Dark Shadows 50th Anniversary In Hollywood, California

Happy Halloween.

As a new arrival to (too) sunny Southern California, we were at loose ends for a way to celebrate the holiday.  We were also saddened that the heroic efforts necessary to move us from New York to California necessitated our missing the Dark Shadows 50^th Anniversary in Lyndhurst.  So … imagine our delight upon learning that we could celebrate both Halloween and the Dark Shadows 50^th in Hollywood.

The West Coast Dark Shadows 50^th Anniversary Celebration took place at the Hollywood Women’s Club on October 29^th.  Despite some logistical problems, the event was a great success to devotees who have kept the show alive in their own unique subculture.

We are only an occasional visitor to the imaginary world of Collinsport, Maine.  The show was often derivative and labyrinthine in its plotting; but, it is also strangely irresistible.  And most important, it was a study in mood above all else, and as a distillation of the Gothic sensibility, it was hard to beat.

The gathering started with a slate of bloopers from the original program (bloopers that aired … most of the series was shot in a single take).  The first celebrity guest was John Karlen, who played Willie Loomis, the Renfield cognate to vampire Barnabas Collins.  Now in his 80s a quite frail, Karlen is a wonderfully crusty character who told terrific stories of 1960s New York.  He also related with relish that actor Jonathan Frid was at his best with a vodka in hand; Frid was delighted with the show, said Karlen, as it afforded him the ability to have a great New York apartment and view.

One of the more interesting guests was Mary O’Leary, who worked as booker and press agent for Frid’s various one-man shows.  She was a great source of anecdote and provided wonderful insights into the somewhat mysterious Frid.

The show’s composer, Robert Corbert, a dapper and salty 92 year old, regaled the crowd with stories of working with the mercurial and flamboyant Dan Curtis.  It is not every convention when a 92 year old jokingly puts the make on a young woman asking a question from the audience (“I’m 92 so don’t expect much, but I’m a great kisser”), and Corbert was the highlight of the event.

A panel with the first season stars: Kathryn Leigh-Scott and James Hall (the original Willie Loomis) was diverting, as well as a group discussion with Jerry Lacy, James Storm (who had to leave for a coughing fit) and Lisa Richards.  Lacy was quite amusing, but we wish he had more to say about Woody Allen and his stint in Play It Again, Sam.

It was interesting to see original series swain Roger Davis age into an entrepreneurial architect who spent a great deal of his time on stage talking about suing previous business partners.  More interesting was his chatting about an exchange between the then-26 year old Davis had with then-37 year old Tab Hunter.  Davis told Hunter that the studio was grooming him as “the next Tab Hunter.”  Hunter’s reply seemed to be both amused and wary:  “oh….?”

Actress Lara Parker, who so memorably played Angelique in the original series (and was, perhaps, the most compelling character after Barnabas Collins), was on hand to debut her new Dark Shadows novel, Heiress of Collinwood.  This is her fourth (and final) novel in the series, and the actress was battling a severe case of laryngitis, which prevented her from reading from her new book.  But she graciously took questions from the audience, and helped turn her appearance into more of a discussion than a presentation.  Many people in the audience provided theories on the reason Dark Shadows has proven so enduring … and she told stories of how the cast would attend the dailies and cringe – cringe – at their performances.  “We were all so … stilted,” she recalls.  “But … Dark Shadows is one of those things that gets better as time goes on.  Because it was so risky, and so unique.  And we were NY actors who didn’t guy the material … it was over-the-top, but not tongue-in-cheek.  We made it work.”

Parker also noted an important distinction:  Dark Shadows was an exercise in Gothic Romance, and not in Gothic Horror.  Gothic Romance has imagination – it generates terror, not horror.  She said, “Horror is your reaction to what has already happened.  You draw away from it, not toward it.  Terror is a delightful, creepy … expectation.  It’s a mood rather than a reaction.”

We read the first three of Parker’s novels with great interest … and found The Salem Branch to be particularly wonderful.  In it, she slightly refashioned Barnabas Collins into a sort of undead aesthete.  Now human and dealing in antique carpets, more of his Oscar Wilde-ish underpinnings come to the foreground, making his character more rounded, interesting and consistent.  It is a wonderful book, and a shining example of all that Dark Shadows can be when done with intelligence and panache.

In the months to come, we will be writing on how Dark Shadows is a continuation of the great Penny Dreadful tradition, and how the series owes much of its canon to Varney the Vampire.