From Byronic Hero to Modern-Day Misfit: Dark Shadows, Barnabas Collins, and the Shift from Paranormal Romance to Burtonian Film ~ Erin Louttit

Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media, Volume 29, 2017

 

Abstract: Dark Shadows began its long life as a television soap opera in the 1960s. It featured supernatural plots and characters, including a vampire named Barnabas Collins. Barnabas’s love story, the show’s producer claimed, was central to the plot and to the creation of a bloodsucking vampire as a sympathetic protagonist rather than a demonic fiend. Although introduced to the show without the intention of retaining the character, Barnabas and, later, his tragic love story, became immensely popular with fans. Paranormal romance formed the central storyline in the revived Dark Shadows of the 1990s, with Barnabas envisaged from the inception as a romantic leading man. Dark Shadows’s most recent outing appeared on the big screen in 2012, was directed by Tim Burton, and starred Johnny Depp as Barnabas. This article considers the move away from the paranormal romance in the film in favor of Burton and Depp’s personal and artistic interests in their own memories of the period, the figure of the monstrous outsider, and the dynamics within a non-normative family.

Dark Shadows, appropriately for a tale of the supernatural, has had many returns and incarnations over the last half-century. It ran from 1966-1971 (ABC) as a daytime television soap opera, beginning in black and white but appearing in colour by the time it went off the air (figure 1). It was revived in the early 1990s as a big-budget, prime-time show with rewritten, streamlined storylines and a wholly new cast (NBC 1991). Despite some alterations, both televisual versions featured the vampire Barnabas Collins as a central, and later the central, character. This vampire with a romantic past was popular with fans, and he and his love story contributed greatly to the show’s success.

More recently, the Dark Shadows legacy was continued as a feature-length film, a projected blockbuster with an all-star cast and a famous director (Tim Burton, 2012). This film, directed by Tim Burton and featuring Johnny Depp in the lead role, retained the focus on Barnabas Collins and also preserved the backstory of his romantic, supernatural past. Burton, however, self-consciously opted to emphasise aspects other than the paranormal romance. In the process, the characterisation of Barnabas developed, moving away from a dark occult lover and adapting the vampire more closely to Burton and Depp’s personal and artistic interests. The “new” Barnabas highlighted the humour of a vampire two hundred years behind the times. More seriously, he also offered a study of the figure of the outsider and of the dynamics of the family, both of which had appeared in other collaborations between Burton and Depp. These new foci shifted the understanding of Barnabas away from his Byronic roots, reinventing him for new audiences. The film recast the Dark Shadows story, the history of Dark Shadows, and, arguably, changed the popular and successful tale of paranormal vampiric romance into something much more easily understood as a specifically Burtonian film.

An Aristocratic Vampire in New England: Dark Shadows and the Origins of Barnabas Collins

Dark Shadows was first conceived by Dan Curtis as a gothic television show. In response to sinking ratings, Curtis introduced overtly supernatural characters, including the vampire Barnabas Collins. In the original television run of the show, Barnabas was created with the intention, so Curtis later claimed, of seeing “exactly how much I could get away with, never intending that he would be anything more than a vampire that I would drive a stake into” (Dawidziak 1990c, 24). The vampire’s immense and unexpected popularity with fans, however, meant that the character had to stay. In responding to Barnabas’s fame, the writers faced a dilemma – the new protagonist was popular, but he was also a predatory monster. To create a likeable and long-running character, Barnabas was transformed from a supernatural fiend into a “reluctant vampire” in “a considered recalibration of the hero-villain as lover” (Dawidziak 1990a, 32; Wootton 2016, 5).[1] Recast as a leading man with a merely incidental supernatural past, Barnabas became a sympathetic protagonist with fangs. He also became, as the show progressed, a vampire with a romantic past and a tragic love story.

Barnabas, rather than an anachronistic member of the undead, became a gentlemanly, foreign, and aristocratic commanding presence. As well as possessing an old-world suavity, Barnabas had a romantic streak. He was still in love with Josette Du Prés, his former fiancée. In the eighteenth-century storyline, Barnabas and Josette had been separated by a witch named Angélique whom Barnabas had spurned. Angélique employed her supernatural power to enact vengeance, causing Josette’s fatal fall from a cliff and cursing Barnabas to live forever in loneliness as a vampire. In the various versions of Dark Shadows, it was broadly suggested that Josette had been reincarnated as one of the present-day female characters. The precise nature of Josette’s reincarnation varied in each retelling, but the return of the lost, bewitched woman was consistent.[2] This plot twist allowed Barnabas not only to display a fidelity to the memory of his lost love that lasted nearly two centuries, but also to portray a romantic (and paranormal) hero who woos his beloved all over again in the present day. The lost love backstory formed a key part of Dark Shadows’s role in “softening the image of the vampire from a bloodthirsty antagonist into a romantic protagonist” (Benshoff 2011, 100). This vampire certainly combined romantic traits with a dangerous edge to create an attractive central character. As Jonathan Frid, the original Barnabas, noted of his character’s appeal, “I was vulnerable, I was in love, I was […] a fiend” (“Behind the Shadows” 2012). Dan Curtis, the show’s producer, saw the show as “tremendously romantic” and believed that “the key to the whole thing is this incredible love story that spans time” (“Inside the Shadows” 2012). For a show originally begun without the avowed intention of emphasising paranormal romance, this aspect of Dark Shadows quickly became a significant part of both the show and Barnabas’s character.

