r/DarkShadows

I got an email from Big Finish today. If you’ve never checked out their audio dramas you are really missing out. Original cast voice their characters from our favourite gothic soap! Pre order for July 30th release!

I was given this book for Christmas in 1998. In 2001 I went to the Dark Shadows convention in NYC (held at the Marriott World Trade Center 2-3ish weeks before 9/11 crazy enough) and had it signed by Lara Parker!! She was so kind and wrote such a sweet inscription. This book has obv been well loved and is one of my most treasured possessions!! Thought I would share it with the group! Did anyone else love this book??

In my recent rewatch, I'm up to the first few weeks of the dreaded Leviathan storyline. Ironically, it seems like watching DS becomes much like the typical arc of a Lovecraft story: Some dreadful dire darkness is on the horizon. No matter what you do, an unnameable stygian horror will come to overwhelm your favorite show and plunge it into chaotic horror!

But anyway, maybe this is a hot take, but I don't think the Leviathan story is the catastrophe that it's usually made out to be. Yes, it's a letdown after the series highs of the 1897 storyline, but any story they ran after that story wrapped up was gonna pale in comparison.

Of course, everyone zeroes in on the Lovecraftian elements in the story, but I do think this story was influenced as much by "Rosemary's Baby" and the Italian giallo movement.

Polanski's film was a massive era-defining hit just a year earlier and would spawn a whole sub-genre of ripoff movies that lasted throughout the 1970s. It was also, unfortunately, back in the spotlight a year after its release due to the murder of Polanski's wife Sharon Tate (before the Manson family were ID-ed as the killers, many people thought she might have been murdered by Satanists as retribution for exposing their secret underground.) Given the amount of "influences" Dan Curtis had the writers incorporate into the show, it was only a matter of time that the show introduced a demon seed baby.

But what strikes me most during this rewatch is the influence of giallo horror. The genre was getting more popular at this time (it hit its peak in the mid 70s) and the influences are all there: the mysterious stranger in a trenchcoat lurking around in the background (Paul Stoddard and - to an extent - Barnabas); lots of saturated colors (particularly deep reds); the extremely tight close-ups of actor's faces; the slow-paced, mostly dialogue-free scenes as some off-screen horror approaches a character. I can see why Curtis THOUGHT this would work on a daytime soap.

Unfortunately, the crucial element that DS misses from giallo horror is the most important one: transgressive gore. The glacial pacing of giallo movies is an intentional counterpoint to the scenes of violent mayhem that punctuate them. Part of the thrill of watching a giallo film is seeing something you know you shouldn't be seeing. But of course, that's not gonna be happening on a network daytime soap. They can show Megan Todd flitting about the antique shop all they want, but it's never gonna end with a rusty nail being rammed into her eyeball. Without that transgressive element, it just doesn't work.

Nevertheless, I do give the show props for at least trying something different. That is essentially what is so great about the show: It was willing to take BIG risks and go in directions that conventional wisdom said you just CAN'T go. When it worked (Barnabas, 1795, 1897) it worked spectacularly well. When it didn't (Adam, the dream curse, Leviathans) - you just have to chalk it up to a swing and a miss.

Anyway, does anybody else have thoughts about it?

Dark Shadows charity fanzine Daytime Gothic is now at the printers and will be released on July 20.

Pre-order now from

https://tenacrefilms.bigcartel.com/product/daytime-gothic-ii-celebrating-tvs-supernatural-soap-opera-dark-shadows

Daytime Gothic is a full-colour charity magazine celebrating 60 years of Dark Shadows, with 160 pages of features, interviews, rartwork, fiction and humour, illustrated with rare and previously unseen photographs from the archives of Dan Curtis Productions. Highlights include…

⚫ Lara and Kathryn: a wide-ranging interview by Kathryn Leigh Scott, conducted shortly before Lara's death in 2023, with special photography by James Storm and Valerie Pronio Storm

⚫ Rare photos from Jonathan Frid’s 1968 publicity tour

⚫Oscar-winning screenwriter John Logan reveals everything he learned from watching Dark Shadows

⚫ The story of how a unique Dark Shadows behind the scenes film was discovered in the archives of the BBC

⚫ Unpublished interview extracts with actor Mitchell Ryan

⚫ Series creator Dan Curtis celebrated with a look at his unproduced biographical screenplay and an unpublished interview with the man himself from 1968

⚫ Mark B. Perry tackles the thorny question… was Dark Shadows truly camp?

⚫ How Art Wallace’s 1953 teleplay The House built the foundations for Dark Shadows

⚫ Dr. Julia Hoffman: the making of a Dark Shadows icon

⚫ Chris Pennock remembered by friend and collaborator Ansel Faraj

⚫ Podcaster Penny Dreadful on dream Dark Shadows merchandise

⚫ The chaotic backstage saga of Dark Shadows’ short-lived Canadian rival Strange Paradise

⚫ A closing letter from David Selby… and much more!

Proceeds from Daytime Gothic will benefit Peace4Kids, in memory of Lara Parker. Edited by Stuart Manning. Format: 160 pages; full colour, 16.5 x 24 cm, perfect-bound

Today, it’s an uber dark and stormy day where I
Live. What better way to enjoy than by rewatching episode 212. I’ll confess I know Barnabas’ monologue by heart…🤦‍♀️ Anywho, this and episode 233 where he tells Vicki and Carolyn about the night Josette fell from Widows Hill. Two of my favorite episodes of his….Third is when he walls up spoiler in 1795…Thats just to name a few. Anyone have any favorite moments?

My offspring works at a used bookstore, she texted me this morning that these had just turned up,$5.00 for each, I got there as fast as I could 😂

Was so excited to find these both while going around to different thrift stores yesterday!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tPlkmgJi998&t=126s&pp=0gcJCU4LAYcqIYzv&ra=m

For those of us who weren’t able to make it to this, I found it on YouTube. Hope this is allowed

1897 is my favorite overall storyline , but it does get wrapped far too abruptly. It seems like the fates of several characters are left dangling.

The one that upsets me the most is Magda. She simply disappears from the story. She's briefly back-burnered when Julia travels back in time, but then Julia fades out of 1897 and Magda never reappears. I think the last time she appears is when Petofi pulls the mind/body swap with Quentin. Quentin (in Petofi's body) tries to convince Magda that he's really Quentin, but she doesn't believe him and runs away.

She's next heard (but not seen) as a disemboded voice that Julia hears when the show returns to 1969, and that's it for Magda! No wrap up, no ending - happy or otherwise. She was such an important character to the story and doesn't even make it to the end of it! They could have at least wrote some brief moment where Julia (in 1969) is looking over Old House ledgers and makes a passing remark about "A gypsy woman named Magda lived here until her death in 19xx..."

When a lame character like Adam (or Tim Shaw for that matter) gets dropped on a dime, I don't care that much. But I'm a little upset that such an important and fun character like Magda could just be dropped like that. Does her post-1897 life get explored much in any extended media?