Memories from the Dark Shadows

When I was eight I couldn’t wait for the bus to stop at the end of my street after school.

School got out late in those days, and I didn’t get to my stop until about 3:30.

But that was ok. Because there was still a half hour until 4:00. I could dash down the street, hopefully not being chased by one of the neighborhood bullies that seemed far too prevalent in my town, toss my school books aside and grab a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies from the cupboard before squatting in front of the TV.

What came on at four, you might ask? What made an eight-year-old boy frantically run home from school?

You’ve probably guessed it, because if you are reading this blog chances are you did the exact same thing. Felt the same prickle of excitement in the pit of your stomach and shiver of anticipation as the eerie theme song played.

It was time for Dark Shadows.

I’m not exactly sure how, at that age, I got away with watching a program that included overt horror elements, other than the fact my mother was totally hooked on it, too. My parents balked at me watching The Wild Wild West and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea because of their violent aspects.

Dark Shadows, though, was downright scary for its time. And totally addicting. It was vampire and werewolf crack and I was a spook fiend. I got nightmares. Remember the episodes where the headless corpse lay in the woods, waiting to grab unsuspecting young women? Or when said corpse’s greenish ghoul head, the warlock Judah Zachary, opened his eyes in the glass case? The werewolf Quentin Collins (who under some mysterious burden of his curse also shrank six inches when the full moon rose and he sprouted fangs and quaffed fur), he whose sideburns were just too cool—we said “groovy” in those days—to a young boy? The beautiful witch, Angelique?

And of course the resident vampire hero, Barnabas Collins, played to perfection by Jonathan Frid.

Neighborhood kids, who already thought I was weird enough for reading comic books, couldn’t understand why I wasn’t out playing ball or some such after school. My parents were a little concerned about my horror and superhero addictions, too.

So much so, that for a time, they banned me from watching my favorite daily show. It was torture. I was given a choice: go out and play or stay in my room.

I chose my room, because I knew my mom couldn’t stop watching the show and I could hear every scary nugget of dialog through the wall.

After a month or so they relented and I was back in front of the TV. I even got a Barnabas Collins game with glow-in-the-dark skeletons for my birthday that year, though I didn’t tell the neighbor kids. Why ask for trouble? I still have the plastic fangs that came with it.

The day the show went off the air in April of ’71 was one of the saddest days of my young life. There was little reason to run home from school after that, except for the bullies. I got the Dark Shadow comic books by Gold Key and the Viewmaster reels but it wasn’t the same.

Most folks might wonder why I enjoyed scaring myself everyday at four. The answer is easy: Dark Shadows was like a year-round Halloween Haunted House or scary hayride. You know something is going to jump out of the dark and scare the crap out of you, but you also know it’s not real. It’s a tension release, a rush. An escape from the real world fears, worries, a child, or even an adult, can’t process without going nuts, the overwhelming. It made being scared fun, and controllable.

Dark Shadows had a huge influence on me as a kid and is probably the primary reason I love to write supernatural novels and stories like my series THE CHLOE FILES today. The reason I love to scare readers, help them escape. In fact, my horror novels NIGHT DEMONS and GRIMM owe much to the gothic soap and there are a number of references to the show in the books. NIGHT DEMONS, particularly, is an homage. And I even named the witch in GRIMM and THE CHLOE FILES Angelique (Ficatier).

If not for Dark Shadows I doubt I would be writing horror and paranormal today, or perhaps writing at all. Dark Shadows led me to another lifetime love, pulp hero Doc Savage. I never would have picked up a Doc book called Brand of the Werewolf, whose cover featured the Man of Bronze, as he is called, locked in a desperate struggle against a werewolf. Doc Savage inspired my first non-fiction and fiction. But Dark Shadows started it all for me. To this day it tickles the kid inside me who still loves werewolves and vampires, witches and ghosts. It still fills me with spooky wonder and inspires me to give a bit of that back to my readers.

There’ll be a new Dark Shadows movie soon, starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins.(The original Barnabas, Jonathan Frid, along with Lara Parker, Kathryn Lee Scott, David Selby from the soap, and horror icon Christopher Lee will be doing cameos in the film.) It won’t be the same as those old school days, running home to switch on the big cabinet TV. But I’ll be there, hoping to escape to that far away gothic world just for a couple hours, and searching for that shivering thrill I felt as a child.

How ‘bout you?

Click the link—Read the book—Escape reality…
Three-hundred years ago, the tragic events that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts set free an Evil that escaped the Witch Trials and cursed the small seaside town of New Salem, Maine. That Evil now claims its due and the dark secrets long buried are rising to the surface. The war has begun. And exotic dancer, demon-ass kicker Chloe Everson is the front line between Hell on Earth and Salvation.
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