brown, you take the meat out of the oven, mix up your mustard, herbs, and minced shallots, and throw some of that fat from the chicken up in there and whisk it like a mayonnaise. (Yes, there really is extra fat in here thrown back in the recipe.) I was surprised that even just breasts did make some fat to do this with, by the way. Then you coat the breasts with the mustard mixture and bread crumb 'em up.

Oh wait. The bread crumbs don't want to stick. D'oh!

Anyway, you smash them on there like a four year old and throw the whole ugly shebang back into the oven under the broiler to do ten minutes a side again, basting with the chicken fat. Unless, for example, visibility in your kitchen suddenly decreases in a dramatic sort of way.

Oh, well. They're done, by the way (check with your thermometer - of course breasts won't take as long, and of course weirdly heaped up not-really-breadcrumbs are going to burn. Of course.)

So let's forget that ever happened and make some green beans in milk!

See? FANCY.

Julia's got some confusing info on the green bean issue - she has instructions for fresh beans, of course, but then she has a page on perking up frozen ones. You can tell from the way it's written that frozen green beans used to taste like the inside of a polar bear's ass or something, and she wants you to cook them a bit in broth and (of course) butter before proceeding. The fresh bean instructions have you blanch them in a big pot of water and then drain and commence with the cream and butter. I sort of went halfway and cooked for a bit with broth and then threw in all the cow products and simmered it until it didn't taste raw anymore. Which I don't think is the spirit of the book, but hey. Anyone can cook. A rat once told me that.

The mushrooms I've made before as a part of the Boeuf Bourguignonne, which in case you're doubting me because of my burning bread crumbs I will have you know I have cooked the shit out of on several occasions. You can ask my mom and she'll tell you, so there. Anyway, I forgot to take a picture of what goes into those little fuckers, but it would just be a picture of some mushrooms and a stick of butter, and that's just really kind of embarrassing and I don't want the Weight Watchers people to find out about it. (Okay, there's a touch of oil in there too.)

The thing with doing mushrooms right (that I learned in this very recipe) is that if you crowd the pan with too many of them, they just steam and they're gross. (Well, I think mushrooms are gross anyway, but I can stomach them if most of the mushroom is replaced with butter. It's sort of like the Petrified Forest. Which by the way is one of our coolest national parks.) You turn up your heat real high and melt your butter in it, and once the butter stops foaming you put fewer mushrooms than you think in there and bang and crash and shake it for a good Five! Minutes!, which is so much longer than you think it is unless you're throwing a pan around. First the shrooms will soak up the liquid, and then they'll start to bead it back up on their surfaces and turn goldeny brown around their edges.

Now, I can't stand these things, but Cousin Barnabas loves them, so when I'm feeling like I want somebody to think I'm an exceptionally nice person, I make them for him.

So I have to say, for a Mastering the Art of French Cooking dinner this one was awfully easy (okay, except for the burning part) and came together pretty quickly. Here's the finished plate:

Verdict? It would have been awesome if the breadcrumbs had stuck! Next time I'll know to go all ghetto with it and use the storebought crumbs in a can and it'll probably be perfect. “Green beans in milk” actually are pretty damned tasty, and I even ate a couple of those nasty little mushrooms.

So there you have it - I hope those of you who linked here as a part of the Cook for Julia project enjoyed the Dark Shadows slant and that all you regular Dark Shadows readers put up with me and dug the food. 

Bon appetit!