This week, Leo takes Steven on a trip down memory lane with House of Dark Shadows. They talk about providing convenient employee parking, the sights and sounds of a manor in Maine, the popularity of Barnabas Collins, fire engine red blood and what happens when a person who has never seen one episode of the Dark Shadows TV Show watches this movie.
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haleo hi Stephen I have to admit I'm a little depressed right now all I'm sorry yeah there's nothing quite like when an old X or when an old girlfriend or even just somebody you were interested in slides back into your DMS gross yeah that's that's a whole kettle of emotion yeah and unfortunately as we've been advertising on Instagram I've been just taking a look and see you know who's looking at our videos that we're posting on Instagram Instagram and just a lot of my old X's are showing back up again like I want to come for you 69 and flashing my beaver XX oh I forgot about beaver yeah I know she really meant something to me yes I'm sure meant another ad blocker that's right right I want to blow you but like it's like clearly Russian and so it's not spelled correctly oh that's the person I thought you were just saying that I yeah it's hard walking down the street sometimes it's your Tourette's again I know we got you no that was another one of the very prominent ladies in my life so they all showed up for our for our trauma ads of course they did that's understandable everybody likes troubleville it's it's yeah exactly it was my visit back to troma villa brought back all my old X's we go there man I'm telling you how my old X's come back start doing that big hat and sunglasses like old movie stars used to do I know I know but I'm gonna have to tell them ladies I'm sorry but I'm just not available right now I'm too involved in my work yeah yeah that's as good a lie as any alright everybody welcome all of you to spoils of horror my name is Steven I am Leo and this is episode number 138 house of dark shadows but an excellent day for an exit is a I'm our number one fan I hope they are watching there see there see and they'll know so Leo this is definitely a pick of yours because it couldn't possibly have picked this movie because I didn't know it existed so why did you pick house of dark shadows you have hold on air a very lovely story about you and your dad sharing horror movies together and bonding and having a great experience over such things my introduction to horror was not as awesome as about five years old roughly when I started watching horror movies and it wasn't because my mother was caring and kind and like hey let me walk you through this and let's have an experience together it was really that she just couldn't bother being a proper mom and she was getting tired of having to change her life for the kids and would just have horror movies on and if I walked into the room and saw them and got nightmares that was my fault quote unquote so I have learned through years of therapy later on that some of that continuation me after 5, 6, 7 years old continuing to watch horror movies with her which is basically the only real bonding experience we had was also me just trying to get any sort of attention or love or affection from her so it's all very tragic but it's you know horror so it's meant to be tragic to some degree and I'm being in the community now and I'm like perfectly resolved for it and I don't have any bullshit around it but I remember in the vague bonding experiences we had over horror dark shadows was a prominent feature of her she was really into the show and I got really into the show because it was exactly right for a young person introduction horror situation it was gothic it was ethereal it was bad acting it was big characters it was so much fun as I grew up I started learning more the background of it and how it came to be that this film existed which short version the show was tanking and Dan Curtis the guy who invented it always wanted this story to happen the character of Barnabas was meant to be temporary and it was going to pay off in this way in the TV show but nobody expected that that character was going to be so popular or bring so much life into the series it didn't go that way but here we are now with this wonderful movie that takes one storyline from the series and turns it into hammer horror in the most exquisite way and I really wanted to share it with everybody you know it's funny I was wondering where you were going to go with this when you started because I knew that you relatively watched horror movies on your own and so when you compared the story to my father I thought to myself if this story ends with Leo sitting next to a broom with googly eyes that's about as much parenting as I got yes broom with googly eyes and before anybody gets too mad at me I knew that Leo would laugh at that joke so before you think that I don't take his plight seriously I don't take it that seriously it's all good all right shall we cover House of Dark Shadows oh hell yeah and the old house at Collinwood Willie Loomis searches for the rumored family fortune he follows a set of clues to an old family crypt and finds a chained coffin covered in cobwebs after breaking it open a hand grabs his neck while leaving for work a secretary for the estate walks to her car through a gloomy forest something's watching from the shadows she begins to run climbs into her car and is grabbed from off-screen moments later she's found with two puncture wounds in her neck the Collinwood family is on edge over time more women are attacked in the night and Willie is caught meeting a mysterious stranger at a bar one evening a long lost cousin named Barnabas Collins shows up at the door he's regal polite and charming he regales them with family history and old heirlooms they're struck by his resemblance to an ancestor who traveled to England in 1797 then disappeared this movie starts us off with some real bangers of imagery we've got these beautiful gray forests and this green grass it looks like old moors and you've got this giant mansion with all these gorgeous lights in the windows this is a really striking start to the film it really pulls you in and this mansion is called Collinwood and it takes place in Collins Port, Maine and I was really pulled out of this movie from the start because when I looked at this image I thought to myself there is no fucking way this movie takes place in Maine I knew you were locking on that there was no death are they yard there was not one moose in this movie not one moose outnumber people in Maine so I didn't buy that at all if this had had a giant RV that was sort of plugged into the I would have bought it like if Barnabas showed up and he had to live in the RV outside I would have believed it one of my great joys in covering this movie with you as I learned that you've never seen anything dark shadows didn't see the theories nor this film as you said didn't even know existed to whereas I grew up with this and have a deep rich history of the soap opera that led to the film and I will make great attempts to not get into too much trivia and etc but I'm very excited with the things I know being that the film had the opportunity to choose various locations they had a better budget obviously so we got real actual locations instead of there's a place in New York and a place in Rhode Island that they filmed the mansion of for the TV series and neither of those are Maine either but I think Rhode Island comes closest right the feel and theme of what would be Maine I prayed a god that someone watched this show every day of their life and thought this is what Maine looked like but it looked like something out of the hound of Baskerville like I grew up in Seattle but I was born in New England and I was very very young when I moved away so it was a very interesting thing for me to live my life feeling like this is what New England looked like on the whole and then move here and realize that is just not true yeah I don't know how they got all their money I don't know if they sold lobster traps or like shares in LL Bean I'm just not sure what they did that got them to be this rich I'm not sure from the series what it was because that part was never relevant to me I liked the show because it was spooky and gothic it started with ghosts it started with seances all that sort of shit and then led to this whole vampire thing which was phenomenal well and before I make this entire episode jokes about Maine and the Collinwood estate being built on russet potatoes I just wish this whole movie had been done with everybody in flannel that's all I'm saying but all joking aside yes you're right I have no I am not familiar at all with dark shadows I knew it was a show I had never seen I'm a big TV guy and I just simply didn't watch it when I was young and in TV you know when I was watching like things like x files and things like that I just never watched it and so I am totally coming into this cold and I have really no idea who these characters are I have no idea who who's popular who isn't popular who means somebody to something who where this takes place in the whole storyline and actually purposely didn't look it up too much the only things that I know is that Barnabas was super popular that this show came out after the tv show and that these actors are not all playing the same roles they played in the show not all of them entirely correct right so that is something that I though but those are the only things that I know and that's it so it is really interesting coming into this cold I do want to take the moment because I don't want to spend the whole time doing trivia either but for those who aren't familiar with this as Stephen is unfamiliar with the series in 1969 the show was on its last legs the people running the studio were like hey you're not getting the ratings so if you can't clean this up and like the next season you're done we're canceling it because like I said it was all about ghosts seances ethereal shit whatever else so they introduced Barnabas Collins and the storyline because Dan Curtis was like well if I'm going out let me tell the story I want to tell Barnabas Collins got so popular so fast the show skyrocketed it was it was unbelievable how the teenagers of the time and just locked on to this as the greatest thing ever the problem is it was still a soap opera and it was still live back in the day before color film was even a thing so there have been Jonathan Fred the guy who plays Barnabas Collins was in interviews talking about how he would be up the stairs waiting to enter the scene and somebody would hand him a revision of the script and he had literally like two minutes to memorize that and then get out there and do it live in front of the cameras so the acting on the tv show was bad some of it not their fault some actors weren't that great and seeing them in the movie having much better acting skills was tremendous and seeing them in the movie for the ones who still couldn't act was equally hilarious I think there's a real opportunity here to talk about how they were maximizing this as a film because they're really having a lot of fun with the tropes of a hammer film you know this doesn't just feel like a vampire movie there is fog there is howling wolves there is secret chambers there's old crypts so one of the first characters that we meet is the groundskeeper of the Collinwood estate who's named Willy which proves the theory that the Simpsons predict everything but he is looking for this family treasure and this movie moves really fast we're going to talk about that later but the plot points kind of hit really quickly you can tell it was once a tv show and so he goes into this crypt and you're really just like really take