Dark Shadows (2012)

Written at the time of the film's bloody resurrection...

Camping Vamps and Risible Damp
or
"What Strange Terrain is This?"

"Dark Shadows" has been a cult favorite for Baby-Boomers for more than 40 years (ouch!), long before it was fashionable to have vampires as fodder for young adults. The ABC soap opera ran for several seasons of afternoons replacing the standard plot-lines of cheating spouses and long-lost family secrets with long-buried family relatives—that often didn't stay buried—and a full range of gothic ghoulery that plundered every horror story in the crypt-library, including vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein-ish monsters, time-travel, parallel dimensions and ghost stories. Why, they even robbed from "The Crucible" and "The Turn of the Screw" and got people interested in the I-Ching, for howling out loud. In fact, I kept expecting the fern in their front hallway to turn into Chthulu!

It was a TV habit of mine when I was a kid, timed perfectly to be the after-school tonic for a parochial school education, an occult chaser for the catechism, all those crucifixes I was surrounded by during the day being used for other purposes. It was also a fixation for Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, Burton digging the horror genre and Depp grooving on the character of Barnabas Collins (played by the late—or is he?—Jonathan Frid, who puts in a very brief cameo here along with a couple of other cast-mates), the reluctant vampire who pursued hearts, rather than the blood that pumped through them. The result of their dual obsessions is this version of Dark Shadows, produced by Depp, directed by Burton.

"It is said that blood is thicker than water," narrates Barnabas Collins (Depp), over the strains of Robert Colbert's alto flute-through-echoplex composition "The Secret Room" from the original series. "It binds us, confines us, curses us." For a moment, things are fairly serious as the 18th century story of young Collins scion Barnabas is unearthed, with his spurning of the witch Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) and her subsequent dark revenge, killing the Collins elders, forcing the suicide of Barnabas' love Josette and turning him into an eternally cursed vampire. She subsequently sets the townsfolk on the monster who chain him into a coffin and bury him for all eternity.

Depp and Burton get it right at the beginning: Barnabas learns his fate.

The worst-laid plans of mages and men...Eternity is cut short around 1972 as the construction of a new McDonald's in Collinswood unearths Barnabas and he lays waste to a construction crew (who must have been getting overtime working at night!) with an explanatory "You have no idea how thirsty I am!" 

On a parallel course, Maggie Evans (Bella Heathcote, the latest in a long line of Burton ingenues with thin necks topped by big heads with huge eyes and "big" hair) is on a train to Collinswood where she has applied for a job as a governess to young David Collins (Gulliver McGrath), who is having psychological issues from the disappearance of his mother at sea. Abruptly, she decides to change her name to Victoria Winters, indicating a past she wants to run away from, as The Moody Blues tune "Knights in White Satin" burbles over the soundtrack. Hey, Burton may be onto something here. The combining of '70's kitsch and some of its more mordant songs with the gothic mood of "Dark Shadows" works well, setting the tone of the series and the morbid fascination my generation had with it. Can "Don't Fear the Reaper" be far behind?

Then, things get a little weird. She's picked up by a VW van of hippies, and there's some stoned comedy about how they're so wasted, and Vicky is cool, man, and it's easy laughs and you wish it was more clever. It becomes apparent quickly that Burton will be playing this for laughs, which is fine (he always does to a certain extent), but the original material is already so melodramatic and over-the-top that the humor undercuts the effectiveness of what drama there is that ekes through the dramatic stares and the vamping poses. "Dark Shadows" was always "camp" entertainment in the broad sense, but to broaden it even further nullifies whatever chills and thrills can be drained from it. This is why Frid's performance on the show was such an anchor for it—he played it absolutely straight, and in fact, ramrod-stiff; you didn't make fun of Barnabas for fear of his wrath—or his breaking down in tears.

Depp's Barnabas is tortured, of course, but risibly so (in a performance that's a combination of Frid's formality, some Max Schreck thrown in, and a bit of Ed Wood cast-mate Martin Landau's incarnation of Bela Lugosi). And there's the "otherness" factor that Depp brings to so many of his roles, as if he's in a different movie from everybody else—he walks through it, and everybody reacts, usually comedically and derisively. In part, that's the point: it ties in with Burton's feelings growing up as being an outsider-geek, looking on at the rest of the world that he found strange, while it found him odd (and there's a mirroring through-line of humor throughout the film of Barnabas, out of his time, observing to some horror the eccentricities of 1970's life, that reflects it).*

But Collinwood's odd family doesn't bat an eye when Victoria shows up and doesn't react to the disrepair of the gothic Collinwood mansion or to David's assertion that he speaks to his dead mother, and she follows quite readily when the ghost of Josette appears floating down the hallways, whispering "He's coming..." Barnabas' arrival, in Victorian array and the palest of skin, and the oddest of manners only brings up temporary suspicions, but the matriarch of the house (Michelle Pfeiffer, who played Burton's Catwoman) readily accepts him as family, even after revealing his vampirism. The cast is uniformly fine, gamely being archly camp throughout, but the one performer who's best at it is Green, who clearly relishes the villainess role and has fun with it, taking it in some very odd, even poignant places.

