Dark House

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Last year I completed an odyssey that began over a decade and a half ago.  I finished reading the Dark Shadows serial novels by Marilyn Ross.  Not because they were great literature, but because they were an important part of my childhood.  Slowly, over the years, I regathered the books and read them until the whole series was done.  One of the used book sellers was offering a collection of the books, and although the collection had some duplicates of what I’d already found, it contained some of the more difficult to locate titles.  When it arrived, I found it also included House of Dark Shadows.  This novelization wasn’t part of the series, and like most things in my life, I can’t claim to know everything about Dark Shadows.  As a child I didn’t know there had been a movie, let alone a novelization.  (I bought the books as I happened to find them, at Goodwill and watched the TV show.)

In the present, I’d just finished Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents and felt that I needed something lighter for my next fictional project.  House of Dark Shadows proved a better read than most of the series books, perhaps because it was based on a movie script written by the screenwriters.  Marilyn Ross was actually William Edward Daniel (W. E. D.) Ross, and he wrote more than 300 novels.  His Dark Shadows oeuvre became repetitious in its dialogue, across the series.  His characters always seem to say “at once” instead of “immediately” or “right now.”  I’m pretty sure the word “mocking” appears in each of them—certainly the latter ones—multiple times.  Having the script must’ve really helped keep those trademarks to a minimum.

Of course, now that I’ve read the novelization I need to go back and watch the movie again.  It’s been almost two years and some of the details escape me.  It’s largely because the movie goes “off script” from the long-running daily show (and the other novels).  I also realized that Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows movie was really a kind of reboot of House of Dark Shadows, unfortunately screen written by Seth Grahame-Smith as a comedy.  I’m no expert on Dark Shadows, just a reasonably enthusiastic fan in search of a lost childhood.  The movie makes the premise of the series untenable—both can’t exist in the same world, so it’s kind of a Dark Shadows multiverse, rather than a simple universe.  And it’s very complex.  I’d need to start again at childhood to become an expert in it, but at least now I’ve read all the books.

Shadowy House

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The more you learn the more you realize just how little you know.  The House of Dark Shadows was like a key, a missing puzzle piece for me.  Dark Shadows has been on my mind quite a bit lately.  I’m the first to admit that I’m no expert.  I never saw the whole series on television—I saw many episodes once, during my childhood.  Enough to know who the characters were—especially Barnabas—but when I stopped watching it (when? Why?) I started reading the novels by Marilyn Ross.  Clearly the soap opera was gaining enough ratings to merit the building of a franchise.  But the thing was, there is so much in life that I never concentrated on it.  I read the novels occasionally, and I never saw House of Dark Shadows when it came out in 1970.  Not, in fact, until 2022.

Since I was only eight when it came out, even though it was rated PG, I would’ve had neither the means nor the money to get to a theater.  I had, in fact, never even heard of it.  Having been raised a Fundamentalist, I have a tendency to believe there is just one way a story goes.  I know there are variations—they occur in the canon of Scripture, even—but something deep-seated tells me it should go this way.  House of Dark Shadows (which explains a lot of Tim Burton’s decisions for his movie reboot) has a different story line.  Given that it was 1970 it would have been in the midst of the initial series broadcast.  The movie was quite successful.  Still, Barnabas ends up victimizing Carolyn (which in the novels he is reluctant to do), and Roger, and outright killing a number of people.

I spent the movie trying to process how the story should go.  Of course, I haven’t seen the soap opera enough to know.  This Dark Shadows franchise is episodic and it doesn’t add up.  The film was shot quickly and leaves gaps in the story.  It certainly doesn’t track well with the tale of the Maine family who knows about “cousin Barnabas”and that he visits Collinwood from time to time.  Our course, between the series and the novels there are many, many avenues to select.  When Tim Burton got the idea to make a movie he had an abundance of stories from which to choose.  The House of Dark Shadows isn’t a great movie.  It is gothic and moody and a standalone story.  And it has me wondering about what other dark shadows conceal.