it in by how much this movie is enjoying being a movie and that it can that both the plot points move really quick like a tv show yet it can kind of drink in the imagery a little bit and that is part of the real fun of this movie is just how much they drink in coffins and spider webs and candles like I almost wish we could have had Jacqueline on as a guest because oh that was so good I just think that she would just drink in this like imagery you know because they did a great episode on a hammer film and you know her and I are very aligned in the like we love the imagery of these kinds of movies and I think that she really really drank that in I agree completely and if you're listening Jacqueline please go watch this movie if you haven't already it's fucking tremendous I love everything you're saying I do like that they took the approach of the hammer horror style for this film which of course back then was kind of the popular trend so that made sense but it really really worked for this if they had tried any other horror style of the of the time it wouldn't worked as well in my opinion and having the time the budget everything else to be able to really dive into it you were talking about how it was clearly a tv series inspiration or what have you I think that was one of the things that both sold this so well but also was one of their mistakes with it one of the few things I can say what I thought was a mistake of it is that it felt like they were relying on the fact that their show was so popular that people knew it to make the film and make the beats because there's a lot of jump cuts that are very sharp there's a lot of plot points that end very abruptly that if you knew the soap opera if you were watching the show made perfect sense but if you're coming into it with no knowledge whatsoever you're like what the fuck just happened yeah it makes a pretty big jump into like back into the mansion it talks so groundskeeper willy is sort of like wandering around downstairs in the crepes i'm going to call him that through the rest of the i get that his name is willy willy yeah yes why is everybody named lumis i don't know to be fair this guy was in 69 so he was probably the first well no because lumis from psycho is the first oh fair point so maybe that i don't know you know it's just but anyway it's a very popular it's like in this movie where they constantly ask people like oh do you this is a manor thing where they ask people like hey if you're from portland do you know so and so like do all these lumis is new know each other it's a it's a melange lumis yes so it's disgusting yes but anyway that's the worst orgy ever but anyway so when we get into the actual plot so after the groundskeeper finds this crypt down in these uh you know this crypt in the secret passage and then there's a coffin down below which he thinks is going to be family treasure but actually ends up being the vampire barnabas who they make a big deal of pretending is not a vampire for about 15 minutes which is about 14 minutes longer than i need it that's right it goes to the collinwood estate where we meet the actual family so we meet this sort of like mother and father of the household and the bookkeeper the bookkeeper is like doing some late night you know bookkeeping and you know signing checks and different things like that and then she says i'm going to get going and she walks out to her car and my first piece of advice for collinwood is they need better employee parking because i've never seen a car so far away from the place where person parks imagine a stereotyped mansion slash castle on a hill with that long-ass fucking driveway right and they have that circular area in front of park cars but this woman decided she was going to park outside the gate at the front end of that long-ass driveway not by the house so she had about a mile to walk in this creepy ass fucking forest that's what i'm imagining i'm imagining her employee interview where they're like don't worry like we have plenty of employee parking if you go out this house through the fog through the creepy forest past the graveyard you'll see three hanging nooses from a tree take a right then you'll go past the lagoon don't go into the lagoon do not go into the lagoon if you stray from the past at all your fate will be sealed exactly just keep your eyes on the road if you hear anybody call out your name any voices just ignore them and just keep going towards your car you'll get there it's about a 25-minute walk and that's not covered in your lunch break by the way right we expect you back here in 30 minutes timeliness is godliness yeah it's pretty a steer i guess of the word i want to use i don't know if that's correct but it visually is stunning it doesn't make any fucking sense at all for the character to endure this but i i'm also intrigued with the standard sound effects album that they're using of the day for the wolf howls rattling chains and ghost noises and oh yeah if i can dig it up i'll end it in here the once you hear it you'll know exactly what this wolf hell is it was in every old fucking hammer movie it was in every gothic vampire thing but i love the sequence i really do you know i'm making fun of it but i love the sequence so you get a great sort of like balance between these beautiful static shots of her walking down the path and she's in a really striking red dress which is just a nice touch they do some great contrasts of costume colors with the colors of the collin wood and the sort of creepy forest around them i love the way they use costumes to kind of pop against the rest of the movie and so she's wearing this really like striking red you know like dresser suit or something and at the same time Barnabas is clearly watching from the woods and it goes to shaky camera every time he is sort of watching her it's his perspective but it's very elegantly done it looks really nice it looks like you know Jason vore he's watching from the trees yeah actually and i love i so she just gets a little weirded out and so she starts to run for her car and man i love this shot this beautiful gorgeous shot where she runs into her car and then the camera pushes in really quick on the window as somebody opens the door and grabs her neck and i just think to myself like only hammer films and Italian horror they just capture terror so well i'm so glad you said that yeah exactly right the Italian horror aspect not obviously literally following that style but the sensibility that you get from that type of scare from that type of terror then certain angles of the camera or certain movements of the character can bring and these guys really nailed it yeah i mean the two that we've covered in vastly different places of quality but like in demons or you know say what you will about a piperial ground those movies capture terror so well genuinely like when a character gets grabbed by a zombie or a demon or whatnot the terror and the fear that people feel is so like eye-poppingly palpable and yeah it tends to be more the women in those movies we've joked when we've covered those movies that women are either like they're either like motherly sexy or dying of terror it's very it like insanity level like slitting their own throats terror but still give a compliment where it's due i mean when it pans in on her face it's not that the scene is really scary it's just her terror really gets into under your skin it's really well acted so a young lady dies during this time we're also looking for david he's the youngest member of the collins family likes to play pranks he likes to go and hide in various places around the state so everyone's always on edge they're looking for him and during the investigation they see willy who had been fired from his job and was like i don't care i'm gonna go find these family jewels finds Barnabas instead they see him talking to Barnabas and they're like that's weird what i thought he left i thought hey come by get your last paycheck that kind of shit they finally cut to a scene of Barnabas walking towards the collins the state and when he shows up everyone's in awe because he looks so very much like the original Barnabas Collins which is of course because he is that guy but he's claiming to be a cousin from far off england etc etc and they have him standing right next to a portrait of himself on the wall and it's actually very cool in the tv series before they introduced Barnabas Collins as a character that portrait looked different and you saw it after a couple episodes look more and more like jonathan frid as it went on sure so there's a couple parts in here that i thought were really cool just little little details number one i really like when there's a character named kathra to katelyn we'll get to like the other characters other than Barnabas because i have kind of like a meta thing to say about yep how they're all kind of the same but anyway so so um but there's a blonde woman with a c-name that is either kathra and or katelyn carolyn and carolyn thank you and actually normally i would be like really particular about making sure i leo can tell you i'm very particular about getting people's names right there's actually a reason in this particular episode i'm not all that stressed about it so but this character she sort of spots willy in this bar and whatnot and what i like about this scene is not necessarily that i think anything that's happening here is deeply important but to give you the hammer films vibe or the vibe of like old classic horror films this felt so deeply to me like the scene in any werewolf movie where they always go to the bar before they actually go to the you know to the place where they're going to get turned as a werewolf or it'll be the bar or the in before they actually go to the big castle where count dracula is you always have that scene where they're like everybody that goes to that castle never comes back you know like that's the old you know like that's the old castle where cow dracula used to right you know i mean like cell Etsy products you know i mean like whatever you know like whatever he's got a feed shop and it hasn't succeeded in years and now AI came in and ruined everything like it you know you know what you know what i'm talking about and so it it feels like that type of scene yeah and again it feels totally out of place in main because they can't set this at like a muscle shack or like you know but it's very app-pro what you're saying because it fits so much not just the hammer horror style but a lovecraftian type feel when they go to this dive bar that's nautical themed and it's by the water and you can tell they're giving the illusion that it's a sort of fishing town or some industry in that nature and they do that classic shot where you see willy at the one end of the table and just the back of a chair with somebody's hands sticking out he's got a big morning ring yeah this yeah the signet ring yeah they've got the signet ring on yeah he looks like dr claw from inspector gadget he's just sitting there yep yep one thing i want to say for this as well is that they lived up to their name right out of the gate this movie knows how to play with shadows they agreed really really focused on taking the lighting in different directions because on a studio set for a television series especially back in the 60s there's only so much you could do but out here they have an expansive world of opportunity for the different camera angles and lighting shots and it just came together so well oh i totally agree and there's a shot that i really like to when Barnabas actually shows up at the house and it does a POV shot of him where he's walking around and there are some aspects of this movie that i'm a little critical of that take a second or a third viewing to quite frankly