Vampire Soap Opera Dark Shadows Crept into Film 50 Years Ago

It’s unusual, but not unheard of, for a TV series to break out into theaters as the regular show continues to run on television. It’s slightly more common with animation (or puppetry), with examples like The Simpsons, South Park, and The Muppet Show all pulling it off during their runs. In terms of live-action, the list is much smaller, with notable efforts being the 1960s Batman and The X-Files, which scored a hit film between seasons five and six of the series. However, Dark Shadows managed to put a feature film on the big screen featuring a number of main cast members while the series continued to run daily. It wasn’t a surprise that the show bucked tradition or expectations; after all, it had been doing just that since its 1966 debut.

Dark Shadows was the brainchild of Dan Curtis, a writer, director, and producer whose output had a seismic impact on the horror television genre. Over the years, Curtis hopped back and forth between television and film. His 1975 TV movie Trilogy of Terror, based on three stories by Richard Matheson, is routinely listed among the best horror films ever made for the medium. He adapted a number of classic horror novels for TV to great success, including the 1973 version of Dracula with Jack Palance in the lead. In the 1980s, he adapted Herman Wouk’s World War II novels The Winds of War and War and Remembrance into a pair of mini-series that were nominated for a combined 19 Emmy Awards, Remembrance winning for Best Mini-Series. He also directed The Night Stalker, the film that introduced Jeff Rice’s intrepid reporter character Carl Kolchak to wider audiences; the 1972 TV film was the highest rated TV film of all time at that point, with 48 percent of all TV viewers in the U.S. tuned into the movie on the night it ran. That film led to a hit sequel, The Night Strangler, and the spin-off series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Curtis formed the idea of Dark Shadows around a dream he had of a woman on a train. Encouraged by his wife, his successfully pitched his concept of a Gothic soap opera to ABC in 1965. He teamed up with Art Wallace, a seasoned writer with years of genre TV experience, to flesh out the overall idea and story bible for the new series. Wallace and Curtis wrote the first eight weeks of the series (40 episodes), and then Wallace traded back and forth with screenwriter and playwright Francis Swann on the next nine weeks.

Flyover shot of the original Dark Shadows mansion
The Carey Mansion of Rhode Island was used in exterior shots in Dark Shadows (Wangkun Jia / Shutterstock)

 

The series began by leaning on the more traditional tropes of Gothic romance, with Curtis’s “woman on the train” becoming Victoria Winters, who was drawn into a Jane Eyre-inspired plotline. Less than a year into the run of the show, ratings were less than great. In an effort to boost interest, Curtis went all-in on the horror angle by introducing vampire Barnabas Collins, played by Jonathan Frid. The show exploded in popularity, picking up three million viewers in a year. The daily timeslot (usually 4 p.m., though it had runs at 3:30 p.m.) gave teens the chance to discover the show after school, and they became a solid component of the audience. Emboldened by their success with Barnabas, the creators went full steam ahead with ghosts, witches, werewolves, and more. Time-travel became a component, with entire weeks of the series spent in different time periods; of course, Barnabas (as a vampire) and others could appear up and down the timeline, while some actors simply played their ancestors or descendants as needed.

A scene from House of Dark Shadows (Uploaded to YouTube by Warner Bros. Entertainment)

With the show, and Barnabas in particular, taking off, Curtis started pitching for a theatrical film spin-off and sold MGM on the idea. One early concept had the creative team re-editing series episodes into a film, but that was abandoned in favor of doing a tight, film-length version of Barnabas’s main story. Curtis and the writers and producers of the daily show coordinated to write out the necessary members of the main cast for when they would needed during the six-week film shoot. Some of the same sets and locations were used. However, the film milieu obviously provided greater leverage for violence and scares, allowing for things that were out on TV (like dripping blood from vampire fang-induced neck wounds) to be shown. The film was released on August 25, 1970, and while it wasn’t a runaway success, it did double its budget, allowing MGM to greenlight a second film.

The Night of Dark Shadows trailer (Uploaded to YouTube by Warner Bros. Entertainment)

Unfortunately, the ratings for the daily show started to taper off. After a high of seven to nine million viewers a day in mid-to-late 1969, viewership went into a skid. There are a number of theories for this, running from the 1970 recession forcing budget cuts, to the loss of ratings leading to local stations dropping the show and feeding a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Whatever the final reason, Dark Shadows aired its last episode on April 2, 1971. A few months later, the second film, Night of Dark Shadows, hit theaters. This time, due to the unavailability of Jonathan Frid, who had gone on to other projects after the cancellation of the series, the movie focused on Barnabas Collins’s descendant Quentin and the witch Angelique. At the last minute, MGM forced Curtis to cut more than 35 minutes from the film to get its run-time down; all involved felt this hurt the film in a number of ways. When the movie opened, it made back its budget, but that was it for the original TV and film incarnations of Dark Shadows.

Over the years, the show has been subject to a number of reboot attempts. NBC put a new version on the air in early 1991, starring Ben Cross as Barnabas. Initial ratings were huge, but the show was quickly derailed by pre-emptions brought on by ongoing coverage of the Gulf War. The show was cancelled after a single season. A pilot was made for the WB in 2004, but didn’t get a series order. Tim Burton directed a new big-screen version in 2012, which starred his frequent collaborator Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins; although the film made money, it was something of an overall miss. Jonathan Frid put in a cameo for the film, which was his last screen appearance before he passed away that year. Since the fall of 2019, Warner Bros. Television and The CW have been developing a sequel to the original series, tentatively titled Dark Shadows: Reincarnation. Dan Curtis passed in 2006, but his daughters Tracy and Cathy hold the rights to the series and are involved in the production of the potential new version.

