A Dark Shadows Crash Course

There are various other time-travel stories, including one in which Barnabas Collins travels back in time to the period in which he is chained in his coffin. During the 19th century, in his original timeline, Banabus was locked up and buried in the ground. When he first emerges, he tells the Collins family he is a long-lost relative of the dead Barnabas Collins, making the secret of his vampirism a long-running plot point throughout the series. Though Dark Shadows was canceled before it could conclude all of it’s storylines, one of the writers, Sam Hall, revealed in a TV Guide interview that the finale would have included a storyline in which Barnabas permanently ceases to be a vampire.

The aesthetic of the original show is slow, bumpy, creaky, and over-the-top. Personally, and though this sounds like blasphemy, I find the color episodes much more entertaining than their black and white predecessors. The time-travel episodes involving Vicki and Barnabas are without a doubt the best, and though all the actors who play Vicki are fine, Alexandra Moltke is my favorite. But the other reason to watch the original Dark Shadows is Jonathan Frid.