understand from an outsider perspective but there are some that i don't mind play better on a second or third viewing because on the first viewing i didn't really know what was happening here i don't know who this character is i don't know why he's looking around but on the second viewing i thought to myself oh it's because Barnabas hasn't been inside his own home in 200 years and so he is drinking in the antiques and he's drinking in the you know sort of like lavish portraits and the little knickknacks and the fireplace and all the things that were part of his home before so i really enjoyed this shot because i do think it tells us a little bit about him as a character says especially because other than maybe one or two exceptions he's really the only kind of character we can really grab onto absolutely true and i love that you locked in on this because his you can almost feel from him in this point of view shot where he's like oh i remember this portrait or oh yes they still keep this on the mantle or just that sort of reminiscing that he's doing in the space and Barnabas as a character is fascinating because he's not like standard vampire tropes of the time he's really playing this up on a more romantic angle as opposed to a horror angle then it when he does get scary is that much more powerful because you're like holy shit this guy's been very classy and regal and sophisticated now he's just fucking terrible sure this is also an important point of the film because this is where we meet everyone else that's right that's right and every single person that i believe lives in Collinsport main uh there there is just a this is a very big family and there's just all sorts of different characters there are the various like Collinwood or Collinsport the but basically the mother and the father and their children and some of their kids are older some of their kids are younger and then some of their kids are married and some of their kids aren't married and then they have my friends and like you know friends that are over and different things like that and so this part is a little it's a little hard to follow when you haven't watched the show who everyone is and how they're all like interconnected uh we do get to meet two of the important characters one is a a doctor like a blood worker who is going to play a prominent role later on in the movie one a prominent role that i thought was very interesting and then we meet the professor Stokes who's kind of like our van Helsing of the yeah story and he starts off i've never had a van Helsing character start off so immediately unlikable and i'm not a big fan of the van Helsing character right i just i usually find him to be quite boring and i always find him to be like i love the 1931 Dracula we've covered it i adore that movie i find his part of that movie to be the most boring that's fair and so he automatically stops it and he's testing Barnabas because he automatically doesn't believe that Barnabas is who he says he is he's a professor he just clearly believes you know he clearly believes that he's a vampire the just for just i want to make it clear since talk about hair films the only van Helsing that i think i've ever liked is Peter Cushing but great choice yeah well get to him later i love him but anyway we get to this part where he is testing Barnabas on where he used to live in England and he says oh you lived in such and such a town in England do you know the smiths they live in apartment b12 and i thought what a fucking asshole there's nothing like no bigger asshole move than being like you oh you live in New York City do you know two people that live in Brooklyn yeah right yeah because i'm going to simply because i'm there yeah that makes perfect fucking sense the only thing you proved with that sentence is that you're an asshole i think if you took the stereotypical van Helsing trope and combined it with otho from beetle juice that's this guy that is so accurate like such a pompous ass wipe and it's amazing you're locking on to exactly two parts of this his character which is like why are you a dick right away everyone else is like oh wow a new cousin and family and okay great and this guy immediately is like i don't like you and i'm going to make your life miserable and the other part which i mentioned before the one complaint i have is that the movie is relying on people having a knowledge base of the tv show because this guy makes perfect sense had you watched the show everyone in this room makes perfect sense if you'd watch the show but if you're coming into it with no knowledge base then i can fully understand i saw it when i was watching it like i'm very versed in this and the jump cuts and the way they're introducing the characters i'm like man if somebody didn't know this this would be fucking confusing imagine if professor stokes had tested barnabas by taking a bite out of a lettuce wrap and being like a vampire wouldn't like to eat a lettuce wrap and it's like nobody wants to eat a fucking lettuce wrap you just shoot on they don't want to eat a lettuce wrap in general like let alone like would you like some of this patty not really no it's more of a flavor thing or texture thing it's not that vampire i just i never read all of an rice's books that's something a vampire would do have you read all of them barnabas i bet you have yes no he's just a dick i was like man i've never had a hero that i disliked so quickly in my life hmm what's all this white foundation in your cupboard not something a vampire would have get out of the fucking cupboard and shut the fuck up oh hi hello it's Dom and along with my co-host Amy we are the hosts of horror house true crime and the macabre if like us you have a morbid curiosity with true crime the paranormal cults and more then our show may just satisfy your curiosities we release episodes on fridays and bonus episodes every other wednesday you can listen to us wherever you find your podcasts and you can also find us on instagram at horror house underscore pod so all that's left to say is until next time my friends stay spooky part of us moves into a nearby house on the estate owned by the original part of us colons he bites the neck of alisabeth's daughter carolyn as she prepares for a grand ball in his honor we quickly cut to the party where friends and family sip wine share gossip and meet the new enigmatic member of the family of barnabas is distracted a governess working in call-and-wood named maggie evans looks remarkably like a woman named josett the love of his life while he flirts with her carolyn becomes jealous after a series of dramatic protests and arguments barnabas bites carolyn's neck away from the others and she dies in the hallway after the funeral dr julia hoffman is examining blood from the victims of the recent attacks she explains to her colleague professor eliot stokes that there is a strange cell she's isolated in their blood after they determine that a vampire might be afoot she wonders if the existence of this cell means vampires and can be cured meanwhile david colons is playing in the old abandoned pool when he hears someone calling his name it's his sister carolyn she walks through the darkness and mist in a flowing white gown david is frightened and runs back to call-and-wood this leads to arguments accusations of vampirism and carolyn's former fiancé taut storming off to her tomb where the undead woman bites his neck taut escapes and follows the spirit of his former lover into an attic when professor stokes arrives they use crosses to subdue carolyn and kill her with a stake through her heart i would like to issue an apology i clearly got something wrong earlier this section of the film prominently features carolyn getting turned into a vampire and then falling in love with barnabas which means that she is falling in love with her cousin yes so this movie clearly takes place there had to be a little bit of realism in it somewhere else i've never been so wrong carolyn is a fascinating character because she was the original attack that barnabas made in the series and was going to make her the bride and everything else kept her locked up in a dungeon for a long time it was really cool and then maggie showed up and they wrote this whole story line about her being the reincarnation of his lost love so watching them speed through it so quickly becomes a much more interesting which one of my family members am i into today yeah that was one thing i kind of figured out because as i was watching this movie i thought i can't figure out how this can possibly connect to a tv show because it clearly has a beginning a middle and an end so unless barnabas is playing barnabas like the actor is playing barnabas but then all the other actors are playing different characters in the same family like some sort of like days of our lives bullshit where they were all different people in the 1700s and now they're different people in the 1970s that happened in the show yeah and look i actually think that that's a great idea like say what you will say what you will about american horror story i actually think it's a good idea to have a show where you have a horror story that they tell in one season you can kill any character you want because the problem with killing your characters you're essentially firing the actor right which is hard to do you know if you had an actor for like five seasons but the american horror story idea you just kill everybody you want and then the next season everybody gets to play a different character and it's just different stories actually a fantastic idea it's a weird comparison there's a detective series called neuro wolf that i enjoy very much they used to do the same thing the actors that they had there's a pool of like 15 of them and every episode that played different people except for the main three or four who are always the same and you didn't care because the story was good and everything was fun and it was worth watching and it didn't bother you that oh this guy was Tony last week and now he's Phil nobody gives a shit yeah yeah that stuff wouldn't bother there is something to be said about trying to figure out where this takes place in the whole story because i just couldn't figure it out but then i realized that it was a retelling of sorts of the story that's kind of what i was able to figure out or at least that was what made the most sense to me what's difficult here is that there's actually no individual story i don't enjoy it's just when they're all together that i think to myself there's a lot happening here yeah but Carolyn's arc which is that she you know gets bit and becomes a vampire and then gets jealous that Barnabas isn't love with somebody else and you know and then they sort of go through their whole storyline is compelling it is really interesting it's a shame that it happens so quickly and i understand why it had to for the movie but you're absolutely right what actually happened was Dan Curtis wanted this story in the tv so to only be a season or two and it was going to have beginning middle end vampire would die at the end heroes victory blah blah blah but again the character of Barnabas Collins got so popular there's like no way they could have killed them off so they just kept it running and they extended these storylines out to whatever conclusion they could make without killing off the main characters and i'm glad that you keep bringing up the writer because if i didn't hear from you who the writer was i would have been convinced it was the actor playing Barnabas because it just wreaks so much of the actor writer director vibe where the story is this character just can't stop having women like Barnabas was not a very soon right but that woman is in love with me and this woman is in love with