If the portrayal of Barnabas as a romantic hero was initially a simple expedient in response to the character’s popularity, in his next small-screen outing Barnabas could be imagined as an attractive vampire from the very beginning. When Dan Curtis returned to Dark Shadows, the paranormal romance, with an emphasis on romance, was bigger in every possible way. When the 1991 series aired, it was in a prime-time slot (figure 2). This reimagined Dark Shadows featured its vampire, and his love story, as the central interest of the plot. Dan Curtis claimed to have learned his lesson from the hectic days of the original soap opera, explaining that, “although the basic theme is the same”, the new series benefitted from hindsight and the ability to reorganise elements of the many plots used in the original show (Dawidziak 1990d, 5). These changes not only made for a more coherent version of the show – the many “other supernatural figures and storylines” that “helped carry the show forward” in the original series were jettisoned – but also a show which recognised the unique hybrid nature of the Dark Shadows gothic romance as embodied in the character of Barnabas Collins (Jowett and Abbott 2013, 47).

Curtis claimed to recognise the limitations of the horror genre, and, indeed, of any kind of genre as a potentially restrictive label. Having worked on other projects, in part “to shake the DARK SHADOWS image”, Curtis commented on how difficult he found horror filmmaking: “People don’t realize that it’s far more difficult to do a horror picture well than a straight drama. That’s why most supernatural pictures stink. […] I know that the supernatural pictures I made were really good, and they were really good because I knew what the hell I was doing” (Dawidziak 1990b, 26). The persistent popularity of Dark Shadows suggests that Curtis did indeed know his audience, and that he also knew how to tell an engaging, character-driven horror story. His secret was that a horror story, despite the label, should not be about horror at all.

In later years, Curtis returned to the centrality of the love story. Reflecting on the original show’s longevity and the 1990s revival, Curtis noted one of the keys to its success: “Dark Shadows is a romantic fantasy. It’s not really a horror film” (Curtis 1992, 9). At a press conference in 1991, Curtis was explicit about the essential plot points that had been retained for the upcoming televisual revival of Dark Shadows. He did not mention the expanded cast of characters in the original series, the horror elements, or the wide-ranging use of the supernatural. Instead, he confirmed that “[t]he characters are the same […] [t]he vampire, Barnabas, hates his existence and is still in love with his Josette from two hundred years ago” (Pierson 1992, 25). Romance, not horror, drove Dark Shadows and its enduring appeal for many fans. Dark Shadows, and particularly the character of the aristocratic “loner” and “outcast” Barnabas Collins, were successful precisely because they worked within the boundaries of the paranormal romance (Stein 2004, 2). Curtis observed that this inimitable combination in the “dreamlike, unique thing” that was Dark Shadows was precisely why “no one could ever copy it” (Curtis 1992, 9).

From Sexy Soap Opera to Big-Budget Blockbuster: Dark Shadows on the Big Screen

Dark Shadows was not copied, but it was revived once more. After another twenty-year interval, Dark Shadows entered the next phase of its long life and had an altered storyline to match its subsequent incarnation. The new Dark Shadows was shot as a feature-length film, rather than a television series, with a budget far greater than anything dreamt of when it had first appeared (figure 3). Tim Burton was set to direct the new outing, and Johnny Depp was to interpret the role of Barnabas for a twenty-first-century audience. The circumstances appeared propitious – Burton, Depp, and Michelle Pfeiffer (cast as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the matriarch of the 1970s Collins family) had all avidly watched the 1966-1971 Dark Shadows and brought energy and enthusiasm to the project. The project and the people involved seemed well-matched. As Depp gushed, “I hope die-hard fans will love it because you don’t get more die-hard than myself, Michelle or Tim” (“Production Notes” 2012, 18).

Depp had originally been contacted by Curtis about portraying Barnabas, with whom he had been “obsessed”, although this initial interest did not bear fruit for some time (Salisbury 2012a). Depp wanted his frequent collaborator Burton involved on a possible new Dark Shadows, and their creative partnership was consequently renewed. As the pair discussed how they wanted to bring Dark Shadows to life once more, some of Burton’s recurring themes that would also shape the new project emerged. Burton’s interests in the figure of the outsider and of the normal as abnormal were both particularly evident in these discussions. By this time, Curtis had passed away, and the direction of the film became something to be remade in a new, yet respectful, image of the original soap opera.

This process of adaptation still emphasised Barnabas as a central character and a tragic, unhappy vampire. Depp also recalled basing not only the physical appearance of his Barnabas but also his characterisation on the 1960s Barnabas as portrayed by Jonathan Frid (Salisbury 2012b, 24-26). Barnabas’s sympathetic qualities would still be based largely on his singular position as a self-loathing vampire, but would not rely so heavily on his attractiveness as a dangerous, supernatural lover.

