At the estate of the wealthy Collins-Staddard family, Willie Loomis (John Karlen), an unstable employee, opens a sealed chest, freeing the vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid). Barnabas takes the identity of a distant cousin from England and turns Carolyn Stoddard (Nancy Barrett) into a vampire. He also meets Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott), who looks like Barnabas’s long dead love. After a few bodies are discovered with neck wounds, Dr. Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) figures out who the vampire is and decides to attempt to cure him. Professor Stokes (Thayer David) also deduces the identity of the vampire, but he plans to kill him.
There was a time when only Dracula was a better known vampire than Barnabas Collins, and discussions of the great fanged actors always included Bela Lagosi, Christopher Lee, and Jonathan Frid. But time has not been kind to the residents of Collinsport, and while they deserved to fade somewhat from the public consciousness, it’s still a bit sad they have all but vanished.
A supernatural soap opera in the late ‘60s was an audacious concept. Sure, the pacing was river-of-sludge slow (well, that hasn’t changed for soap operas), the dialog was less poetic than the phonebook and not nearly as realistic, the acting was somewhere between pre-school pageant and Paris Hilton, and the cinematography was inferior to tying the camera to a swing and just giving it a shove, but this was still a soap opera with a vampire, a werewolf, witches, and any number of things that would have upset my grandma. You have to love Dark Shadows, in theory anyway.
If you want to see what the fuss was about, House of Dark Shadows is the way to do it. It condenses multiple seasons of the soap into ninety-seven minutes, and adds color and passable production values as bonuses. But outside of curiosity, there’s no compelling reason to take this trip.
The story follows the standard for vampire films, with little variation. Barnnabas isn’t a bad vampire, and Carolyn is a better than average bride of the vampire, but Stokes is even more annoying than the usual Van Helsing, and the heroic male who comes to save the day doesn’t get enough screen time for me to remember his name. With the brief running time, a lot of characters are given short shrift. It is assumed that viewers will remember who is who from the series. Perhaps a reasonable assumption in 1970.
There are plenty of flaws to pick at (like why does Stokes believe in vampires? Why does everyone else listen to him? What is the law in that section of Maine that allows the police force to replace their weapons with crosses and shove a stake through the chest of a girl in her underwear?), but the problem is deeper. It is a low rent project, and everything about it is sub par. That’s not surprising as this is a Dan Curtis production. With works like Burnt Offerings and Scream of the Wolf on his resume, it’s best to keep expectations low when his name appears.