DARK SHADOWS 2012-- An Unlikely, Perfect Gothic Concoction

I saw Dark Shadows this weekend-- when you have little girls, the prospect of going to a new movie relates less to when the movie opens than when you can find a babysitter-- and I loved it. Right at the start, as director Tim Burton's camera follows a train through New England woods to the haunting sounds of the Moody Blues, I turned to my wife and said, "Okay, I already want this on Blu-Ray."
Mind you I'm a huge fan of the 1960s soap opera, though I came to it late, and that should actually count against this film. I was a huge fan of the 1960s show The Avengers, and I was expecting to hate the 1998 movie version even before it turned out to be terrible. I felt the same way about The Saint, which updated the -- hey!-- 1960s detective series starring pre-Bond Roger Moore, in a role so full of wit and irony it was probably better for him than Bond.
But Tim Burton's Dark Shadows doesn't make the mistakes that The Avengers and The Saint make, for several reasons. For one thing, both of those movies seemed to have been written by people with only a cursory knowledge of the source material, as if maybe they'd read a memo prepared by a staffer. The Avengers made no attempt to copy the smirking flirtation between Steed and Peel or the fun rhythm of the show, and the Saint was a generic actioner that tossed  the detective stories that always propelled that show. But there was something worse: if you knew nothing about the source material, you were left with weird, bad movies that existed for no reason anyone could make out. (And my gosh, the Avengers is terrible. Go back and watch it and let me know if you don't think it might be missing a reel somewhere.)
Dark Shadows, though; this is something else. I had fears it would be Avengers bad when I heard it would be a comedy. Dark Shadows was never played for laughs in the 60s. If you watch it on Netflix-- and really you totally should, starting with Episode 211, when Barnabas first appears-- you'll see what an oddball piece it was, so perfectly gothic, narrated by a young governess who has, in fine gothic tradition, come to a great house of dark secrets. It is in black and white, on strange wobbly sets, filmed live-to-tape, and there's a wonderful feeling that this that you're looking at is another, stranger world you can get lost in. Look at the number of Barnabas' entrance-- the show had already run for over 200 episodes before the secretive vampire first appeared, run with its world of crashing surf and ghosts who walked.
Barnabas the vampire took it up a notch, though, scheming against members of the family and longing for the return of his beloved Josette. He was a stone killer, too.
(There was also one movie based on the soap already, in 1970-- see my blog post about House of Dark Shadows.)
Tim Burton's Dark Shadows knows the whole terrain of the show, and it knows more. It knows that it can have it both ways, parodying the show while constantly showing such familiarity that the jokes feel genuinely affectionate. It knows that somehow 1972 is funnier than 1966, so we get to see Barnabas come back to a world of the Carpenters and Alice Cooper. It knows that Johnny Depp is not Jonathan Frid, so his Barnabas is completely different-- a hilarious meditation on vampires in general, a reptilian, cursed, alien creature, whereas Frid's Barnabas was a rather discreet vampire most of the time, no more alien than JR Ewing. Depp is funny here, and is in almost every scene.
And man, it knows the gothic tradition. The brooding house, the tortured young ingenue, the secret pathways. If you feel you've seen all of Burton's tricks before, think of it this way: all of his tricks belong here, in Dark Shadows.
Fans of the show should love this adoring letter to Collinwood.

Dark Shadows 2012 looks AMAZING

Johnny Depp as Barnabas in the upcoming gothic satire Dark Shadows.

Dark Shadows from Tim Burton is going to be funny, and I'm thrilled. At first I kind of hated that idea-- I wasn't a big fan at first of Burton's MARS ATTACKS, for instance. But Burton clearly seems to be bringing a glorious appreciation of the famous gothic soap opera to the big screen. It looks gorgeous. If you're still a fan of the original-- or want to know what it's all about-- you can find every episode on Netflix. But the Burton/Depp Dark Shadows should probably please the fans by not at all competing with the original, and instead acting as a kind of massive skit about it. Good enough for me!

See my review of the first super-serious, super-Gothic Dark Shadows movie, Night of Dark Shadows.
Dark Shadows opens May 11, 2012.    

Johnny Depp Revives Dark Shadows: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 52

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:

Johnny Depp in Dark Shadows. I've written before how much I've recently come to love Dark Shadows:

Dark Shadows concerns a lot of things, because it's a soap opera, but chiefly it concerns vampire Barnabas Collins, who has returned to the stately Collinwood in coastal Maine, where he plots to find his lost love and control the people around him. On Netflix streaming, you can literally watch this series the way it was first intended, one episode after the other. Of course that would take years.

In the early 70s Dan Curtis produced two movies in the universe of Dark Shadows and I recommend both of them. But now we're starting to get more details about an event that has Dark Shadows fans in a tizzy-- Tim Burton directing a new Dark Shadows with Johnny Depp as Barnabas. "What I’d like to do," says Depp,"is maybe stretch [Barnabas] out a bit — in the extreme. Just ever-so-slightly take him a little further, beyond what may be considered… corny.”

I'm not sure what that means. But I know this will be good. And if it's not you've got years and years of the original to watch.

Check out the article at EW.

Stefan Petrucha on BLOOD PROPHESY, Vampires, and Barnabas Collins

I've admired Stefan Petrucha's writing for many years-- Petrucha is able to seamlessly weave stories that contemplate pop culture and deep thought together, such as in the first example I saw of his work, a legendary run of the X-Files comics. Petrucha is one of those writers who can take any assignment and hit it out of the park.