This shift was not a deliberate move away from paranormal romance as much as a focus on other aspects of the plots and the characters in the soap opera. When reflecting on how to distil it into a single, simple explanation, Tim Burton found the essence of the original Dark Shadows impossible to pin down. There was, he said, no clear-cut single story to translate to film, as the original “had such an elusive tone to it […] the tone was so unidentifiable […] [i]t had a whole weird vibe” (Salisbury 2012b, 13). Burton’s difficulty in finding an easy definition is entirely understandable. The show ran for 1,225 episodes and incorporated a number of preternatural plots, and his description of it as “a strange cultural phenomenon” is entirely apt (Burton 2012b, 7). Burton stressed that his film was not a remake of the soap opera, “because there’s nothing to re-make” (Salisbury 2012b, 13). The Dark Shadows of 2012 was “inspired by” the soap opera, but anything more would have been impossible (Salisbury 2012b, 13). The film’s producer felt that Burton’s Dark Shadows was wholly original, and simply “creates its own genre” (Zanuck 2012, 182).[3] The sheer amount, as well as the diversity, of material from Dan Curtis’s earlier vision generated seemingly inexhaustible options for the later writers and actors. Certainly, the original Dark Shadows suggested different possibilities and emphases to those who worked together to create the 2012 film.

The Eighteenth Century in the 1970s: Barnabas, Johnny Depp, and Humour

The initial story by the writer John August captured more of the paranormal romance which underpinned Barnabas’s history. Delays, however, meant that the field suddenly became rather crowded: “When I wrote it, Twilight hadn’t come out, True Blood hadn’t come out […] I think there was a feeling we’re going to be so late telling the big, Gothic, vampire romance” (Salisbury 2012b, 14). The resultant change of direction responded not only to the perceived influx of other paranormal vampiric romances but also to the strengths of the creative team behind the new Dark Shadows. Seth Grahame-Smith wrote a new script, working closely with the names already attached to the project. This new script was very much a collaborative effort, but Grahame-Smith particularly recalled emphasising the absurdity inherent in the story and adapting it to Burton and Depp’s “wicked, dark senses of humor” (Salisbury 2012b, 15). That the film would be funny was essential to the team as they discussed ideas for the script. Depp recalled that comedy “was the only real approach to take with this, that it needed to be loaded with humor”, while Grahame-Smith recounted his ability to “tailor” the writing specifically with Depp and Depp’s strengths as an actor in mind (Salisbury 2012b, 17, 15).

The emphasis on comedy presented a very different side to Barnabas’s character. Jonathan Frid, the first Barnabas, was quite clear that the vampire was “uptight” (Dawidziak 1990c, 27). The 1990s remake, also made under Curtis’s direction, retained the “dignified” vampire (Aquilina 2013, 31). Barnabas was emphatically not the show’s comic character – a role which went to Willie Loomis, played by Jim Fyfe, to exploit the actor’s “flair for comedy” (Pierson 1992, 13). By contrast, the “macabre humour” evident in other collaborations between Burton and Depp was transferred, at least partly, to the figure of the tormented vampire for the reimagined Dark Shadows (Windolf 2012). Depp’s comic abilities, and a script which catered to them, formed one very different aspect of the characterisation of Barnabas Collins and the shift away from the dashing and occult Byronic hero.

This deliberate stress on humour in the developing screenplay allowed the team behind the new film to explore several, more personal concerns as they revisited a cherished part of their formative years. Part of the humour inherent in the new Dark Shadows concerned Barnabas and his highly out-of-date speech and bearing. If the 1960s Barnabas did not always know quite how to respond to the world in which he found himself, he nonetheless maintained his upper-crust sense of dignity. Depp’s Barnabas is also a “vampire-out-of-water”, but clearly finds 1972 an even more bewildering experience than Frid’s vampire found his own brave new world (Mondello 2012). The potentially amusing scenarios arising from “a man seriously out of sync with the times” became vehicles for Depp’s comic delivery in the film’s script, with the resultant “culture-clash gags” noted by many film critics appearing throughout the film (Rea 2012; Harkness 2012).

This humour shows that a significant move away from the original Barnabas had occurred in the twenty-first-century Dark Shadows. The 2012 retrospective of the 70s adopts a completely different tone in relation to its vampire than Dan Curtis’s works had employed. The Barnabas who is released from his coffin in 1972 experiences culture shock, but he also shows himself to be comically adaptable. In one scene, Depp’s Barnabas quotes lines from the Steve Miller Band’s song “The Joker” as if they were poetry, adapting them to suit his archaic patterns of speech (Burton 2012a). The scene mocks his inability to adjust to his new surroundings as much as it lampoons the period’s popular culture. The point is made deliberately; the use of “The Joker” is anachronistic and stresses the humour of the situation.

The scene may usefully be contrasted with a parallel one in which Curtis chose to emphasise the protagonist’s romantic, not comic, nature. In the 1991 Dark Shadows, Barnabas (played by Ben Cross) goes for an evening walk with the woman he admires and recites poetry to her. Barnabas’s preferred work is Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty”, and his companion joins in as he recites the Romantic, and romantic, poem (“Episode 3” 1991). It is a scene between lovers with an unmistakable romantic and intellectual affinity. The choice of author also underlines Barnabas’s presentation as a literal and literary Byronic hero, and, like Byron, he is linked to the origins of the vampire myth.[4] The few lines spoken from the poem emphasise simultaneously Barnabas’s romantic nature, his sex appeal, and his dangerous qualities – all perfect for, and perfectly essential to, a vampire suitor. That his knowledge of the poem would not have been possible, given the strict chronology of his entombment, is incidental. Curtis used the most suitable literary work for characterisation and to build and sustain the mood of the show. In the 1966-1971 Dark Shadows, Curtis had adopted a similar approach, drawing on gothic and supernatural elements from the literary canon to create atmosphere at Collinwood. Curtis’s second Barnabas was explicitly and literally Byronic, just as his original Barnabas embodied the traits of “a Heathcliff or a Rochester” (“Inside the Shadows” 2012). In Curtis’s vision, anachronistic quotation deepens an understanding of character and plot. In Burton’s work, such quotation underscores the humour and the strangeness inherent in Barnabas’s place in society.

