An overwrought Gothic soap opera defines Barnabas Collins and the daytime hit TV show "Dark Shadows." Director Dan Curtis took his black-and-white "Young and the Restless"-with-fangs idea and shot it in darkly lit color with very minor bloody scenes. The result is 1970's "House of Dark Shadows" which for once is not a quickie cash-in attempt to make a feature film out of a TV show and has a reasonable fright factor with its foggy, day-for-night scenes outside Collinswood manor and a suitable eerie quality thanks to actor Jonathan Frid as the classy, courtly vampire, Barnabas. Still, his gentlemanly demeanor does not diminish his feeding time.
The story is a basic reprise of the original concept of the show. Willie (John Karlen), a handyman from the Collins family, decides to break in to the Collins mausoleum and break the chains of a coffin only to reawaken the 200-year-old Barnabas (Willie was apparently looking for precious Collins jewels). Now Willie sort of becomes Barnabas' own Renfield, serving the master at his every whim. Later on, Barnabas pretends to be a cousin of the Collins family as he formally introduces himself to them, though one astute Professor Stokes (Thayer David, the Van Helsing type) senses something is afoot. Meanwhile a couple of women are bitten and become vampires, while a fresh-faced governess named Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) catches Barnabas' eye. She reminds him of his 18th century fiancée, Josette du Pres, and he naturally hopes to be reacquainted. It may take a cure to Barnabas' vampirism to make a marriage and the ability to walk around in daylight hours. Call it a contrivance or pure luck, to some degree, that a certain Dr. Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) has discovered how to isolate his vampire cell and weaken it. How is this possible and why only one cell? The questions I thought of when it came to curing vampirism nearly overwhelmed my viewing experience.
Most of "House of Dark Shadows" is rudimentary vampire lore straight out of the Dracula playbook with only the vampire cure remaining the most original idea. Many scenes end far too abruptly, as if moments of shock and awe as in an emotional response to a vampire attack or the ghostly vision of a female vampire are cut off haphazardly. Still, the film is thickly layered with Gothic Collinswoodsy atmosphere and the sight of Barnabas Collins holds the movie together (the delay of his appearance at the beginning was smart and creepy). Director Dan Curtis, a veteran of TV and film horror (his "Trilogy of Terror" is one of the best TV horror films ever made), shows he can engineer horror and make it somewhat palatable, if still all-too-familiar. Frid's Barnabas remains the milestone it was and still is.
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