me and i don't know what to do this some sort of like tommy was so the room shit like yes it's tearing me apart no it's really just the theory of the standard vampire tropes which i think this movie really takes advantage of and again this is vampires of the 60s and 70s not what we have now a modern vampire such but back then when you're talking about classic belavagosi when you're talking about hammer style vampires things like that they're really staying true to that mythology and i think it's a very compelling vampire story of that style you get intrigued very quickly because especially i thought the actress playing carolyn was very easily like she you could get on her side easily she was very interesting i thought she was well acted especially when she becomes the vampire but even early on you know you're you're quite curious about her she is one of those sort of like easily likeable i don't want to say heroes because she didn't do anything you're right but you know a protagonist a character that you can sort of get behind early on and so i did get pulled in pretty quickly especially when i was sort of trying to figure out how this was all going to come together and i thought maybe she'd play a larger role than she did i thought that maybe this would be a love triangle throughout the entire movie i didn't know it'd be one of 12 love triangles throughout the entire movie that's fair i i think it was quite a surprise to those of us who knew the show to watch carolyn die and that was what they really expanded upon as well as actually killing off characters that we liked and got behind and actually the amount of blood they were able to do because now it's a movie instead of a tv show where there's a lot more censorship and they if you're part of the pun really hammered into that to bring us this shocking moment carolyn turning into a vampire that happened we got that okay great her actually getting killed off that was big yeah and let's talk about some of these hammer influences for a second so first of all i think the house of dark shadows really owes a debt to you know hammer and the movies that they created not necessarily for their aesthetic or for their influence just for the simple yard sale that they must have been happening during that time that allowed them to buy 300 pales of fire engine red blood yeah that old i had forgotten about hammer blood and how just a bucket of paint it was it was it like it was just like they threw as many red highlighters into a white bucket of paint just melted them all together this is the reddest blood i've ever seen like if you dipped a paint like if you dipped a paintbrush in it you could paint a fucking you could paint pictures of apples with absolutely it is so fucking red i had forgotten that was the style of the time and i don't know if it was because for black and white film it translated better as looking like real blood to be that bright but when it's a color transfer of the film or the show or whatever this stuff is not part of the human body this stuff doesn't exist in nature and it's so funny because i think now it's such a fun little trope that you almost couldn't even not have it it'd be like doing a forbidden world remake and not having the cheap ass in the background like if you were gonna do like an ode to hammer films you would have to have this like blood that is so red that like you can see this from mars like it is so bright and i know it's a bit of a tangent but that's how you can tell the difference between a a good tribute to an old style and a bad one as to whether or not they're willing to go with the old style effects all joking aside i think that this movie has some of the most striking and beautiful images that i have seen in a movie that we have covered i and i mean that sincerely like i was actually looking at our catalog and i was thinking to myself what are some of the most just like physically beautiful movies that we have covered you know physically beautiful to us you know like horror fans you know of course people outside of it don't really get this but like i honestly i think it stands up there with maybe the last matinee and dracula 1931 as probably just some of the most gorgeous like strike maybe some shots in demons i brought that up earlier like yeah i guess that yeah a movie that i could had drink in and i will tell you this i said in our dracula episode that there is a scene where the three brides of frat of frat yeah he did have three just one was a side check that's a the three brides of dracula come in through the member when they come through the terrace and they that is such a gorgeous shot i wanted as a poster and this movie has another shot and i bet you know what it is it is the shot where david is in the like old pool they have this old pool on the site of the of the mansion and he's like throwing rocks he's upset that his sister's dad and what happens is she calls his name and there is a part where he is standing in this derelict pool that looks like an old like roman pool like it's very it's not like a fucking like above ground pool it's not like it is a plastic round thing you put in the backyard this is an opulent right this is very opulent it looks it looks like so again it looks like something like out of green yes it's got columns and there is this fog and this like very light like gray green blue tones and she comes wafting through the fog in this like beautiful like white dress with the fangs i think that that might be one of the top five most gorgeous shots we have covered on this show oh it was beautiful i i stopped everything every time we got to this point in the movie like i just could not take my eyes off this image and i will use it as some of our advertising and i'll even put a note you know i'll see if i can find something that i can click to in the show notes just so you can get the idea of just how striking this moment is it really captivated me and that's that is probably one of the greatest takeaways of this film it's fucking gorgeous i couldn't agree more i don't honestly have too much more to add to it because you're spot on and there are more moments like this there is going to be a whole marriage scene later on at the end of the movie that is just like out of the dreams of like fucking haunted house lovers and fucking gothic chicks like it is incredible like it's incredible yeah everybody who wants that name before christmas wedding this is better trust me yeah exactly you're gonna fucking your heart's gonna stop when you get to the end of this movie and you see this like marriage in front of a coffin with fucking cobwebs and candelabas and shit it's just incredible and they have great mood lighting everywhere they have great you know this this i would love i would love by the way there's a part where carolyn goes into the house and dies this is in between her getting her first bite as a vampire and then the second bite which kills her and then actually makes her into a vampire everyone needs here to be bit twice i don't know i don't know bardamis is aging clear in 200 years one to transform i don't know i don't know yes exactly i don't know what the rules are here but but she runs into the house and she dies in the hallway and i would just love for the camera to like point upward into the collin wood house and just show me the perfect lighting grid that they clearly have in their ceiling because like every time someone dies their face is like perfectly lit but everything else is in shadow and every time bardamis has like a monologue he has that like morticia morticia uh you know adam's sort of like the light on his eyes yeah yeah which in the atom certainly that was a joke sure yeah but like and i don't know if it was a joke on dark shadows but i'll fucking take it like i think i think it's great i do know but like that they were told theoretically not to point the cameras up in the tv show because there were enough boom mics and background actor shadows hitting the walls during that series as it was they're like you can't show anything up there just stop my god these people really are taking their money and putting it into like perfect lighting inside this house and that's that's genuinely what i want to compliment you know for the little very little that i can say is not working for this in terms of you have to know the show and blah blah blah they really put their money in wisely the effects that they are using the lighting that they're using the the people running this dan kurtis and others who actually apparently know how to do lighting and know how to do cameras because i don't know like i again at the risk of repeating everything you just said i'm on your side about how fucking amazing and gorgeous all of this looks but it doesn't mean you can't have a little fun with it because i just picture like a meeting of the family you know they have like a little family meeting around the dinner table and they're like look everybody we care about you we care about your safety we don't want anything bad to happen to any of you but if you are gonna die we have several places in this house we highly recommend oh you have to do is look for one of those vases with green flowers mean us dramatically against it and you're perfect and you'll notice and if you just hit the switch before you die your face will be perfectly led it's like clue but instead of a bunch of extra passageways and shit you have this great lighting in very specific places but you know to end on a positive and not end on making fun of it my god i mean that part where carolyn walks out of the mist in the pool scene might be and i don't feel bad saying this it might be the most beautiful shot we've covered on the show it might be i agree amongst all of this wonderful lighting and everything else we have a moment where we talk to dr Julia Hoffman who is also talking to Elliot Stokes our othel character Julia Hoffman is a character that i never really got behind in the tv series and i always attributed her bad acting to how much pressure they were under to make this live show happen and like i said the scripts came late and everything else then she got into this movie where she had several takes to do things again and didn't improve her acting skills at all and i'm not saying this to be mean i just found it a funny contrast that everyone else seemed to get better because they had the chance to try again and she did not so i didn't really have a big problem with her acting i thought she was fine and i actually thought that the story should have been a little bit more built around her character only because it seemed like a really good story to tell for an offshoot on a main character so like if you're gonna tell a story about a main character that it it really has to be kind of like an open and shut loop like maybe people that have seen the show are gonna watch this movie maybe they haven't it's gotta have an ending that makes sense to everybody but if they ever continue something with this character they don't have to have seen the movie it's like fucking marvel tv shows where like they like pretend it's really important but it's a closed loop where if you didn't watch it you can still follow the movies but if i'm gonna be kind and i quite liked house of dark shadow so it's easy to be kind but a good closed loop would be a story where Barnabas has the potential for a cure of vampirism and then either chooses not to take it or eventually it just doesn't work or whatnot i was also struck by i think the role of the hematologist is like a role that pretty much shows up in vampire films and that's it hematologists are only allowed to be played by women who fall in love with the vampire and or or once loved the right i'm talking about because like luva in blackulas kind of like