For both Burton and Depp, Barnabas’s perplexed view of the 1970s was not wholly dissimilar from their own. The 70s, both men felt, were a peculiar and not entirely positive period. Depp conceived of Barnabas as providing a different window on a relatively recent period of history, able to view objectively what was “maybe the worst time, aesthetically, in human existence, where people accepted everything from macramé jewelry and resin grapes to lava lamps” (Salisbury 2012b, 17). Burton agreed. He recalled the decade as “a very uneasy, strange period” that “was strange then” and which remained “strange now” (Salisbury 2012b, 18). Grahame-Smith was too young to have watched the original broadcasts of Dark Shadows, but he could appreciate the feeling which Depp and Burton brought to Barnabas’s unique perspective on the 1970s. For Grahame-Smith, 1972 “was a strange transitional period”, and one which admirably suited their intention of bringing out the comedy of Dark Shadows (Salisbury 2012b, 17). As an eighteenth-century gentleman, Barnabas could act as a perceptive and occasionally unwitting cultural critic. His sophistication would be foregrounded – not to emphasise his appeal as a dashing lover, but to highlight his disconnectedness from a fragmented time and culture.

The Loneliness of the Long-Undead Vampire: Outsiders, Monsters, and Freaks in Collinsport and Burton’s Oeuvre

Positioning Barnabas as a comic cultural observer underpins another key decision made by Burton and Depp in their continuation of the Dark Shadows story. Growing up watching Frid’s vampire, what struck both men was not the romantic elegance, but the loneliness of the undead protagonist. Both Depp and Burton remembered Barnabas not as a romantic, paranormal hero but as an outsider who feels, and indeed is, out of place in his surroundings. This shared sense of Barnabas’s core identity proved crucial in creating the new Burtonian Barnabas who had a romantic past but whose love life was only one, less significant, part of his character.

Barnabas Collins, for Burton and Depp, was one misunderstood monster of many. Their fascination with the gothic and freaks on the fringes of society stemmed from early exposure to popular culture such as Dark Shadows, and this influence has contributed, over several films on which they worked together, to their own reimaginings of misfits, alienation, and the fantastic. Burton has spoken of his exposure to Hammer horror films, the works of Vincent Price, and other popular films and television programmes which influenced the future director. He recalled his sympathy for the marginalised monsters he saw on the big and small screens growing up: “I’d always wonder why people are treating the monster badly […] [t]hey treat it badly because they see it as different” (Nashawaty 1999, 131). For both Burton and Depp, Barnabas’s mystique was not as an individual, tormented romantic vampire, but as a part of a continuum of shunned, feared, or otherwise ostracised freaks.

Depp has also acknowledged the influence of horror characters broadly, seeing similar qualities in them to those Burton found so fascinating. Depp claimed that he “found solace in these outsider creatures” and specifically recalled Barnabas as “[a]nother fringe dweller” with “a strange and haunting presence” (Depp 2012, 5). That he saw this in the character, and chose to recreate it in his own portrayal, might be expected from his own curriculum vitae. As one reviewer noted, “Depp has always loved to play melancholy outsiders who find happiness only when they embrace their inner weirdo” (Stevens 2012). Dark Shadows and Barnabas Collins were no exception. Depp’s highly personal approach to monstrous characters portrayed by Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi, and others, conditioned, and perhaps preconditioned, his understanding of Dark Shadows and his embodiment of Barnabas as an outsider first and a romantic lead second.

Explicit personal investment in Dark Shadows was something Burton elaborated upon when discussing the film. There was, he suggested, a great deal of his own biography in both Barnabas’s outsider status and Barnabas’s discomfiture at finding himself stuck in the 1970s. Although alive to the comic potential of the period for his reborn Barnabas, Burton’s own memories offered less pleasant material on which to draw. He recalled feeling “very isolated and dislocated” but felt that the original Dark Shadows gave him a comfort largely unknown from this awkward period in uncomfortable surroundings: “you feel like a weirdo, you feel like a freak, then you go home and you watch it and somehow you connect with it. I think that’s why a lot of kids who liked it were outsider types” (Salisbury 2012b, 18).

Burton has spoken more broadly of his own childhood in Burbank and his persistent feeling of disconnection from the safe, conformist life of mid-twentieth-century suburban California. His fascination with darker films, fairy tales, and genres arose, he suggested, from his “reaction against a very puritanical, bureaucratic, fifties nuclear family environment” (Burton 1995, 3). Burton’s personal interest in outsiders, as many reviewers and interviewers have been quick to point out, is a quality frequently evident in his creation of films and characters, from Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood to Corpse Bride and The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy. As he candidly confessed to one interviewer, “you’re very affected by your early life and I think that if you ever had that feeling of being an outsider or loneliness or whatever, it just doesn’t leave you” (Douglas 2002, 185).

