The Curse of ‘Dark Shadows’ and Barnabas Collins

Barnabas Collins and Dark Shadows: Oh, I have memories of this show, but it’s a mixed bag for sure. After all, I suffered from the Dark Shadows curse for months. What curse, you ask? Well…  I’ll get to that.

Let me state for the record that I am not much of a soap opera guy. Yes, there was a point in the early eighties when I did jump on the General Hospital bandwagon, but I didn’t stay on it for long. After all, I didn’t want to put my “man card” in jeopardy. Still, Dark Shadows was different, especially when Collinwood’s resident Vampire Barnabas Collins, played by the great Jonathan Frid, was introduced.

I mean, come on: Where else could you find a show on daytime television, not only with vampires, but witches, werewolves, and ghosts? Sadly, it’s the ghostly apparitions on the show that ultimately resulted in my undoing, but more on that later.

Everett Collection

Truth be told, I kind of fell into Dark Shadows. I didn’t watch it often. Instead, it was something that I’d watch with my mother when I was sick or pretending to be sick and staying home from school. I distinctly remember more than once her popping the tops on two bottles of Coke and asking me if I wanted to watch the show with her. Implied within the invitation was the unspoken agreement that I wouldn’t report back to my dad about what we’d watched.

As I held that cold bottle of Coke in my hand, I never imagined that this little unspoken pact between me and my mom would come back to haunt me. Literally haunt me. Because while vampires and werewolves didn’t really scare me much, ghosts really freaked me out at that age. I routinely had nightmares about them, and to this day, I remember a dream about a ghost that seemed so real that, well, I’m still not certain that it was a dream.

So, I really can’t remember the details of the episode, but I do remember that ghost. Of course, that led to a rather sleepless night, a night where I would find myself eventually sleeping on my parents’ floor.

The next day, under intense interrogation, my dad wanted to know what I’d watched that had caused such vivid nightmares. Of course, I couldn’t tell him about Dark Shadows. That would get my mother in trouble, so I did what I had to do. I blamed the bad dreams on Scooby-Doo.

This one hurts even to think about today, but it made perfect sense to my dad, and he promptly grounded me from watching the show. For how long? I wanted to know. To that question, he smugly said that it depended on me. When I could stay in my own room and quit waking him up, I could watch it again. Earlier in this article, I said that the curse lasted months. It may have even lasted a year. However long it was, it felt like a really long time.

Credit: Everett Collection

And even though I kind of hated Dark Shadows for a while, I did eventually return to the show via the Dell comic book adaptation. I love Dell Comics almost as much as DC and Marvel. In addition to Dark Shadows, they had versions of Star Trek and Lost in Space that were really great. In 2015, journalist Paul Gravett shared his memories of Dell comic books, you can read more about them here.

Then in the early nineties, Dark Shadows returned. This time it was a primetime series on NBC. Like most of the nation, I watched the first few episodes, but then I became distracted with other things. I did like this version, however. I thought Ben Cross was great as Barnabas Collins. I loved him years earlier in Chariots of Fire, and this was a nice departure from that type of role. Sadly, the series was canceled due to a lack of viewership after just one season.

End of the day, Dark Shadows is a moment in time for me. It is forever ingrained in my mind along with the first man on the moon and the Vietnam War as an artifact of an era, and it was a special time with my mom. I still remember her sitting on the couch watching her daytime shows while she folded clothes and sipped on her soda. Despite the curse, it’s a good memory and I’m thankful for it and for her.