31 Days of Gothic Romance | Dark Shadows

In 1966, gothic romance moved to television. Dark Shadows was a daytime soap opera that started off like Jane Eyre and added supernatural elements as it went along. Initially, it followed a young woman named Victoria Winters as she's hired by the mysterious Collins family to be a governess. Victoria is an orphan and believes that the Collinses may have connections to her unknown past.

As the show progressed though, other Collins family members returned home with their own spooky and mysterious dramas of blackmail, revenge, and murder. Then in the spring of 1967, the show introduced the most famous of these, the vampire Barnabas Collins, and finally brought a supernatural aspect to the already gothic setting and tone of the series. Eventually, it would also add ghosts, werewolves, witches, and all sorts of other monsters, solidifying its spot as the coolest soap opera of all time. There was also time travel to Barnabas' past, letting the show have a period setting for extended runs of episodes.





By the time the show ended in 1971, it was a bona fide phenomenon with Dark Shadows comic books, a series of novels, joke books, board games, coloring books, View-Master reels, and a couple of feature films: House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows.













There have been three attempts at revivals since '71. In 1991, NBC tried to bring it back as a primetime series run by the show's original creator Dan Curtis. It premiered as a four-hour mini-series and did well in that format, but the ratings fell off when it was put into a Friday night time slot. It was cancelled after 12 episodes.



In 2004, the WB commissioned a pilot for a potential relaunch series, but the show wasn't picked up and the pilot never aired.



Most recently, there was the 2012 feature film directed by Tim Burton. By this time, everyone was pretty tired of Burton's casting cartoon versions of Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp in everything, but Dark Shadows is a fun movie. It's a silly, campy version of what should have been a cool, spooky story, but taken for what it is, I quite enjoy it. But it would still be another handful of years before we got a legitimate gothic romance revival at the movie theater.

Pirate cologne, Jesse James films reviewed, and illustrators as actors

Kill All Monsters!-Related

I can't see BoingBoing at work, so I'll just have to trust that this link works and that it takes you to some cool giant-monster belt buckles. I'll check it out for myself later at home.

Dust to Dust-Related

I don't understand the connection between Jesse James and Seacoast New Hampshire, but the SeacoastNH site is running a very cool feature called the Dingus Project that looks at as many movies about James as possible and reviews them for historical accuracy.

And speaking of Jesse James movies, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is going to hit both the Toronto International Film Festival and Venice's 75th anniversary film festival. (Also appearing at both festivals is Keira Knightley's new movie Atonement, which should matter greatly to you.)

Pirates

Speaking of Keira reminds me about pirates, which reminds me that soon we'll all be able to smell like Jack Sparrow. As if that's a good thing.

Indiana Jones

One of my biggest disappointments with Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade was the lack of Marion Ravenwood. I really wanted to see that relationship continued from Raiders. Wish granted.

Dark Horse has also announced that with the new movie coming out, they'll be relaunching their line of Indiana Jones comics starting with an omnibus collecting their earlier Indy comics and eventually even reprinting Marvel's take. I gotta start saving some money.

Mystery

I've been enjoying Guy Ritchie and Andy Diggle's Gamekeeper comic from Virgin enough that I quit buying the single issues and decided instead to buy the trade when it comes out. So it's pretty cool that Ritchie's turning it into a movie.

Not really Mystery-related, but it's Crime, so close enough: Boom!'s doing a comic based on the Godfather movies. That's pretty frickin' bold. It'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off, but they say that when they announce the writer "jaws will drop."

Horror

Another comics-film connection: Dreamworks has optioned a Courtney Crumrin movie. No word on if it'll be live action or animated. You have no idea how much I'm hoping for animated, especially if they can pull off Ted Naifeh's style.

And in other Important Horror Movie News: Johnny Depp will play Barnabas Collins in a Dark Shadows movie. It looks like he'll also be one of the producers.

Science Fiction

Jeff Smith has released details about his next project, RASL. It'll be an over-sized scifi comic about "a thief -- an art thief -- who is known to the police as 'RASL,' because that's the tag he leaves whenever he steals a piece of art. He spray paints RASL on the wall in the spot where the art was." According to Smith, RASL has a suit that can "create thermal-magnetic disturbances through space-time and step between dimensions. So if you were a really rich person who wants to collect, say, a Mona Lisa, you could pay RASL, and he'll go to another dimension and steal the Mona Lisa for you!"

The downside is that "what happens when you go through these dimensional barriers -- these light barriers between dimensions and universes -- is that apparently it hurts a lot. I mean, it hurts so badly that it takes him days to recover. The pain is so bad that, for days, he drinks and gambles and smokes and eats rich foods and has whores and all that. But to get back, he has to do the exact opposite. He has to completely clean his body and mind and thoughts and almost reach a zen, centered perfectness to get back through the light. But then he comes back out and is in pain again and it all starts over." Sounds really good. I can't wait for it.

Looks like the bad guy from Heroes is going to play Spock in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie.

And they're releasing the remastered/CGI-touched-up episodes of the original Star Trek series on DVD.

Writing is Hard

I like this quote from Hulk writer Greg Pak about letting artists interpret emotions themselves instead of trying to spell everything out exactly in the script: "For the most part, I'm trying to write for (illustrator) John (Romita, Jr.) using the same kind of language I'd use to direct an actor on a movie set. When working with an actor, I'd never say, 'Be sad.' Because that turns the actor into a puppet who's just trying to make the face you want and the soul of the scene dies. Instead, I'd say, 'Try not to cry.' Then the actor can just inhabit the character and the scene comes to life. Similarly, when writing for John, I try to describe actions rather than expressions. When the Hulk's gazing up at the fake Sentry that Reed's generated, I wrote, 'The Hulk continues stepping toward the light. Gazing upwards. Almost as if he's looking up towards an angel.' I don't describe the expression; instead I describe the circumstance so John can interpret the emotional content and get to the soul of the character on his own. John's a brilliant artist, which means that in the world of comics, he's a brilliant actor."

That's something I tried with Jason Copland on Kill All Monsters! and it resulted in some amazing, touching facial expressions and body language. You gotta have the right artist to pull it off -- one who knows how to make his characters act -- but Jason's totally that guy.