Blood is Thicker than Water: The Collins Family and Unconventional Unity

Burton’s own biographical background influenced his highly personal interpretation of Dark Shadows generally and the character of Barnabas Collins in particular. The teenage Tim Burton who watched Dark Shadows and identified with the outsider vampire became the adult director privileged enough to reinterpret Dark Shadows for a cinema-going audience, bringing to bear on the later production the earlier knowledge of and interest in outsiders, loners, and misunderstood monsters. What Burton created in the Dark Shadows of 2012, however, was not just one ostracised and unusual protagonist, but an entire cast of misfits.

The theme which unified the humour and the sympathy for the outsider-cum-monster was the theme of the dysfunctional family. In this reimagined Dark Shadows, the peculiarity of the 1970s combined with the decided strangeness of the newly released vampire had found their perfect expression in the odd family of the vampire’s descendants. If Dark Shadows was about a protagonist very much out of place, it was also the story of several unusual characters, all joined together by their membership of, or service to, the Collins family. Dark Shadows, in Depp and Burton’s vision, became a tale of many outsiders, and a celebration of their apparent abnormality. It was a story not only of Barnabas the brooding bloodsucker, but also a story which extended to his family and his attempts to revive the family fortunes and pride.

The Collins family’s various oddities were crucial to the vision of Dark Shadows for many of the people involved on the new production. Depp considered this central to his and Burton’s version of the Dark Shadows narrative: “The initial desire to take Dark Shadows and make it into a feature film is the idea of this highly, highly dysfunctional family” (“Collinses” 2012). The importance of family – that is, the importance of the emphatically non-traditional family – had already appeared in other films on which Burton and Depp had collaborated. Peculiarly constituted partnerships and family units appear in Burton’s films from Edwards Scissorhands and Corpse Bride to Sweeney Todd and Alice in Wonderland. Burton unequivocally described the Buckets in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as “a weird family”, and these dynamics clearly interested and engaged him (Burton 1995, 235). The characters of Dark Shadows provided both Burton and Depp with ample opportunity to explore the weird, the dysfunctional, and the downright bizarre.

In this Dark Shadows, Barnabas’s return allows him to meet the reincarnation of his long-lost love Josette, but his romantic reunion and wooing take far less screen time than might be expected. Instead, Barnabas confronts Angélique, the witch whose curse turned him into a vampire, and whose vengeance has extended to destroying the Collins family fortunes slowly through economic rivalry. As well as emphasising Barnabas and Angélique’s battle of love that has become hatred, rather than Barnabas and Josette/Victoria’s unblemished love story, Burton’s Dark Shadows also focuses on Barnabas’s efforts to revive the familial pride in his name and to restore the wealth of the formerly affluent dynasty. While emphasising how very strange Barnabas seems, the narrative shows him being accepted into the 1970s Collins family, reinvigorating their fighting spirit and their pride in their heritage, and providing a kind of cohesive spirit for the Collins family as a band of misfits.

Barnabas may remain the central character, but it is his relationship to the others of his name that supports the film. The screenwriter Grahame-Smith noted that the absolutely key element of the film was this familial bond: “Despite all the witches, ghosts and vampires, it’s a family drama and a story about a family that’s lost its way, and of Barnabas reminding them who they are” (Maher 2012). Grahame-Smith’s vision was shared by members of the cast. Pfeiffer noted that the Collinses were certainly strange, but that “they have no idea just how weird we are”, but, despite their idiosyncrasies, “[k]eeping up appearances is very important to my character and she’s very proud and very protective of the family name” (Salisbury 2012b, 23). The revival of the Collinses of Collinsport, in esteem as well as economically, provides the film with the greater part of its narrative thrust. That Barnabas is the focal point of this enterprise is unsurprising. What is perhaps more surprising is that his new role as a head of family (or possibly joint head of family, with Elizabeth Collins Stoddard) is not assumed with his beloved by his side. The romance of Barnabas’s story forms a secondary plot. He becomes, in this Dark Shadows, a strong-willed vampire with a sense of duty, not a powerful and paranormal lover. The family, in this retelling of the story, is painted on a much broader canvas. It is the tale of a larger, more apparently fragmented family, not the foundations of a nuclear family – in short, it is the history of a group of outsiders, not a romantically linked couple.

Burton came to the film with expectations very much in keeping with those of his screenwriter and stars. He commented that “[i]n the end, it all boiled down to just trying to capture the weird dynamics that happen in any family. Whether they’re rich or poor or supernatural, there’s a certain kind of internal dynamic that happens. That was the thing that interested me, the workings and the melodramas of a family” (Salisbury 2012b, 13). Burton’s description perfectly fits the finished film. The Collinses are not simply a family fallen on hard times, or the disturbed clan of a gothic melodrama. They represent an entire family of the outsiders, loners, and freaks that so captured Burton’s imagination during his formative years. They are as unusual as Barnabas himself, with a werewolf, a ghost, and a comic drunk among their number. In spite of the sense of community, Barnabas’s return to an ancestral home full of strange characters permits him to retain his outsider status by placing him among a group of fellow outcasts and oddballs.

