Welcome home, Barnabas Collins
Eli Roth has made a family movie. A family horror movie, to be exact. The director has returned to theaters this month with the adaptation of John Bellairs’ classic children’s novel, The House with a Clock in its Walls. The film tells the story of a young boy (Owen Vaccaro) who goes to live with his mysterious uncle (Jack Black) and odd neighbor (Cate Blanchett) in a mysterious mansion which holds a deep secret.
I’m glad Roth branched out to make The House with a Clock in its Walls, as are the critics, who have mostly praised the movie. Inspired, I decided to revisit one of my own favorite titles featuring family secrets, visiting relatives, and spooky mansions with 1970’s spectacular House of Dark Shadows.
Producer/director Dan Curtis brought this feature film version of his popular daytime supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows to the screen, retaining the characters but reworking the storylines to tell the tale of the Collinses, the most prominent family in the small town of Collinsport, Maine. After a string of strange attacks have left some of the town’s young women with bite marks on their necks, every member of the Collins clan is on edge. In the midst of this appears enters Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), the family’s long-lost cousin who suddenly appears, enchanting everyone he encounters. Unbeknownst to the rest of the Collins family, however, the newly-arrived Barnabas is actually a centuries-old vampire who has come back to take his rightful place in the family and collect his bride.
The best way to think of House of Dark Shadows is as an American Hammer horror offering. The movie retains the fun, playful, but also sinister sense of late ‘60s horror with an operatic feel thrown in. The large Collinwood mansion, the sleepy town of Collinsport, and the never ending woods in which Barnabus and his victims hunt down anyone in their sight are all perfectly gothic settings for a tale brimming over with themes of family and a haunted romance from the past. The shedding of the typical TV standards and practices meant that Curtis was allowed a blank canvas on which to paint his characters. Because of this, House of Dark Shadows emerges as a perfect extension of the daytime series, with more of a violent edge and a horrific, gothic atmosphere. Set pieces such as Daphne’s (Lisa Richards) pursuit by the hidden Barnabas, the tension-filled costume ball in which passions and suspicions are both on high levels, and the movie’s gloriously bloody over-the-top ending are all fraught with the kind of movie horror so encompassing of the era that it could only be found on a movie screen.
With the exception of 1976’s exquisite Burnt Offerings, House of Dark Shadows remains Curtis’ strongest effort as a film director squarely because of the way he transferred the essence of his masterwork to a pulsating cinematic exercise in horror. Free from the trappings of television, House of Dark Shadows is perhaps closest to Curtis’s original vision of the property. The production design, rich in color, remains appropriately gothic, thanks in large part to its autumn setting and healthier budget. Also, because House of Dark Shadows was shot as a feature, many of the inventive camera angles and moves give off a kind of dizzying, surreal feel that was indicative of that late ‘60s/early ‘70s style of filmmaking. Meanwhile, the sexual tension (always present, but obviously stifled on TV) was finally allowed to flourish on film between Barnabas and virtually every female character, perfectly illustrating the kind of forbidden naughtiness and desire oftentimes associated with the vampire genre. But it’s Curtis’ pioneering method of establishing the parallel universe which ultimately makes House of Dark Shadows most significant. Having already created a beloved brand and a stable of characters, the idea of re-fashioning them again from scratch was a bold and revolutionary artistic move which would have been a disaster. Yet it’s a testament to Curtis’ storytelling gifts that he was able to take the well-known world he created and make it seem both fresh and all the more alive.
There isn’t a whole lot to comment on in terms of performances since the actors are just slipping into roles they had by that time already come to perfectly inhabit. Many of the actors had to be temporarily written out of the show in order to film their scenes for the movie. As he did in the series, Frid holds court amongst the ensemble, further cementing Barnabas’s status as one of the most magnetic of pop culture vampires of all time. If there’s any other member of the cast who manages to stand out in Barnabas’s shadow, it’s Grayson Hall, who is finally able to showcase Julia’s tortured state in a way that only could have been achieved because of the big-screen nature of the film. Indeed, because House of Dark Shadows was a theatrical release, every actor’s performance seems more loose after being freed from the rigid time constraints of a daily TV soap opera.
Critical reaction to the film was mixed, not surprising since critics generally aren’t all that kind soap operas, let alone movies spun off from them. If the critics didn’t like it, the Dark Shadows fans did. Released at the peak of the show’s popularity, the die hard devotees of the supernatural soap leaped at the chance to see their favorite characters on the big screen, turning House of Dark Shadows into a profitable hit and even spawning off a sequel, the less fun but still entertaining Night of Dark Shadows the following year.
The popularity of Dark Shadows has never once wavered. Fans have lapped up syndicated episodes since the show’s end, prompting a short-lived prime time reboot in the early ‘90s and another big screen version from Tim Burton in 2012, which opted for more tongue-in-cheek humor than straight horror. In spite of the popularity surrounding Curtis’ greatest artistic endeavor, House of Dark Shadows was nowhere to be found following a VHS release which quickly went out-of-print. Although Burton’s film was decried from fans and non-fans alike, its presence did reignite interest in the franchise from the studio, who appropriately gave House of Dark Shadows and its aforementioned sequel the proper DVD/Blu-ray treatment. As the original series made history by becoming one of the only daytime soap operas to have its entire run released on home video, House of Dark Shadows remains the ultimate entry in Dark Shadows canon for the way its creator took the story-driven nature of his characters and draped them over the big screen, capturing the purest elements of his creation and realizing their fullest potential.