a hematologist you know wrong and then of course you have blade where it where she's like i can make blood explode i like the angle and as you've just pointed out other vampire movies and tv shows have tried it where hey we can actually fix this and then the vampires out in the daylight everyone who's like you're a vampire oh wait the sun's up it's noon what the hell i like that i'm going to use the word angle again for the confusion that it drives and for the plot that it drives if that makes sense have you ever heard of something called the sculli effect perhaps that sounds familiar so the sculli effect is something that happened in the 90s where a lot of young women who grew up in the 90s watching the x-files happened to go into stem so they went into science technology engineering or mathematics got it and the idea being that they were inspired by the character of sculli fair enough i like to think that there is an unknown bunch of goth chicks that got into hematology in the hopes of banging a vampire do you think that's where they got that abby character from the csi or whatever it was yes yes exactly science nerd yes i just pictured there's like a bunch of like women out there with like fucking tattoos all over their face and shit and they are like they're like looking at microscopes and they're like and they just they just something like cancer cell or something like i think it's a vampire performance before like you've got to stop with a vampire shit every time you do you think everybody is a vampire they have leukemia like this is we're here to fix real diseases yeah exactly so all of the stuff with julia hoffman is interwoven throughout you know we've got this great storyline with barnamis trying to reconnect with the family hiding that he's a vampire he's got willy lumis as his sort of rent field running around doing his shit for him we've got caroling in this really great storyline where she's a subservient vampire vampire bride whatever the hell she is at the moment and we're still dealing with that which is going to lead her to taught her former fiancé figuring out i got to do something about this if she's really alive i got to get there which is very heroic and noble and cool and it's just ultimately going to lead to his demise because that's what happens in this sort of scenario first of all i love how you describe this opening i love how you describe it as barnamis is just trying to reconnect with his family and his vampireism like it's like it's like the saddest low-grade gay coming out of the closet story i just want to be accepted but nobody ever will right like it's what a baseball player that comes back home and can't tell everybody these gay this is the 50s we don't do that sort of thing around here right i just want to read my pro-muscle man if you want to get that joke listen to our nightmare on on elm street two opposite i totally agree with you i really like the way this all plays out and there's a lot of heroes that you think are going to be heroes and they just kind of like bite the dust which i actually really enjoyed in this movie there is this whole storyline where Todd goes after his girlfriend or wife or it calls him it calls like her his ex fiancé so i don't know what kind of like that's what i said on wikipedia so i don't know what kind of like sad desperate like they had a troubled relationship it was please dear please dear god be my be my girlfriend i don't care that you're a vampire i'll take anything i can get that story line here but but i did really enjoy this sequence the way that he i love the way he chases after her i the way that she sort of appears this is like apparition even though i think it is really her but she's being very haunting and again more of this like gorgeous imagery that this movie is just filled with with her standing in windows and standing in doorways and there's a part that i just like fucking adored almost as much as the pool scene which is when a bunch of police officers are driving down the road and carolin shows up in the oh yes middle of the road and they have to steer around her it's a shot we've seen a thousand times but this movie might just be the most visually striking of it you know sort of the ghost in the road that makes the car drive into a tree but i don't think any movies done it better than this one right here it just looks so gorgeous and haunting like it almost makes you wish this was a ghost story because it works just as well as one using the word haunting is exactly right i've always found this exact moment to be that mostly the stuff with carolin was i think the most literal haunting stuff in this film Barnabas stuff i mentioned earlier where he gets really angry and really violent and all that is very very cool and it's very terrifying but this ghost like apparition angle that they're using for her Dracula's bright style character i i was blown away the choice was solid the acting was solid everything came together to make it boogie as shit and i talked in our omen episode about how the the hand of god sometimes can be felt and sometimes isn't felt and i really like that in the omen three that you can really feel the hand of god and you can really feel that there is a little bit of um protection happening for our heroic characters because when they all get up to the attic they all kind of surround carolin and they all have these silver crosses and just thank god for the dollar general fire sale that they were having on tinfoil crosses how wrong this stuff was definitely a home project for homeschool kids and yeah my god thank god that they got the local Collins port kindergarten to make 200 crosses for the local police department i like that the police department and we'll get to more of this a little later on just happens to have a store filled with crosses and silver bullets and i don't know what the fuck has been happening to this town that that is a regular ammunition thing for them but they're ready i thought that too i thought shit if i went to that town i'd fucking open a garlic store right i was like holy shit this police department has fucking everything they have crosses they have silver bullets i thought to myself isn't it supposed to isn't the trope in these like wearable vampire movies supposed to be that somebody has like one locket that they can melt down for one bullet yeah and this is spent throughout everything this is where i was gonna harken back to the simpsons and open up a shop full of fucking gardening tools for the regular time of the year and then flip the sign to say angry mob tools right right exactly yeah for those of you who haven't seen this movie this apart later on i was gonna comment on this where they give the entire police department silver bullets to fight an empire and they just have them in fucking boxes yeah they just have them they're just there like you have to custom order that shit that's not readily available yeah imagine if you went on to amazon and they had for 2699 a package of 2000 silver bullets like bimable exactly what the box looks like too and so that's what they have with these crosses like every police officer has their own cross and they're looking fake as shit they look so fake it's like if you unwrappy you're gonna eat a chocolate cross i said in our black hula episode that they clearly went to like good will to get crosses because they they all had a cross it was all different no this was some cross manufacturer went out of like business and had to just get rid of 800 that they had that were all the same dr huffman confronts part of this about being a vampire and makes him an offer she'll cure his vampirism with a series of injections he agrees over a period of time his condition improves and he begins courting meggy evans who he feels is the reincarnation of his lost love to zet colons after Barnabas gives meggy a prized possession once intended as a gift for his dearly departed jozette it becomes clear that Barnabas intends to marry her meanwhile professor stokes discovers that dr huffman has been curing Barnabas of his vampirism and has developed her own feelings towards him as maggie and Barnabas grow closer dr huffman becomes jealous and poisons the next dose of medicine it causes him to instantly age into a decrepit old man enraged he strangles her to death before biting maggie's neck maggie's boyfriend jeff returns from boston to care for her professor stokes fills him in on the vampirism jozette and Barnabas has plans to make her his bride when i was doing the tiny bit of research i did for this film because i really wanted to approach this episode from the perspective of somebody who had never seen the soap opera i typed into my google search engine is the house of dark shadows a hammer film because i actually didn't know i got the h in there and then it auto corrected to a hallmark movie short answer yes and the short answer is yes i realized that it has all of the tropes of a hallmark movie it's about a wealthy family it is about falling in love their exes keep showing up and it ends with a wedding that's i thought to myself that if a developer comes in and says they're going to turn collin wood into condos i'm shutting this movie off the other thing that could have made it more of all of that is if it was that christmas time yes and they kissed under a gazebo right like or on the back of a sled boy i never really made those comparisons but you are not wrong if they brought him some like old actor who is like in their eighties but everybody loved when they were on a tv show in their 20s and had them give some like cordial advice accurate like they brought in like mary tyler morris that's right when i met your grandfather kissed on the back of it because he also he was also a working woman from the city who just came back to her small hometown and had worked herself to death and just really could not appreciate what hometown living was like and what it was like to make an apple pie okay that's right i do think that this is where it's a good point to talk about i don't even know if it's my criticisms in this movie because i mean look you're talking to a guy that stands by the movie rock and roll nightmare like i'm not necessarily the best critic in the world and sometimes what doesn't work in a movie is its own charm i would never change a fucking strip of celluloid in rock and roll nightmare i get into a bit of a conundrum when it comes to house of dark shadows because i was really enjoying the barnabas storyline and i was really enjoying the beautiful imagery there's some really cool music in this movie and there's some really great melodrama and i knew i was in for melodrama i knew that that was what was going to be happening here and i actually i like melodrama when it's like horror melodrama or you know like fantasy yeah you know like i like it when it's genre melodrama i don't like it when it's a drama but i like it with just a normal drama but when it's like like when it's like action or fantasy or horror i can really enjoy it so i was in for all that but i gotta be totally honest with you it wasn't until the third time i watched this movie that i knew who fucking anybody outside of our existence anybody i didn't know who david was i didn't know who how he related to anybody i got jeff and tod confused i thought they were the same person and some of the problem is is that once characters are done in the story they just vanish that's true like tod you said he dies when i don't know when he vanishes as soon as his as soon as his ex fiancée is gone from the story he just never comes back same with the mother of the collinwood family or the collins family whatever they are the mother comes and finds dead people during this scene in the in one of the bedrooms and then just vanishes from the