The work of Dan Curtis in general and Dark Shadows in particular continues to resonate across media. The X-Files creator Chris Carter spoken often of the debt his show owed to Kolchak. You can see its echoes in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, among others, and in the number of daytime soaps that adopted supernatural plotlines, including Days of Our Lives and the almost entirely supernatural General Hospital spin-off, Port Charles. Perhaps a new version will jump up and seize the zeitgeist again; maybe it will even be popular enough to produce new films while the new series runs. If Dark Shadows has taught us anything, it’s that nothing stays dead for long.

Featured image: Ironika / Shutterstock

How the Queen of Soaps Created a Television Dynasty

Soap operas remain part of everyday American entertainment, but like anything in our culture, they had to start somewhere. These Are My Children, the first daytime soap, launched 70 years ago today, but the roots of the genre reach further back, first through primetime TV, and then into radio. One common thread unites all of those milestones, and her name was Irna Phillips, “The Queen of Soaps.”

The first daytime soap opera on the radio in the United States was called Painted Dreams; the 15-minute daily show debuted in October, 1930 on Chicago’s WGN. Irna Phillips, who was already a radio actress, created the show after a request from the station for a dramatic program centered on a family. The term “soap opera” began to get applied to this type of programming as the sponsors were frequently the creators of home and cleaning products, like Procter & Gamble, and the melodrama drew comparisons to operas, about which unhappy endings are an oft-invoked cliché.

Phillips pioneered a number of ideas that became part of the form. She came up with the notion of transition music between scenes (called the “organ bridge”) and ended episodes on a cliffhanger. A legal battle over ownership of the show drove Phillips to rival radio station WMAQ where she put together a clone of the program with renamed characters and rechristened the show Today’s Children. She then created a hospital-set radio show called Woman in White. During the production of that show, Phillips hired two people who would also be huge figures in the genre: Agnes Nixon and William J. Bell.

In 1937, Phillips created a new radio show, The Guiding Light. It would run on various networks until 1952, when it would make the switch to TV and run on CBS until 2009. But Phillips’s first television breakthrough was These Are My Children. First airing on January 31, 1949, the show aped the format of Painted Dreams and Today’s Children, following Irish widow Mrs. Henehan, her three children, and her daughter-in-law. It was only on the air a month, but by then, the dam had been broken.

After Guiding Light transitioned to success on TV, Phillips continued to creative shows with great staying power. In 1956, she created another CBS show, As the World Turns; by 1958, Turns became the highest-rated daytime drama, and would hold that distinction for more than 20 years. In 1964, Phillips and Bell co-created Another World for NBC; they would later turn the showrunner duties over to James Lipton (yes, he of Inside the Actor’s Studio), and he would later hand it off to another former Phillips apprentice, Agnes Nixon. Philips herself would be profiled by The Saturday Evening Post in 1960 in a piece you can read below.

The creative legacy of Phillips is unparalleled in the daytime genre. She created or co-created nearly two dozen programs for TV and radio. She consulted for other shows like Peyton Place and was a story editor for Days of Our Lives. Phillips also pioneered producer ownership of shows; after the lawsuit debacle involving Painted Dreams, she never again created a show that she didn’t at least partially own. Phillips’s independent streak extended to fighting for storylines; she quit her show Love is a Many Splendored Thing at CBS in the late ’60s after battling with the censors over storylines involving abortion and an interracial relationship between a white man and Amerasian woman. Her daughter, Kathleen, followed her mother into television, creating the show A World Apart in the ’70s (which featured one of the first roles for a young Susan Sarandon).

Phillips’s creative disciples stacked massive achievements atop her legacy. Bell became head writer on Days of Our Lives in 1966 and would go on to create (with his wife, Lee Phillip Bell) The Young & The Restless and The Bold & The Beautiful. The Bell children continue that family tradition today, with son Bradley serving as executive producer and head writer of Bold while daughter Lauralee remains a mainstay of the Restless cast in the role of Christine “Cricket” Blair. William Bell’s colleague Agnes Nixon forged her own path, creating One Life to Live, All My Children, and Loving (which later became The City).

Looking back now, it’s fair to say that the daytime soap opera genre rests firmly on the foundation put down by Irna Phillips. These Are My Children didn’t last long, but Phillips took the basic concepts, combined it with a fierce, independent spirit, and build a genre that has withstood the test of time. Whatever your personal opinion of daytime drama might be, it has entertained millions while being a durable staple of two broadcast mediums. One could speculate on how long the format can continue in the digital age, but we wouldn’t bet against something that’s always ready to continue tomorrow.

Feature Image: The radio cast of Guiding Light from 1940. Front row from left: Ruth Bailey (Rose Kransky), Gladys Heene (Torchy Reynolds), Dr. John Ruthledge, Mignon Schreiber (Mrs. Kransky), Muriel Bremner (Fredericka Lang), Betty Arnold (Iris Marsh), Back row from left: Bill Bouchey (Charles Cunningham), Paul Barnes (Jack Felzer), Phil Dakin (Ellis Smith), Seymour Young (Jacob Kransky). (Wikimedia Commons via Public Domain)

First page of the article "Madam Soap Opera"
In the June 25, 1960 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, writer Peter Wyden profiles Irna Phillips, the woman they called “Madam Soap Opera.” Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.