Barnabas may identify with these new characters as Collinses, but, crucially, they are not his immediate family. His sense of inheritance and his restoration of the family business propel the plot, but he nonetheless remains somewhat apart from his kin. They are his relatives, but his relatives from two hundred years in the future. The irregular family dynamic, though undoubtedly driven in part by the supernatural, is also informed by the lack of what might be considered a traditional family structure. When Barnabas returns, Collinwood shelters a mother and daughter and a father and son, as well as a governess, two caretakers, and a psychiatrist. What is conspicuous by its absence, however, is the conventional family unit of a heterosexual couple with children. The Collins family is indisputably a family, but their family structure is as unconventional as are the individuals who form it.

This apparently broader, more inclusive definition of family and family dynamics stresses the concerns apparent throughout the film. Burton’s own interests and experiences may once again be at work in this shaping of a new family unit. While he does not suggest traumatic or major conflicts of his childhood, he acknowledges that his relationship with his parents was difficult and that he moved out of their home at a relatively young age. The environment of conformity was restrictive. He noted, however, that the imposition of suburban homogeneity affected others negatively as well. His parents, he believed, “suffered from that ideal of a perfect nuclear family” (Adams 2012). Some of Burton’s poems such as the ominous “Anchor Baby” or the filicidal “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy” certainly seem to imply that a traditional parent-child relationship is dark, difficult, and even potentially harmful (Burton 1997). Burton’s reflections on the abnormality of what was considered a normal family, so marked in interviews, his poems, and his other films, reappear in his version of Dark Shadows. The film embraces the idea of family but only on its own terms; the Collins clan is bonded by blood more than obvious temperamental affinity, and lacks a clear, central, traditional family unit.

Burton, Depp, and Grahame-Smith’s emphasis on this collective of outsiders necessarily draws attention away from the nuclear family. In doing so, the foundation of the nuclear family – the heterosexual couple – is tainted by its uneasy association with this conventional and apparently imperfect family unit. The union, or, in this story of vampirism and reincarnation, reunion, of the couple is seen less as a happy ending and more as the potentially troubled beginning of a conformist family dynamic. Rather than offering resolution, centring the film on Barnabas’s relationship with Josette/Victoria would threaten his status as a lonely outsider, his focus on the survival of the Collins family, and the loosely joined community of fellow outsiders that the Collinses represent.

With the Burtonian Dark Shadows conceived of as a story about the dysfunctional Collins family, the romance between Barnabas and Josette/Victoria occupies a secondary role in the film. The 2012 retelling retains the romance between the lovers, but makes their developing relationship subordinate to Barnabas’s renewal of the Collins dynasty’s social and financial superiority in the town. It also subtly rewrites the roles of both Josette and Victoria to align them more closely with the film’s main interests of marginalised monsters and the network of a dysfunctional family. In the newly imagined Dark Shadows, the two women in Barnabas’s life function as part of a greater cast of characters, not primarily as the object of intense romantic longing.

Barnabas’s initial interest as a romantic figure in the Dark Shadows of 2012 stems entirely from his entanglement with the witch Angélique. Her personal intensity – repeated in their scenes in 1972 – suggests that she is the passionate and paranormal lover of this pairing, rather than the still-human Barnabas. Barnabas ultimately rejects her in favour of Josette, a decision which starts the events culminating in Josette’s death and Barnabas’s vampirism. His scenes with Josette, conversely, express a chaste and proper courtship that will, by all the signs given, lead to a traditional upper-class marriage and the perpetuation of the Collins name and estates. Barnabas’s parents’ marriage is seen only briefly. It appears loving, but wholly conventional. At the film’s beginning, Barnabas seems to be destined for a similar life with a supportive wife and a successful business in the new world, a status which his betrothal to Josette only confirms. In the eighteenth-century storyline, he certainly does not occupy the position of outsider, but rather its opposite; the Collinses are wealthy members of the community and the source from whence the town itself derives its name. Prosperous conformity, at least in the opening sequences, threatens to dominate the narrative.

Burton’s signature style of “a story built on the strangeness of its characters” soon asserts itself (Ferenczi 2010, 16). Under Angélique’s supernatural influence, Josette jumps from a cliff and Barnabas becomes undead. With the townsfolk turned against him, Barnabas is interred and his position as an outsider is established beyond question. As a vampire, his inability to act as the normal, married, head of family separates him from the life he would have led and allows him, two hundred years later, to assume the role in a very different form. Barnabas’s transformation into a vampire allows him to adopt the role of lover with Josette’s reincarnation, but only after he has found his sense of identity within the Collinwood and the Collins family of 1972.

The romantic relationship, when renewed in the twentieth century, is also far from straightforward. Victoria (figure 5), the reborn Josette, shares a story remarkably similar to Barnabas’s. She too is an outsider; her parents consigned her to a mental institution when as a child she saw Josette’s ghost. After escaping the asylum, Victoria came to Collinwood as a governess. Like Barnabas, she found in the family of misfits a kind of community which she could adopt as her own and “feel at home again” (Burton 2012a). Although Victoria and Barnabas share an attraction, the film depicts them more as kindred spirits on the fringes of society than as reunited star-crossed lovers. What is more, they become a couple only at the end of the film, when Barnabas bites Victoria and turns her into a vampire. They can, in the end, be together, but only as strange, marginalised monsters who escape the restrictions of the conventional nuclear family. While their romance partially adheres to genre conventions of the paranormal romance, the relationship between Barnabas and Victoria fits far more closely within the Burtonian model of oddity and isolation.