story she's never seen again and there is a part later on where you find out that a lot of the characters that have been in the movie are just dead loved that loved that had no issue with that but there are i gotta be frank i had no fucking idea who anybody was no it's understandable the way they're doing the jump cuts in this again as if to say hey if you watch the show it's great but if not figure it out my only real complaint about what's going on here they should have taken more time to be not in depth with every character because i think that would have ruined things but just a little more direct about this is my younger brother david or this is my fiancée tod or whatever it happens to be so at least we have some stakes in the people who are dying all around us and there's so many of them like i just have again i just had no idea i didn't know how they were related to one another i didn't know if they were related i didn't know why the stokes and the hematologist were even at the colin's house and i love some of their scenes so the hematologist has a scene where she figures out that Barnabas is a vampire that i fucking loved which was that she's putting makeup on with her compact and she catches in the mirror that Barnabas isn't there and there's been enough talk of vampires that it clues her in but i actually completely understand why she doesn't tell everybody because she'd look fucking crazy that's right and that's actually something i was going to bring up because we've talked many times before about the harbinger as a word and don't go in acting like a nut job because then they're going to think you're a nut job hofman does it correctly she figures this shit out then goes to the source and says let's barker a barter a deal here between you and i i can help you if i get something else out of this blah blah blah that's how you do it that's how you do it as a harbinger you don't act like an insane person immediately turn around into the room and start shouting vampire right exactly you would just look like an idiot especially because even if he was i mean Barnabas could kill everybody in the room so you know they don't have the weapons that they need that he's stronger than everybody you know so it's just kind of a death sentence so it's not that i don't like how these stories are intertwining and i do understand that a lot of these a lot of these vampire movies will have these like endless parlor room scenes yeah and again it's the only part of the 1931 movie that i just think is like like wretched because it's just it's so boring oh yeah it's just you know at least like interchangeable guys like one's a neighbor one's a fiance one's an old boyfriend one's a newborn and it's like yeah and it's like and and then there's always a van health saying and he you only know who he is because he's the one that's older than the rest of them like that's it and it's just these sort of like endless scenes with these characters that are like all white and they look exactly the same and so the Collins family i just i just had struggled like other than carolim i just struggled and the hematologist i struggled to know who anybody was it's understandable there are there are three male characters that i swear to god i thought were the same person that's also understandable because basically they are at the end of the day right those three characters whether you're talking about the tv show or this film they could have been each other they could have just one actor playing all three parts with a different wig and been just the same and maggie for instance is actually introduced much earlier in the movie i like her scene in the in the party yeah and i totally understood i i got what they were going for it's the same story that they tell in Bram Stoker's Dracula and it's the same story they're telling in blackula which is that they have a there's a woman that looks like the previous person that they loved and she may actually be in reincarnation of that woman or just might happen to look like her right don't i don't care that that's a trope i actually that is a trope i enjoy yeah like vampire movies can do the whole like my love died and now i'm back and now it's 1986 and my love is wearing you know like uniformers yeah like and and it's the same actress playing both roles i like that trope i i find that story engaging i find it very tragic yeah because it's always very like it's always like she it's always tragic i'm in for that story but like when they introduced maggie earlier in the film it's a scene that i didn't even bring up in the narration because i didn't know what the fuck was happening which is a scene where she gets locked into a room and she thinks it's her younger brother not her younger brother see i can't even remember who's who because she's her it's the governess of the kid who's the colin's family david who i barely mentioned because he doesn't matter blah blah blah blah dogs and cats live in the other mass hysteria but but she gets locked into a room yeah and then it's like unclear who locked her into the room she fucking loses her mind she's screaming yes and then she gets let out of the room and none of it matters and i thought to myself is this like some lost footage from some it's cutting her battalion seance movie like i don't know what i'm looking at yeah and that brings the only other thing about this that i think i have to complain about is that when they do the jump cuts and they do these moments just for context david in the tv series was always this kid's getting in trouble he's always running away he's always going where he's not supposed to go playing pranks all the kind of shit this scene for those who know the movie or the series is supposed to establish oh look it's david up to his old shit again but it's completely worthless in this film and there's about ten of them scattered throughout the film for various amounts of time that only matter to a small handful of people and don't really contribute to the film at all and i would rather edit them out and not have to deal with it and i think it gets to my other i guess sort of like complaint slash the charm of the movie because it is kind of charming because i laugh about it a little bit which is that everything just happened so fast like this is the first time that we have covered something that i have really truly felt like i was covering a soap opera for all its strengths and weaknesses and i try very hard to not complain about writing the script in an episode i try very hard to not be like this is the easiest script i've ever wrote or this is the hardest script i've ever wrote i try to like only ever use that once in a while this might have been one of the hardest ones that i've ever written because so much happens and i wrote it down so like the Hoffman love story so this is a big love triangle between Hoffman Barnabas and Maggie Hoffman's in love with Barnabas Barnabas is the love with Maggie Maggie's not in love with anybody but it's this whole character dynamic between the two of them or three of them i didn't really have a problem with Hoffman's acting and i actually really liked i i'm indifferent about her falling in love with Barnabas but i did like her role in the story which was that she was convinced she could cure Barnabas and almost her hubris is the thing that is in question because she's so convinced she can heal him she's not thinking about any of the moral or ethical implications of the fact that he still fucking killed a lot of people right doesn't make him a good person but but just to make a point here real quick i cataloged the timecode at an hour and 10 minutes and 25 seconds into the movie in three minutes at the hour of 14 25 second mark they had established that Barnabas was going to get married to Maggie that Hoffman had feelings for Barnabas that she responds to being jealous by poisoning the dosage of his cure he becomes older kills Hoffman and then Maggie is bitten in three fucking minutes three minutes i'm not joking i know three minutes and it speaks to the weird pacing of this film as we talked about already to some extent where again very charming and very good and i don't have a lot to complain about i am not even sure that this is a complaint for me either but to have these moments where that scene necessarily didn't belong here and then have in three minutes we recap about 10 minutes of footage i don't know it was a weird balance that felt a little off at times it didn't take away from the show it didn't actually distract too badly but it was very noticeable those three minutes could have been an entire movie that's true like that is an entire movie's worth a lot and look some of these uh we we talk about this we cover full moon movies where like they they tend to like move at a pretty good clip and i actually don't mind that you know there's something that i really enjoy about watching like old school movies that are 90 minutes long that like tell a complete story that isn't all that involved look i love my art house films too but like sometimes you're just like you know what it's 90 minutes a vampire comes back to life falls in love with one girl another girl is in love with him she fucking poisons his ass and then everybody kills him the end and sometimes that's a really good movie sometimes that's a really entertaining as fuck flick and so i'm not complaining that this isn't some sort of like metaphor for capitalism i'm complaining that it just simply moves so fucking fast yeah at the i was about to say at the wrong time i don't even know if that's accurate but just at weird moments it chooses to go quick versus slow at the detriment of not caring enough about what's happening and i think that that is the one thing because i don't have a lot of connection to Barnumus i got to be totally honest i don't totally get why he's so popular that's nothing against the actor actually quite liked the actor i just seeing this from an outside perspective it'd be like watching one episode of Dexter and being like i thought Michael C. Hall was good but i don't i don't get the whole thing i think i can tell you why he was so popular for the teens of 1969 in the same way that the night stalker was popular there was a whole group of people who wanted some icon some tragic hunk to latch on to for their hormones to get involved with and at this moment in history the tragic sympathetic vampire did not exist jonathan fritt created that with the Barnumus character and that's fair you know this movie is depending on where you look it was made in either 1969 or 1970 so it is right on the cusp of two eras it is right on the cusp of an era where people become fascinated with the serial killer and everybody in the movie looks like they could have been part of the b-50 callinwood the love shack we figured it out so it is just in kind of this weird place in time but it still is i mean i like i just have to admit like i just found the movie hard to follow at times it wasn't that i didn't enjoy it or wanted it to be some something bigger than it was i wanted this to be i wouldn't go so far as to say disposable rental but you know how i mean you and i grew up on the phantasm movies and we love them you know there was something that was i don't want to say disposable but you just you got what you got like you weren't expecting anything big so you could literally rent phantasm to and be like wow this is kind of like a slasher and regi's cool and they got big they got a quad gods exactly you know like and and it was nothing more than that i am not looking for this to be anything more than a very romantic soap opera with gushing blood and gorgeous visuals i'm just saying that sometimes you can have two movie too many movies stuffed into one movie sharks of the corn virus