Was the immense popularity of the 1960s television series “Dark Shadows” among American youth some sort of cry for help during a decade of brutish violence and social sickness? After all, its central character Barnabas Collins was a vampire with moral compunction.
I recently finished watching all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, the campy gothic soap opera that appeared every weekday on ABC television from 1966 to 1971. I committed myself to watching them because I am fascinated by television history and wanted to familiarize myself with that series. Also, I just wanted to enjoy its fun storylines, which indeed kept me on the edge of my seat from one episode to the next. I now understand why it was so addicting for its fans during its first run and why it has enjoyed cult popularity ever since.
When I watched Dark Shadows, despite being a series about vampires, witches, werewolves, and a fictional haunted house called Collinwood, I saw something revealing about the true dark shadows in American life hovering over big manor of Collinwood. When framed within the backdrop of the countercultural milieu of the 1960s, there is a certain conservatism to the show, revealing a commentary more on the real world than the fantasy world portrayed on the TV screens. I wondered if any the conservative thinkers who lived during that era had ever commented on the series, but I could find no commentary on it in the annals of American conservative intellectual writings. It seems that no one else noticed what I saw.
Then, I thought, what about Russell Kirk? Had he ever watched the series? Kirk wrote ghost stories himself and was indeed a devotee of gothic literature. In fact, one of his ghost stories was adapted for television on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. So, I asked my friend and former writing partner, Professor Bradley Birzer, who is one of the foremost experts on Kirk and wrote his definitive biography, Russell Kirk: American Conservative.
I sent him a message through Facebook. I said, “Hi Brad, I got a question for you. Do you happen to know if Russell Kirk liked to watch Dark Shadows?” Professor Birzer gave my query a heart emoji and then responded, “As far as I know, Kirk wouldn’t have known about Dark Shadows, as he didn’t own a TV. He was rather open about his disdain for TV and all TV programming. Definitely a curmudgeon.”
You know who else had a disdain for TV and was a bit of a curmudgeon? Jonathan Frid, the actor who played vampire Barnabas Collins, the central character on Dark Shadows. He really did not like television either or respect fantasy television audiences. He made allowances for children who he felt were fully entitled to obsess about make-believe fairy tales, but he was impatient about the immature “big kid” adults among his adoring fans. In the book Remembering Jonathan Frid, Steve Randisi told one example. “At the various Dark Shadows festivals over the years, Jonathan could get visibly annoyed at the tenacity of some fans. During one question and answer session a woman old enough to know better asked him, ‘How do you really feel about vampires? He told her, ‘I’m an actor. And I played a part – once. I don’t think about vampires.” (p. 49)
In a later interview, Frid said, “People don’t want to separate the fantasy, especially when it’s in your living room.” But he himself was never focused on the magic in the character’s premise. He said, “I wasn’t really interested in the vampire, per se. I was interested in a human being with a conflict, with an internal problem that he had to work out.”[1]
That is what he brought to the character of Barnabas and the direction the series took when he joined the cast. The theme of the show was the “reluctant vampire,” who eschewed his own evil nature and fought against it to live his life as a moral being. For a time in history when society was beginning to embrace a new nihilistic attitude that “if it feels good, do it,” Dark Shadows certainly went against the grain. Teenagers who were hearing all around them that it was time to reject the conservative culture of their heritage and embrace licentiousness would run home every day after school to watch Dark Shadows, still one remaining relic of the past that they could see on TV.
At first, Dark Shadows was an homage to the great classics, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The House of the Seven Gables. Set in a mysterious, murky old mansion in Maine on top of a hill overlooking the crashing waves of the sea, the show simply involved psychologically disturbed, brooding characters without yet incorporating the element of fantasy. It was about a family with deep, dark secrets. The series opened with Victoria Winters, its principal character and narrator, arriving at Collinsport on a train to begin a job at the great house as a governess to little David Collins, nephew of wealthy family matriarch Elizabeth Collins.
Elizabeth was portrayed by the legendary film actress, Joan Bennett, whom series producer Dan Curtis was lucky to cast in the final years of her career. There is a reason Elizabeth specifically asked for Miss Winters to take the job as her nephew’s governess. Although her motive is never overtly revealed, it is assumed, with several hints and clues dropped into the scripts, that the reason was that Victoria was Elizabeth’s illegitimate daughter that she had to give up for adoption at a young age because being an unwed mother in those days was considered scandalous.