Conclusion

The evolution of Dark Shadows, begun in response to the simple expedients of plummeting viewing figures and enthusiastic fan mail, meant that the character of Barnabas Collins became a central part of the show. As Barnabas’s creator Dan Curtis later acknowledged, the invention of the “reluctant vampire” was fortuitous, but Barnabas’s love story across the centuries was at the heart of both the Dark Shadows of 1966-1971 and of 1991 (Dawidziak 1990a, 32). The paranormal romance thrilled fans, ensured the show’s popularity, and helped to make believable some of the wilder elements of the supernatural soap opera. The 2012 Dark Shadows retained the relationship between Barnabas and Josette/Victoria but relegated it to a subplot. The film focused instead on the potential for humour with an out-of-place aristocratic vampire in 1970s New England, the figure of the misunderstood monster outside society, and the unique dynamics of a dysfunctional family. These emphases stemmed from the personal interests of the film’s director, Tim Burton, and its main star, Johnny Depp. Both had been avid viewers of the original Dark Shadows when young and both recalled Barnabas as an outsider. Their fascination with these subjects, evident in other filmic collaborations from their productive partnership, returned in their reimagining of Dark Shadows. Ultimately, their understanding of Barnabas as an outsider and their study of the Collins family as a family overshadowed the Byronic elements of the earlier versions. In Burton’s outing, Dark Shadows shifted its focus, moving further away from its (accidental) roots in paranormal romance and into a much more individualised film embodying many of its director’s artistic themes and personal preoccupations.

 

Works Cited

Adams, Tim. 2012. “Tim Burton: ‘The Love and Life and Death Stuff was Stewing from the Start’”. Observer, October 7. Accessed March 9, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/oct/07/tim-burton-frankenweenie-interview

Aquilina, Conrad. 2013. “The Deformed Transformed; or, from Bloodsucker to Byronic Hero – Polidori and the Literary Vampire”. In Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day, edited by Sam George and Bill Hughes, 24-38. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

“Behind the Shadows”. 2012. In Dark Shadows: The Original TV Series.

Benshoff, Harry M. 2011. Dark Shadows. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Burton, Tim. 1995. Burton on Burton, edited by Mark Salisbury, revised edition. London: Faber and Faber.

Burton, Tim. 1997. The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories. London: Faber and Faber.

Burton, Tim. 2012a. Dark Shadows. USA: Warner Brothers.

Burton, Tim. 2012b. “Introduction”. In Dark Shadows: The Visual Companion, by Mark Salisbury, 6-7. London: Titan.

“The Collinses: Every Family Has Its Demons”. 2012. In Tim Burton. 2012. Dark Shadows. USA: Warner Brothers.

Curtis, Dan. 1992. “Foreword”. In Dark Shadows Resurrected, by Jim Pierson, 9. Los Angeles: Pomegranate Press.

Dawidziak, Mark. 1990a. “Barnabas Bites Again”. Cinefantastique (December): 32-33.

Dawidziak, Mark. 1990b. “Dan Curtis Genre Auteur”. Cinefantastique (December): 26, 60.

Dawidziak, Mark. 1990c. “The Horror That Wouldn’t Die”. Cinefantastique (December): 24-25, 27-30.

Dawidziak, Mark. 1990d. “The Return of Dark Shadows”. Cinefantastique (September): 4-5, 60.

Depp, Johnny. 2012. “Foreword”. In Dark Shadows: The Visual Companion, by Mark Salisbury, 4-5. London: Titan.

Douglas, Edward. 2002. “Director of the Living Dead”. In Tim Burton: A Child’s Garden of Nightmares, edited by Paul A. Woods, revised edition, 183-186. London: Plexus.

“DVD Reviews”. 2012. Toronto Star, September 28. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

“Episode 3”. 1991. Dark Shadows: The Revival.

Ferenczi, Aurélien. 2010. Masters of Cinema: Tim Burton. Paris: Cahiers du cinema.

Gire, Dann. 2012. “Stark ‘Shadows’ Camp Vampire Comedy Sucks Laughs from Classic Boomer TV Series”. Chicago Daily Herald, May 11. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

Harkness, Alistair. 2012. “DVD Reviews”. Scotsman, October 14. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

“Inside the Shadows”. 2012. In Dark Shadows: The Original TV Series.

“Johnny Darko”. 2012. Leicester Mercury, May 10. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

Jowett, Lorna and Stacey Abbott. 2013. TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen. I. B. Tauris.

Kermode, Mark. 2012. “Review: Critics: Film: Mark Kermode on DVDs: What Does It All Mean, Tim? Dark Shadows is Perplexing but There’s Still Much to Enjoy”. Observer, October 14. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

MacCarthy, Fiona. 2003. Byron: Life and Legend. London: Faber and Faber.

