To be read to this song.
Each Dark Shadows DVD collection has four discs. Each contains ten episodes. At the end of each disc there is an interview with someone who either acted in, wrote for or worked on Dark Shadows. One of the most recent ones I saw was an interview with David Selby, who played Quentin Collins, the Dorian Gray/werewolf of the series. I gotta say, I think he was high as all fuck during this interview. During another interview, too, come to think of it. I'm pretty sure he is high all the time unless he's working. He looked pretty intense when he was on Mad Men and Legion.
Anyway, he was talking about the attraction people had to Dark Shadows. He talked about the horrors of the real world, and he attributed people's joy in the show to escapism. He said this with a grand smile on his face, and I realized that he was very proud of his ability to help people get through their day simply by acting on a horror soap opera (the only one of its kind, by the way, until Passions came around).
When I'm enjoying fiction, I don't see it as escapism. Sometimes it's even work, because as a writer I can learn anything from any book, even if it's only to figure out what *not* to do. But the older I get, the more I wonder about that. Why *do* I love this show? My mom introduced it to me when I was very young, and every once in a while I'd catch it on Syfy back when it was called the Sci-Fi Channel. But I found VHS copies at a Hollywood video once. It was the ones that started with Barnabas's arrival, not the original series that started with Victoria Winters arriving at Collinwood for the first time. I fell in love with it, but unfortunately I couldn't see the whole thing, not until a friend who used to work at Dark Sky Films got the very first episodes for me. And then, like the Dark Shadows junkie I am, I got the whole fuckin' run on DVD.
But why did I fall in love in the first place? I think it was poor Willie Loomis that did the trick. He was a creepy drifter who came into town with his criminal partner who was blackmailing Elizabeth Stoddard, who thought she'd killed her husband and stowed the body in the basement of Collinwood. No one trusted Willie, and he was so greedy that he learned of a secret room in the mausoleum where untold riches were supposedly hidden in a coffin.
Except . . . well, Willie found Barnabas instead and was bitten, thus entering the vampire's thrall, forced to do things that even he, a weaselly scumbag, didn't want to do. I think I identified with the poor bastard, and I hoped that he would finally escape Barnabas's control.
But that opened another door. And another. And another. I really don't know how Dark Shadows became such an integral part of my DNA, but it did.
I'm running out of episodes. I have two and a half DVD collections left. Soon I will know how Alexander the Great felt. I will weep when I have no more Dark Shadows to conquer.
It should also be noted that Mom had a huge crush on Quentin to the point where she actually had the sheet music for his song (the one you're supposed to be listening to right now). She could play it very beautifully on piano.
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