The likeliest reason the mystery of Victoria’s link to Elizabeth is never openly clarified is that the series was still trying to maintain its social innocence. The writers left it to the audience to know that Elizabeth had once in her younger years been unwed and pregnant. They knew the viewers were not so naïve to be unaware that such things happen. Such circumstances of a person’s conception and birth was no longer universally considered improper by 1966 when the “Sexual Revolution” was underway. Other programs on network television for youth viewership by then were already dealing with unwed pregnancy, such as Mr. Novak and Peyton Place, so it was no longer a taboo topic. But the producers of Dark Shadows did not want to go there, at least not explicitly.
When after its first year, the series began to develop into full-fledged fantasy and started introducing supernatural elements, it continued to take its inspiration from classic literature. Novels that were modified into Dark Shadows scripts included Dracula (obviously), Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and The Turn of the Screw. It also interspersed material from Greek mythology and a bit of H.P. Lovecraft. Time travel had also been incorporated into the storylines, allowing the setting to change and become a period drama through a lot of the series run. The time travel element provided many vehicles for storytelling, not least of which was getting to see characters interact with the social mores of the past.
Barnabas is first introduced in episode 211, when he is accidentally released from the confines of his coffin by the greedy troublemaker, young Willie Loomis, played by the brilliant actor John Karlen, who gave a purposely exaggerated performance. Exhuming the vampire from his shackled box in the mausoleum would be Willie’s comeuppance from his tyranny over others. He is forced into slavery by the creature he let loose. Later in the series, as Barnabas begins to take control of being cursed by vampirism, he wins the battle of good versus evil within himself and allows Willie his freedom.
Most of the plotlines involving Barnabas deal with his struggle to overcome his natural instincts as a vampire, often with the help of Dr. Julia Hoffman. Julia was played by Grayson Hall, an accomplished actress who had just been nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting role in the film version of the Tennessee Williams play, Night of the Iguana. Although a serious thespian, her portrayal of Julia was humorously, over-the-top campy. Like Barnabas, she also has aspects of her own sordid nature to conquer. Unlike the prevailing relativistic, amoral system of that era and today, the characters on Dark Shadows know that a person’s inner nature does not necessarily justify his behaviors. Even Angelique struggles to combat her evil ways of witchcraft because she wants to live a normal life. Civilized people must rise above their inner impulses.
Nor is biting people without their consent the totality of a vampire’s crimes. On Dark Shadows, Barnabas does not even want women to give themselves over to him freely to be bitten. He does not want to be a vampire at all. He badly longs to either return to being a living, moral man or move on finally to a restful death.
Barnabas is not totally blameless for his curse. It happened to him because he had sinned. In the first of several time travel arcs, the series goes back to 1795 and explores his origin story. He had toyed with the affections of a servant woman, Angelique Bouchard, with whom he had an affair while engaged to Josette du Pres, and then cast her aside. Unbeknownst to him, Angelique was a witch with powerful abilities. She took out her revenge on Barnabas by hexing him with vampirism. His mistake also cost the life of his beloved Josette.
In the world of Dark Shadows, actions can still have painful consequences. Ironically, in that respect, in this television fantasy soap opera might be truer to life than the moral confusion of the real world off screen.
The Sixties was the dawn of licentiousness in mainstream American culture. While the very same generation of American youth were running home after their high school and college classes to find out what Barnabas was up to next in his struggle to overcome his sinful desires, they were also enjoying the open lasciviousness at events like Woodstock and parties closer to home. The hippy generation took John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of personal experimentation to its fullest extreme. The sexual revolution, rampant drug use, and “psychedelic” artforms had forever changed the cultural landscape of American life. This era eliminated external standards of moral judgment. Seemingly everywhere, people began asking, “Who is to say that what I’m doing is wrong?” Under this new renunciation of social propriety, if one has a taste for something, he cannot be told that it is sinful to pursue it.
While there was a story arc on Dark Shadows spanning several months in which Barnabas and Julia travel back in time to prevent the Collins family from destruction, actual American families were beginning to crumble off screen. The very same social bonds of family and community that were so incredibly central to the people of Collinsport were disintegrating in the real lives of the show’s audience.