It looks great. Burton's films always do, with a superb design sense and his knack for picking terrific, seemingly impossible angles to shoot from. But, like a lot of Burton films, it tends to fall apart in story, snatching hasty explanations and Deus ex machina to get out of trouble, or to provide the director with a bizarre concept that may seem right in retrospective sub-context, but that comes out of nowhere, randomly and jarringly. One has to stop, back-track, only to realize that, no, this has never been mentioned before, and why now?

One suspects it's a whim, a passing "wouldn't-it-be-crazy-if" thought passed between Depp and Burton as they geek out, rocking in their corners, internal logic no longer mattering as much as a superficial entertaining notion. As such, Dark Shadows accomplished their goals. Yeah, it's entertaining, but highly insubstantial, a mere spirit of a movie.

"Yes, yes" I hear you cry. "But, don't you think it was better than the OLD "Dark Shadows"? I mean, have you seen it lately?"

In truth, I have.

My frustration with Burton is not that he desecrated the memory of a classic television show—even with the air fragrant with the nostalgic scent of Mom's Apple Pie, I'm not convinced that "Dark Shadows" was anything more than a quickly put-together variation of soap programming with elements of gothic romance/horror tossed onto it. No, my problem with Burton's version is that he didn't try to make it better, but chose to just mock the absurdity of it. Not much sticking your neck out there, even for a vampire movie. 

But, then, maybe he didn't try because he already saw what happened when somebody did try to do it semi-seriously. That someone being show creator Dan Curtis.

House of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis, 1970) Filmed while the soap-opera was still running (and so a lot of cast-members "disappeared" for 29 days from the taping). They dragged out the "big-guns" and did a 2 hour version of the "Barnabas Arrives at Collinwood" storyline with Jonathan Frid's character withheld from sight—except for his black onyx ringed hand—until he shows up as the "lost Collins cousin from England." He meets nanny Maggie Evans (Katheryn Leigh Scott), who bears an uncanny resemblance to his lost-love Josette, Dr. Julia Hoffman's (Grayson Hall) attempts at curing him, then, in a fit of jealousy, reneging, turning him into his aged 200 year old self (make-up by the amazing Dick Smith), and a vampire-hunt that ends in a lot of Collins-family vampires. The first is Carolyn Stoddard (Nancy Barrett) who's blond, pretty, and looks good in the Hammer label of diaphanous lingerie, so a lot of screen-time is given to her—poster-acreage, too—even though Barrett was not the most skilled of actresses. The soap languished through repeated exposition and lingering looks in its story-line Monday through Thursdays and put all the "good stuff" on cliffhanger Fridays, and so, compressing it all in one movie makes the movie feel camp and hysterical. Still, once the movie gets going, Curtis starts to be a bit more free with the camera and compositions—it's like half-way through he realized he wasn't dealing with the old studio RCA TK46's anymore and could do something beyond waist-level. Still, in such a quick time-frame, the story doesn't coagulate too well and makes you realize that long-form eased the mis-match of gothic romance and horror.

Night of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis 1971) House of Dark Shadows made money, enough to green-light a sequel and, as the television series had been canceled, a newly unencumbered Curtis started on a direct sequel to the earlier film. Jonathan Frid, worried about the curse of type-casting, bowed out of participating. But, the story of Angelique Bouchard, witch and  former lover of young Barnabas, had never been told, so Curtis and series writer Sam Hall cobbled together a story of a young couple (David Selby and Kate Jackson) who inherit the Collinwood estate, only for the man to be haunted, then possessed, by the spirit of his Collins ancestor, who had an affair with his brothers' wife, Angelique (Lara Parker), resulting in her being hung as a witch, and him entombed with her. A somewhat similar story had been used in the series involving Selby as Quentin Collins, but the Angelique angle was new. Returning were John Karlen and Nancy Barrett, as well as Grayson Hall (the writer's wife) and Thayer David.

Anyone who sees Night of Dark Shadows will understandably come away from it wondering what they just saw, and if they'd missed something. They had. The film, was originally 2 hours long, but M-G-M thought that was too long for a movie they'd planned to put as the B-movie in double-bills (No, really, they used to do that), and so they insisted that Curtis cut half-an-hour out of the film—and he had 24 hours to do it. With such hack-work, any slow build-up was excised, and so Night comes off as poorly as a U.S. released foreign film that only includes highlights...and a bit of a muddle. 

Oh...and studios still do that.

* This also sets up a series of sight-gags that are somewhat clever, as Barnabas never seems to be able to find appropriate sleeping arrangements at Collinwood.