MacDonald, D. L. 1991. Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of The Vampyre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Maher, Kevin. 2012. “How Tim Burton Resurrected the Vampire Movie”. Times, April 7. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

Mondello, Bob. 2012. “‘Dark Shadows’: A Retro Redo Lacking Life and Luster”. National Public Radio, May 11. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

Muhvic, Peter. 2012. “Dark Shadows a Lifeless Horror Comedy”. Orangeville Banner, October 10. Accessed May 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

Muir, Kate. 2012. “Critic’s Choice”. Times, May 12. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

Nashawaty, Christopher. 1999. “A Head of Its Time”. Entertainment Weekly, November. Reprinted in Tim Burton Interviews, 2005, edited by Kristian Fraga, 128-133. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Neumaier, Joe. 2012. “The Vampire Strikes Back”. Daily News, May 11. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

Pierson, Jim. 1992. Dark Shadows Resurrected. Los Angeles: Pomegranate Press.

“Production Notes”. 2012. Warner Bros. Accessed March 8, 2016. http://wwws.warnerbros.co.uk/darkshadows/dvd/assets/pdf/production_Notes.pdf

Rea, Stephen. 2012. “‘Dark Shadows’: A Vampire Tale That Bleeds Retro”. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 11. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

Salisbury, Mark. 2012a. “Dark Shadows: On Set with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp”. Telegraph, May 12. Accessed March 8, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/9241102/Dark-Shadows-on-set-with-Tim-Burton-and-Johnny-Depp.html

Salisbury, Mark. 2012b. Dark Shadows: The Visual Companion. London: Titan.

Stein, Atara. 2004. The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Stevens, Dana. 2012.“Dark Shadows: It Will Remind You Why You Once Liked Johnny Depp”. Slate Magazine, May 10. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

Williamson, Milly. 2005. The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy. London: Wallflower Press.

Windolf, Jim. 2012. “The Young and the Lifeless”. Vanity Fair, April. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

Wootton, Sarah. 2016. Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Zane, Alex. 2012. “It’s Dragula”. Sun, May 11. Accessed March 9, 2016. https://www.nexis.com

Zanuck, Richard D. 2012. “Afterword”. In Dark Shadows: The Visual Companion, by Mark Salisbury, 182-183. London: Titan.

 

Endnotes

[1] Dark Shadows may have “introduced a sympathetic vampire into the homes of the American viewing public”, but the protagonist’s vampirism was never simple (Williamson  2005, 32). This difficulty was to plague Burton as well as Curtis. One reviewer of the 2012 film particularly noted that “as Barnabas’s body count rises, he becomes a difficult hero to champion” (Zane 2012). The complexity of having a vampire as the leading man was something on which Curtis commented more than once, and clearly with reason.

[2] In the 1966-1971 television show, Josette Du Prés returned as the local waitress Maggie Evans. In the 1991 series, she was reborn as the governess Victoria Winters, a streamlining that Curtis said was “something we would have done then if we had known what the story was going to be” (Pierson 1992, 25). The 2012 film playfully acknowledges both characters; the reincarnated Josette’s true name is Maggie Evans, but she adopts Victoria Winters as her name as she journeys to her position as governess at Collinwood. For the sake of clarity, references throughout this article will be to Josette and Victoria, although readers interested in the subtexts of identity and concealment in Dark Shadows may wish to remember that Victoria’s character is an assumed one.

[3] The critical response was predominantly underwhelming, and the reason most frequently cited was precisely this defiance of single genre conventions that gave it the appearance of being “like four films in one”, or, less kindly, “a movie in search of a purpose” (Neumaier 2012; Gire 2012). Some reviewers considered it as a directorial genre picture, identifying typically Burtonian elements such as his trademark menacing visual style or his interest in socially ostracised leading characters. Even for those familiar with Dan Curtis’s original, sometimes haphazardly plotted Dark Shadows, however, Burton’s film simply lacked an overarching coherence or any kind of true “balance” between the different genres it encompassed (Muhvic 2012). It was deemed a “head-scratchingly weird mess of a movie” that suffered from a “tangled script” (Kermode 2012; “Johnny Darko” 2012). Most reviewers professed puzzlement, but some dismissed the film outright as “execrable” or, more personally, as Burton and Depp’s “first outright failure, and by a large margin” (Muir 2012; “DVD Reviews” 2012). However strongly expressed, the majority of views communicated their assessment of, and frequent disappointment in, the film as a Tim Burton cultural product rather than judging it by other genre standards.

[4] Byron was present at the 1816 ghost story writing challenge now best remembered for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. However, the experiment also produced The Vampyre by John Polidori, Byron’s personal physician. The Vampyre offered readers a sexualised aristocratic vampire that was “a portrait – or caricature – of Byron” and far more modern and seductive than the undead revenants of legend (MacDonald 1991, 98). To compound the association, the name of Polidori’s suave Lord Ruthven was a veiled “allusion” to the fictionalised Byron of Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon, and The Vampyre’s first publication was “under Byron’s name” (MacCarthy, 2003, 294, 293). Byron may not have liked the tale, but its central character’s influence on subsequent depictions of vampires is indisputable.

 

 

BIO: Erin Louttit is an independent scholar based in the Netherlands. She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2013 and her research interests include gender and the occult, Victorian literature and culture, and literary faiths.