I've been thinking of Dark Shadows a lot. I miss it. Like Pro Keds commercials, Jonny Quest, and Space Ghost (the original, not the talk show).
I was disappointed in the recent Johnny Depp version. If you were going to do a Dean Martin Roast of Dark Shadows, you would do the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp wackiness. They obviously didn't take the show seriously.
I suppose you could look at the old shows and all the mishaps on set and the forgetting of lines and deduce this was Keystone Cop Vampires but I didn't end up going there. I think the way the show was set-up filming half-live with a very serious deadline to meet fit perfectly with what its artistic goal was.
I'm assuming that goal was terror and the evocation of half-alive creatures stuck in a fate worse than death. The actors were all placed in a tangential vortex and were permanently deprived of a comfort zone. Imagine the terror of having millions witness you having no idea where you were in the script, in the story, in the blocking, anywhere. Like trying to terminate your cell phone account.
I'm not saying I'm a method actor. Or that I believe in "preparation" other than memorizing your lines and knowing your blocking. But the theatrical situation of Dark Shadows was method acting done to perfection.
The actors daily were going to be placed in an impossible situation and told "see what you can do with that." They used their fears as fuel and you can see the fires they lit with it on screen as the dramatic trap set for them screamed across their faces. Faithfully, they went to their executions.
Some of those "traps" were real. How many times did they threaten to burn the set down? Did you laugh or go Oh My God when the crew got caught on film? What a bizarre situation it was when the camera caught another camera following characters into a room. It was like another perversion of time travel only on this occasion the Collins family was haunted by the coming of automation, mechanical monsters from the future like Depp and Burton baptizing them as cute little puppets from a lost era.
I think we should bring Dark Shadows back. I'm of a mind that there should be a Southern Branch of the Collins brood and a dark mansion that is the hub of a plantation. A Southern Gothic version but embued with very serious gut-wrenching explorations of the "situational" horrors of slavery as lived out in exploitational vampirism, the human struggle with inner monstrosity, taming it or vomiting it out in bloodsucking and broody revenge upon one's fellow "man" with heaping helpings of the zombification of the "labor force".
The history of American "Magic" would play out, especially its Voodoo/Hoodoo incarnations and African liberation theology witches doing by "any means necessary" spells. The native sorcerers in the woods. Werewolf soldiers and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Frederick Douglass. Vampire slayer.
Well, it is a David Selby/Lara Parker remembrance. The slight hint of the southern accent and the scenarios it builds in your mind of the kind of gothic horror Faulkner or McCarthy might forge.
A Couple of Shady Places