Anyway-- so I was thrilled to see that not only does Petrucha have a new vampire novel, Blood Prophecy, about a Puritan vampire trying to shed the curse, but he also has a new blog post (and book giveaway!) over at Fangtastic.

In this post, Petrucha neatly explores the vampire myth and hones in on Dark Shadows as a key moment in the evolution of all vampire literature.

Barnabas was different. Rather than a soulless metaphor for disease and/or sex, he had a soul, and thanks to it, whined constantly. To be fair, Count Dracula, in Stoker’s novel, expresses sadness at not having seen the sun for a real long time, and there may be other precursors, but I’m convinced that it’s in Barnabas the notion of vampire as someone trapped reaches fruition. (The idea may seem a bit alien to fans of the 21st century glitter-vamps who sort-of don’t like the bloodlust thing and still attend high school. These days, more often than not, the punishment aspect of vampirism has been diluted to the point of meaninglessness.)

Read the rest here.

Night of Dark Shadows: Creepy, Moody Horror

 "Mrs. Collins? Did you ever stop to think that perhaps you don't belong here?

Early on in the 1971 film Night of Dark Shadows, a writer looks out the window of a stately New England mansion and sees thickly gray skies and leaves so deep they seem an ocean. For a moment he sees someone hanging from the branches of a gnarled old tree, and then the vision is gone.

I have no history with Dark Shadows. I just discovered the series a few weeks ago (incredibly, given the prominence of it) and found myself entranced by the gothic soap opera, the great houses and endless hints at something darker beneath the surface of the characters' lives. The soap opera thrived on stretching stories out forever. The first movie, House of Dark Shadows, compressed the storyline of vampire Barnabas Collins down to one feature-length drama.

The second Dark Shadows movie, Night of Dark Shadows, is a different and better film than House of Dark Shadows. House was intended to appeal to fans of the series and worked to present the show's most popular storylines. By the second movie, the show had been canceled and the original cast had moved on. As a result, creator Dan Curtis chose to tell an all-new story of Collinwood Mansion. I think the result is a better, creepier, and more evocative horror tale.

Here, Quentin Collins inherits and returns with his new bride to his family's maginificent New England estate, Collinwood. Immediately he begins to experience ghostly visions: the hanging, old funerals, rainy processions.

Night of Dark Shadows is the perfect brandy-and-blanket movie.Everything about it evokes something cold and deep, even before the spirits arrive on the scene to interrupt the creepy piano score and gorgeous upstate New York setting. And they do appear, but this is more a witch-and-ghost movie than a vampire film.

The visions Quentin suffers are sometimes genuinely chilling, such as the sudden vision of a screaming child in a window. The movie treads along at a slow pace, like all gothics must. It is all about evoking a feeling of unease, of suspected betrayal and doom.

Mind you, this is not the sort of thing I write. I write books that start with people falling out of airplanes and ends with them stealing speedboats, and there is generally some kind of deathtrap in every chapter. I write action or action horror, depending on your preferred word. But I am haunted by the gothic, with its hidden corridors and hints of old wounds and old curses, and cold November days.

Beautiful work.


Trailer (this is a trailer for both movies; the trailer for Night of Dark Shadows starts at 2:40.)

House of Dark Shadows

Dark Shadows-- and the movie that reduces it all to a slick 90 minutes-- is a case study in gothic, true gothic, complete with governesses and long shadows, whispered secrets and vampires rising from crypts. I wanted to spend a moment on Dark Shadows before I return to my own crypt, of sorts.

The clock is ticking for me. This week I'm doing what should be the final touches on the outline for Alex Van Helsing 3, and then we get to writing that book.  I've been enjoying the break-- along the way I've written a couple of new proposals, one of which hasn't gone out and who knows if it will, and read a lot of books as well.

This past week, though, I've been watching Dark Shadows, a gothic vampire soap opera from the 1960s. It's strange to me that I never watched this show the many millions of times it's been re-run over the years. Dark Shadows fandom has been a phenomenon I was aware of but had never actually taken part in, and as with all such things I always felt a certain painful detachment, as though I should know these characters. For a vampire fan, not having watched Dark Shadows was like not having seen Bela Lugosi in Dracula. It's okay to tell someone you never got around to watching Daughters of Darkness, but Dracula?

So Dark Shadows is like that. But hark: you can now catch it streaming on Netflix streaming, which seriously I advertise so much you'd think I worked for them.

Dark Shadows concerns a lot of things, because it's a soap opera, but chiefly it concerns vampire Barnabas Collins, who has returned to the stately Collinwood in coastal Maine, where he plots to find his lost love and control the people around him. You can literally watch this series the way it was first intended, one episode after the other. But of course watching it would take years, which is why in 1970 Dan Curtis (who would go on to make one of my favorite Draculas) took his own series and made a movie out of it.

The movie, called House of Dark Shadows, is available on iTunes and through Amazon, and it retells the story of the soap opera in vivid Hammer-esque color. Here, Barnabas returns and falls in love with Maggie, a woman he believes to be the re-incarnation of his lost love (Curtis and Richard Matheson would re-use this plot in Dracula, introducing an element that everyone remembers but wasn't there in Stoker's novel). The movie has some pacing issues but what I loved most was the gloomy, gothic sense of it all, the great house, the vampires in gossamer, the unabashed use of crosses and traditional vampire trappings, and finally the absolutely jaw-dropping beauty of Barnabas' and Maggie's almost-vampire-wedding. Truly, that's some beautiful vampire imagery.

Here's the trailer. Check out House of Dark Shadows.