ark Shadows, created by producer/director Dan Curtis, is a pop-culture phenomenon. The series ran for a half-hour each weekday from 1966-1971. The success led to two feature films—House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows. The gothic soap opera has a cult following reaching Beatlemania proportions and a fan base that stretches over three decades.
Other movies Curtis directed included Burnt Offerings and Trilogy of Terror 2. His TV movies The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler led to the Kolchak: The Night Stalker series. Curtis and his Dan Curtis Productions remade such classics for the tube as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula (1972) and Frankenstein (1973).
Other TV movies included The Norliss Tapes, Scream of the Wolf, Trilogy of Terror and Dead of Night (1977). At that time, he was dubbed "television's king of horror." In the 1980s, he made the mainstream made-for-television movies The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, based on the books by Herman Wouk.
Dark Shadows has now been resurrected on DVD, starting out with the introduction of Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) in episode #210 from April 1967. The DVD sets of 40 episodes on four discs will be coming out quarterly from MPI Home Video. The first set was released the last week of May and the next set will be issued in late August.
Why do you think Dark Shadows has had such a devoted following for over 35 years?
Curtis: If I knew the answer to that I'd be a genius. Obviously it has some kind of deep-seated appeal that reaches down into the bowels and the hearts of the viewers. It's not just a horror story, it's a romance story that crosses centuries as well. It's a reincarnation story of lost love. It can be very scary at times, with a lot of imaginative twists and interesting characters.
It has a universal appeal, because it appealed to people of all ages and continues to appeal. It wasn't just a question of would it appeal to kids in the late '60s. It seems to appeal to all who watch it.
Of the 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, what were your favorite storylines?
Curtis: My favorite story is when Victoria Winters (Alexandra Moltke) goes into the past and we find out how Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) became a vampire, the whole Angelique (Parker) story and the cursing him and all that whole business.
You introduced Barnabas Collins in episode 210. Was the vampire going to be just a short-term character?
Curtis: I had turned the show supernatural and I was going to see how far I could go with it in terms of how much the audience was going to buy it. I put on a vampire, which I consider the scariest of all supernatural creatures. That's how it happened.
When Barnabas Collins turned into such a huge hit, I couldn't kill him off, which I had originally intended to do. I had to find a way to keep him alive.
Why did you kill off Barnabas Collins in the end of the House of Dark Shadows movie?
Curtis: That is what I always wanted to do with that story, but I couldn't on the television series. So I did it in the movie.
If one looks very closely, right around the time of the credits, you see a bat fly up towards the camera, which would have given us the opportunity to come back and do a sequel. It's a little hidden fact that probably nobody knows [laughs].
What are your thoughts on Kolchak: The Night Stalker series?
Curtis: I had nothing to do with the series. I made the first two pictures. I made the original, which was the big hit, The Night Stalker. Then I made The Night Strangler. I didn't want to do the series. I had nothing to do with the series, the monster-of-the-week formula of what happened to Kolchak after the first two movies.
Over the years, there has been a lot of comparisons made between The X-Files and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. What are your views on this?
Curtis: I could never understand that. I don't know what the similarity is.
We never do discover what happens to Norliss by the end of The Norliss Tapes. What do you think happened to Norliss?
Curtis: [Laughs.] That was supposed to be a pilot for a series. I just left everyone up in the air. When they didn't pick it up as a series, I laughed my ass off.
What do I think happened to him? I have no idea. [Laughs.]
Trilogy of Terror is famous for the last story, about the Zuni fetish doll that chases Karen Black with a big knife. Was the Zuni doll done with puppets or stop-motion photography?
Curtis: We had ourselves a hand puppet and another puppet that had a rod stuck up its ass and was held up above the floor. The floor of the set was held up by risers. We cut lines into the floor that were covered by the carpet and we had some idiot underneath running with this thing that moved [the puppet's] arms up and down and its legs. It was pathetic. [Laughs.] It was the worst-looking thing I had ever seen.
This was done in desperation. It was the last day of shooting and everyone went home. I kept the puppeteer there. I said to him, "I'm going to get a bunch of close-ups of this thing against a black [backdrop] and you stick your hand in that puppet and just have it open its mouth—keep it moving within and without of the frame."
So I basically made it all work in the cutting room. I sped those shots up by skip-framing them, I flopped them over to make them go from left to right and right to left. The knife would jump from one hand to another—but nobody had ever noticed that. It was against black. I would cut to it anytime I wanted.
I shot the whole thing in four days.
Why did you get out of the horror field in the late '70s?
Curtis: I was just getting so tired of doing it. It is a very difficult thing to do, to do a horror film properly and make it good. Far more difficult than a normal drama.
I love scary stuff, so it was fun. I was just hungering for the time to do real stories, dealing with real people, where every line isn't suspect, where you didn't have to constantly squeak the door.
That is why horror films stink. Because people don't know what the hell they are doing, they think it's a horror film and they can do anything. They can't. They do a horror film, they have to be really careful. You have to use logic. Just because there is a ghost or a monster involved, it can't become totally illogical, and if you do that—and they always do—you lose the audience completely. All
realism and believability is gone. They never know how to end these things.
I used to say, "Anybody can write a horror story if you didn't have to end it."
I just ran out. I couldn't come up with another great scary idea. I couldn't find any existing material. I just wanted to forget it and put horror behind me.
Any last words?
Curtis: Dark Shadows will live forever.
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