And it was a time of brutish violence, to be sure. Americans had already lived through several high-profile political assassinations, including politicians and civil rights leaders. Dark Shadows in fact had to be preempted one day in 1968 by the breaking news of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Later that year were the infamous riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. During the late Sixties there were also protests by angry, self-righteous mobs of youth in the streets and on university campuses, most notably at Berkeley and Columbia.
And then there was the incident of the fatal stabbing and beating of a young man at the Altamont Speedway Concert in California in 1969, just a few months after Woodstock. In a Ramparts magazine article that has become regarded as an important essay from 1960s social literature, reprinted in Ann Charters’ The Portable Sixties Reader, the journalist Michael Lydon wrote about how excited the attendees were to partake in the festival’s debauchery.
Lydon wrote: “Whoever or whatever, we are here, all here, and gripped by the ever-amazing intensity of the psychedelics, we know that this being here is no accident but the inevitable and present realization of our whole lives until this moment. One third of a million post-war boom babies gathered in a Demolition Derby junkyard by a California freeway to get stoned and listen to rock ‘n’ roll—is that what it has all been about?”
He continued: “And more political: if a concert isn’t the right word for the day, festival isn’t either. The week’s maneuverings, still known only by rumor, have raised a hard edge of suspicion, the day’s vibes include aggressive paranoid frequencies that demand self-justification. Some come in bitter mourning for two Chicago Black Panthers shot to death just days before; a concern without confrontation would frivolous escapism for them. But it is more than the radicals; large segments of the crowd share a dangerous desire to tighten up that festival idea a few notches, to move to a new level—just how weird can you stand it, brother, before your love will crack?” (pp. 310-11)
But then things cracked, and someone died.
The victim, Meredith Hunter, had tried to charge the stage with a handgun while the Rolling Stones were performing. The Hells Angels motorcycle gang had been hired to provide security at the music festival, in exchange for $500 worth of free beer. One of the bikers killed Hunter but was later acquitted of murder because it was ruled self-defense.
It was a senseless, meaningless tragedy, with nary even one honorable person anywhere within the vicinity of the story. It was borne out of reckless profligacy in an era of social sickness.
In his prophetic essay, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” first published in Partisan Review in 1958, Norman Podhoretz saw the roots of the problem sprout from the Beat generation a decade earlier. He wrote, “Being against what the Beat Generation stands for has to do with denying that incoherence is superior to precision; that ignorance is superior to knowledge; that the exercise of the mind and discrimination is a form of death. It has to do with fighting the notion that sordid acts of violence are justifiable so long as they are committed in the name of ‘instinct.’ It even has to do with fighting the poisonous glorification of the adolescent in American popular culture.”
Was the immense popularity of Dark Shadows in its heyday, particularly among American youth, some sort of cry for help? Barnabas was not the sociopathic vampire in the brand of Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee. He was a vampire with moral compunction.
In one interview, Lara Parker, the actress who portrayed Angelique said, “The story of the vampire goes back to before the Egyptians, the Greeks, and it exists in every single culture. Why is it so widespread? Not because it’s true, but because it contains the truth of our fears and our desires. Joseph Campbell said the myth is the metaphor for society. The myth is actually an example of our dreams and our deepest desires.”[2]
If Joseph Campbell was correct, was Barnabas Collins the metaphor for American society? Was he the moral conscience of the Sixties?
When people today look back at mid-century films and television programs, it is common to attribute their lack of provocative sexual and violent content like the kind so abundant on today’s screens to them being from a “more innocent time.” But clearly, the Sixties were not a more innocent time. TV networks certainly sought to keep things clean in their programming, but still producers often attempted the push the boundaries just a little to the extent that their network executives would allow. Not so with Dan Curtis and Dark Shadows. It was a throwback to an earlier era when science-fiction and horror were campy and did not take themselves too seriously.
But as R.J. Jamison, reminds us in Grayson Hall: A Hard Act to Follow, campy drama, ironically, may be the most emotionally accurate drama. Jamison references a point made by Susan Sontag in her famous 1964 Partisan Review essay about the dramatic arts, “Notes on Camp,” writing, “the whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’” (p. 119)
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The featured image is “Photo of Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins from the daytime drama Dark Shadows” (1968), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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