shark shark and stein shark to plus yep those are all real movies now on the bucket of chum podcast i dive into the bizarre funny and occasionally fantastic shark film so tune in every week as i sink my jaws into the deep blue sea that is shark's exploitation cinema on bucket of chum Barnabas returns to collard wood and kills the officers protecting maggie he bites her neck again and transforms into his younger self he steals maggie away in the night while officers search the ground of the estate jeff follows instructions to meet professor stokes on a nearby island it's a trap stokes has been turned into a vampire and jeff is forced to kill him with a silver bullet jeff goes back to collard wood and finds roger dead amongst more police officers he searches the floor grabs a wooden stake and makes sure his old friend is killed properly before returning as a vampire after finding a crossbow our new hero hunts for maggie he finds Barnabas performing the wedding and shoots his crossbow accidentally hitting willy when all seems lost will he pulls the stake from his back stabs Barnabas through the heart maggie is saved when jeff leaves with her Barnabas turns into a bat and escapes as the end of credits roll despite any criticisms of how the plot plays out even though again i'm in for the whole romantic gothic vibe and i'm very in for the complicated love story of a vampire and his once lost love i got a compliment the movie on a plot point the twist that professor stokes was turned into a vampire i didn't see coming and i fucking was great i could be critical about the fact that we have a hero now this character named jeff who really only popped into the later part of the movie that i couldn't tell you one thing about his personality other than the fact that he's a big fan of sweaters like i can tell you anything about his personality at all and the movie really hangs like i almost want this movie to just be like Barnabas is just the main hero and like have no hero and you know i have just even get rid of there there's a version of this movie where you could literally get rid of jeff and have the ending still work yeah because willy's actually the one that kills the vampire and yada yada yada so i would be totally fine with that ending i'd be just a movie full of villains but the twist that professor stokes the van van Helsing character has actually been killed off screen and turned into a vampire and attacks jeff on the island again another fucking like the gorgeous just like just utterly this is porn for horror people it is though yeah this is just another like beautiful shot of this island of of you know misfit vampires and they have and just fog and like old boats and just fucking oh god like i i practically my eyes rolled and my skull and i smoked a cigarette and i like the implication with stokes being turned that Barnabas when we weren't looking as the audience was up to shit because that's yes exactly that's something a lot of horror movies don't do because obviously the payoff is when the action is on the screen that's what we're there to see but sometimes it really pays well to have shit happening elsewhere that catches up to us later and you go oh fuck because the shocking twist here was not the vampire wedding and it wasn't willy stabbing Barnabas to the heart it was this moment where our absolute hero to your point the van Helsing hero that we are so accustomed to is no longer that and has become the bad guy yeah i'd add in care because i fucking hated his guts right so i thought it was a smarmy asshole but i found but i enjoyed it nonetheless i found it very fun yeah like i was my my jaw opened up and i was like this is great like i i was having like an avengers infinity war moment where i was clapping and cheering for tremendous for a moment in a movie i really enjoyed it but i did laugh though because even though i i didn't see the twist i was a little aware that something was up because a lot of our characters are dying at this moment like they're just killing off a bunch of these characters i mean to the point where literally Hoffman has died and her death is hilarious oh yeah because she has poisoned the dosage it has made Barnabas much older like he's he looks like grandpa and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre like exactly i was gonna make that comparison yeah yeah he looks much older and then he gets angry puts his hand around her neck and she immediately dies like i don't know if his hands were cold or if he had like a smell that was not to her taste uh she's like she just fucking keels over immediately delicate little rose butt that one yes but then it leads to all the police officers running around going we got to find Maggie we got to find Maggie we got to find Maggie and then one of the police officers delivers a note that says we need you Jeff to go to this remote island that has not been mentioned in this movie once and meet the good guys there so that you can find Barnabas and do you remember that scene in good fellas where the wife of the main character is told to go into the back of the store and like we've got dresses back there and it's so clearly that they're gonna fucking shoot her in the head yep yep it's like it's the best scene in the movie it's a fucking amazing scene but i just thought to myself i've never heard like it's a trap so much like written on a piece of paper this is definitely a danger warning and you're ignoring it wholeheartedly and Jeff was never the most clever never the most clever character in this film anyway so i can give him past for being stupid enough to fall for this it's weird honestly more weird that he came up to be the hero at the end than it is that he fell for this trap is that something from the show because i just did not care about this character at all i thought that again actor was fine like i had no issue with him i thought that there were easy much easier ways that he could have been incorporated to the entire story but i think that for me i'm not thinking in terms of like these actors were in the show and therefore they need some kind of role i'm thinking more in terms of streamlining the story and getting rid of some characters so that other characters more prominently involved you you hit it right there actually the movie wanted to put as many characters from the tv show in as possible but because the tv show ran as long as it did one fiance would die or an actor would quit and so see he went off to war or whatever and they had to get another fiance and and over the stretch of time with various episodes in between it made sense to tell the story and suddenly i'm in love with a new guy or whatever else when it's this movie and you have three or four superfluous characters you don't need them all you could have one jeff through the entire thing called a good yeah he didn't need the other people involved in it who basically either served the same point plot plot point that he served or no service at all yeah i just kept thinking to myself like jeff and tod could literally be the same catheter they basically were you know he could right and you don't even have to make him maggie's lover that actually doesn't matter he could have been carolins yeah lover and he could have been like okay i'm gonna protect the remaining sister it could have been like a uh like the hills have eyes scenario where like the couples are mismatched like the people die across the couples and so then it just becomes these sort of like last survivors that are like i'm going to protect your little brother you know we're where colons is we're gonna abandon yes exactly like so he doesn't have to be maggie's husband for this to work it could have been that you know that he his wife died and now he's going to save her little sister right exactly but it doesn't mean i don't enjoy the sending because again i really enjoy the the twists and the turns of just everybody being dead you know you find out that the head of the household is just dead like he's just been by the old office and of this movie nearly the entire cast was dead and that's rare even now for a movie to be like we are going to be bold enough i think it's fucking terrifying is the only thing i could think of it in recent years that has been bold enough to be like we're killing everyone fuck y'all and yeah i love it terrified never fucking do it off screen no we're not ever like this fucking terrifying like we got we got shit to show people why don't i get your point it's really good for the time i it's really good for now and it's something i don't want every horror movie to do because obviously it doesn't work for every style or every story but i wish more people would be more bold like this in their horror movies if that makes sense yeah yeah no i really enjoyed it i i actually had maybe it was because i wasn't really attached to the characters and i don't really go to this type of film for the kills because the kills are usually not they're not i mean terrifying is a great example like terrifying you go do for the counts absolutely like you know this is a movie that you go for the story you go for the characters you go for the ambiance that's you go to a saw film for the traps and the weirdness you don't go there to look at the pretty backgrounds yeah exactly like when i watch because again i'm comparing it to a hammer film i want a compelling story from a hammer film i want i want a little melodrama i want some fucking top notch acting and i want to give a shit about these characters and their love triangles and their plight and their stories that's what i don't know about complicated type of movies yep exactly don't over complicate it but that that doesn't mean that i don't enjoy this ending i think it has beats that it doesn't need like for instance it has this it has a really great moment where jeff shows up at the at the sort of like derelict house it's on the collinwood property which is where actually Barnabas is staying didn't figure that out until the third time watching it but but they go to this derelict house i kept thinking why does their house have fucking spider webs and shit in it like but it's because it's a derelict case and that's where Barnabas lives and so he goes to this house it's when he finds that a bunch of the characters are dead he has to kill them again just to make sure they don't turn into vampires really enjoyed that but then there's this like weird beat in the middle where jeff confronts willy and willy just knocks him the fuck out and then jeff just wakes up again and then confronts these characters again which i didn't really feel like i didn't really feel like that was setting the tone for the ending i didn't really feel like that was like a for like if they had had an actual fight i would have preferred that i might have understood it yeah i was actually going to mention that as well i think the one thing that this was lacking i think willy got his uh the ending he needed you know whatever redemption arc he needed to have blah blah blah i think he he earned that but i think it would have been more compelling if the fight between him and jeff had actually been a little stronger and then knocked jeff out and then all right i'm a slave to the vampire what can i do but in that moment maybe realized i can fight back maybe i do have a choice i think that would have been a bigger call for him at the end and i think that this movie is just enjoying like all the gothic beauty because again it's like really soaking in this marriage scene it's really soaking in the the derelict house it's really soaking in this moment where maggie is standing in her bridle gown i mean like even the fucking actors they're like everybody's gorgeous like everything in this movie is beautiful like all the you know i mean like all the guys are handsome like all the women are like fucking gorgeous even even willy the red field character is like more handsome than he needs to be or a red field yes he definitely yeah and so i think it's just more enjoying drinking in the moment than it is you know no pun intended for a vampire film then it is uh necessarily making a whole lot of sense i get that i do have a piece of advice for our hero though yes so jeff gets knocked out by willy and then you know before this he's made a really smart decision he went into like one of those like bruce wane style weapons rooms you know and grabbed a crossbow and he shoots the crossbow and he accidentally hits willy and quote-unquote kills him now again filmed phenomenally like there's a little slow motion in here again i've said that the set for this marriage is just like this is the stuff of my dreams you know like it's just so beautifully done and i'm not trying to oversell it you know it's it's a it's a set it's props it's you know it's websing staircases yeah yeah it's the things that horror people love if you're getting this idea that it's some sort of like you know something that's straight out of like the current dune or what you're not going to be happy but like it's the stuff that those of us who like these 60s and 70s error hammer films and think that they're just gorgeous to look at you're going to love this but then jeff tries to resist barnabuses like you know like influential powers and he runs downstairs to shoot barnabas with a final crossbow bolt here's a problem he runs downstairs then decides to try to load the crossbow yes before you know like loading it and then attacking barnabas and i tried to like think of how to explain this to him and i thought to myself you know you really should load your crossbow bolt full at first this would be like meeting a really sexy woman getting undressed and being like hold on one second i just have to get task grab it on my phone and ask them to deliver com that's right yeah every second you waste is a very precious moment you've lost yes right can we just enjoy the moment so how was your day would you have for dinner yeah and then i'll shoot you with your with my crossbow if you know that's right wink wink wink it's not often although lately it seems more often than it used to be where we've reached this point and i already know how you feel about what we've watched today but the audience would like to hear us give a little recap so what did you think of house of dark shadows look it's going to be really simple i really enjoyed house of dark shadows i don't think that this is a movie that is beyond some criticism and i can get it right out of the way right now number one i just had no fucking idea who anybody was no idea other than barnabas and the hematologist and you know like the i knew i knew the kid was a kid because he's shorter than everybody else and that's it you know so i didn't really know who these characters were and quite frankly just a plot move so fucking fast like the love story between barnabas and maggie should have been really charming it's smooth so quick like everything just moves so fast there are different vampire stories and different love triangles and different moments and there were three male characters that i know who the fuck one was versus the other one you know even some of the female characters were like that too i just didn't know who anybody was but god damn it did i enjoy fucking looking at this movie it is gorgeous it is just beautiful to look at at every god damn second it is cobwebs and crips it's a great shot i didn't mention of willy walking through the graveyard as he's going to find the kind of crypt uh there's secret passages and wolves and wind and fog and just everything that i just absolutely love about watching like old british horror films or old you know like again like old Sherlock Holmes movies old BBC shit you know like i just love that stuff and i really enjoyed that i thought the character playing barnabas is a good actor i really enjoyed his performance i also really enjoyed um it's funny that you said that you didn't really care for the actress playing the doctor because i i liked her uh just fine i thought she played some pathos really well and uh she indicated her jealousy very quickly in a way that was interesting um even though i didn't care for that part of the story i give her that credit um i also did actually enjoy the performance of the woman playing carolin pretty i i thought she was good especially when she was the vampire i thought she was fucking great as the vampire this movie has one of the most beautiful shots i've ever seen in cinema and that is the part where she walks through the fog towards her little brother in the pool i want to really hang on to that image because i want it in a fucking poster i loved it so much and i don't know what it is about vampire women walking through fog that i think is the most striking image in all of cinema but that says more about my love like anything else um fair but um but i really really did enjoy that in this film and i just i don't know like i'll end by saying i can say it quickly i really thought this was great i really had fun watching it every single time there's a movie that is on our short list that i don't mind announcing to everybody it'll come up in the next six months which is subspecies two which is probably my favorite of the subspecies movies because it basically to give a hint it mixes the boring parts and introduces a new element that is so like fucking fun i can't believe they didn't think of it in the first film and i love and defend these movies that just are nothing more than 90 minutes of like an interesting plot that is fun and well executed that doesn't have to be like exploring some larger story like subspecies that series is just about a woman that got turned into a vampire that is basically has a choice of becoming an evil vampire or a good vampire that's what those movies are about that's it that's all there is and i enjoy the fuck out of them and so i take this i can get it i can see why look somebody would look at house of dark shadows and be like yeah i recognize that there's some shit in here that doesn't work and just like steven in the flare witch project i don't i don't give a fuck i don't care this is fun it's a horror movie that is a soap opera and it's got great shots where cameras zoom right in on people's faces as they say things that are dramatic and every time they look up in the sky they light forms right around their eyes perfectly and it's just a big drama and i love every fucking second of it and i get it and i want to actually throw out one more shout out um there's some really great acting in a scene in the scene between Barnabas and Hoffman where she offers him the choice to uh take the cure and i love the acting in that scene i love particularly by the actor playing Barnabas his mesanthropic like i i could see the little i could see the leaves on trees and like you know like is so is so he's just chewing the scenery and it's exactly what i want in this kind of film like i both feel for him yet at the same time it's a little over the top is perfect i'll just end by saying that i wish they were a little bit more streamlined because i want more of the mesanthropic i want more of the Hannibal Lecter i want to see a tree by the lake yeah yeah you know um you know in swim in the ocean i want more of that but i really enjoyed this film and i think it's probably again one of the most beautiful films that we've covered yet just visually i love that i can keep my recap succinct one of my greatest joys was bringing this show this movie and i to the point that i have been wanting to do it since season one but i didn't want to burn it too early and other things other choices along the way and i knew this year was the year for it and even more so the joy of you having never seen the series having no influence i was so excited to hear the point of view of somebody who was not devoted to the show that i didn't gush or go on as much as i would normally do when i'm talking about this as a nerd of the series so i hope that that all translated to a very compelling show for everybody the movie is phenomenal it's something i'm definitely going to be bragging about forever because i grew up with it again one of the few things happy memories not to sound too gross and gothic and whatever in my childhood that i have is this series it's been one of my most favorite shows since i was a young little gothling rather than taking the usual path of a vampire movie with blood soaked murders and all that this one focused on the mystery and the romance of the genre which i thought was very cool especially for the time era putting it in the hammer horror style as i mentioned before was the exact the right choice the you know i i don't know i i'm at a point now where i could just go on for all the things i know about it and all the things i love about it and i don't really feel like i need to because i feel like i covered it pretty well here in the show and i just hope everybody loves it as much as i do i could see this being an episode that we revisit because you know some of our revisits have been really fun like i don't know if people enjoy them or not never gotten a lot of feedback for them but i've enjoyed them when we revisit witchcraft too and uh and uh forbidden world and uh fried at thirteenth part two we kind of like redid that one i could see this being a great bonus episode when we take a little bit of break where we add some new material yeah and or just like do a new recap to it because i really this is a film that i don't want to be totally done with i really enjoyed it yeah i think there's more to get out of each time you watch so i'm down for that so the day come sure and i've got i've definitely got more main jokes fair enough um before we go i do want to show just throw out a quick shout out and i'll put a note in the uh show notes or link in the show notes um i finally got to listen to someone who has been really supporting us it's you know sometimes it's hard to listen to everybody shows i finally got to listen to an episode of our friends over at dissect that film they have been nothing but kind and thoughtful to us and supporting our show and it was not out of disinterest it was just simply out of the fact that you know you learn that it's hard to listen to everybody's stuff and so i listened to their episode on tH Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 also because our friends uh Charlie and Pete were on that show and it was fantastic i really enjoyed it they kind of like go through it sliver by sliver almost in a similar style to us but a little less um we kind of go in blocks and they're literally like celluloid by celluloid and i love the fact that they don't just pick like Chandler's list and stuff they also pick like very children they did black cauldron and they just pick like and again it's like sell by sell and i really enjoyed it it was really funny so please go check them out they've been nothing but wonderful to us they actually make fun of us in that episode i thought that was great um they uh they talked about our dear friend Nate and his terrible um his terrible advertisement and he told me every episode and i thought it was very very apropos but anyway so please go check them out we will be listening to them more because and i really want to work with them down the line because they got a great show i really fucking enjoyed it i haven't listened but i think they're wonderful just for being wonderful to us so perfect all right everybody so we'll catch you next week for uh a a strange one with an interesting story behind it lake manga see you then guys bye so so
