I was all of maybe twelve when a commercial appeared on the television set which caught my attention immediately.  It touted a new daytime television show coming to the American Broadcasting Company, and it had this odd and scary sounding music with a very pretty lady with long dark hair, no bangs and wide innocent eyes. Wow, they had a show that was just like me: odd, spooky and a pretty girl that I could be too.   So, the best part was it would be on at 2:30 in the afternoon, after school was out for summer.  So I began to count off the days to when it would air.

A warm humid day has overtaken the small community known as Chauncey, WV, in the year 1996. The ringing of the bell has signaled the end of another school day for a particular sophomore student who was gathering his books to start his usual walk home by the old cemetery located next to his school. Unknown to him this evening, his brother will bring home a VCR cassette that, upon his viewing, will begin to fill the days and nights of his next twenty years with experiences and friends that will define who he will become...an insatiable fanboy of a series known as Dark Shadows…

I was a 14-year-old boy in the summer of 1966 when Dark Shadows made its debut on ABC. Even before the show debuted there was hype for it in the air, a Gothic-styled afternoon TV show with elements of the supernatural all coming at a time when horror was in vogue with Hammer horror films and the drive-in theaters monster marathons all playing full tilt. I was on board from the first of the series, loving the quirky and spooky casting, and fixating on Vicki who seemed so stable and sincere amidst the intrigue and ghosts who surrounded her.

“Hey, Ronnie, have you seen that boss new soap opera, yet?” my perpetually jittery 13-year-old cousin, Debbie, asked me, one long ago August (1966) evening.  “It’s called Dark Shadows, and, um, there’s this kid who’s trying to kill his father and stuff, and they all live inside this big house on a cliff and…um…stuff…”

It’s 1967, and I am 10 years old. Wandering the neighborhood, I discover my teenage cousin and her friends huddled on the front porch, all staring wide-eyed through the window at the television set in the living room.

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Watchin’ a soap opera.” Oh. I hate boring soap operas and start to leave. “It’s about a vampire and he’s gonna kill this girl.” Oh! I love horror movies and join them, squeezing in amongst the bigger kids to take a look.

Dark Shadows. Growing up, I was a Gen-Xer who loved to study pop culture and history, and I had never heard of that TV show. Neither of my parents, who would have been the age of “the kids who ran home from school,” ever watched it or were interested. Living in rural Iowa, that would have been quite a feat for them to run home that far! Even at the age of 11 in 1991, when the DS revival aired, I don’t recall the show being advertised.

My mother was a big soap opera viewer—one of those often stereotypical 1960s housewives who never missed her stories. I can remember soaps playing on the TV throughout my childhood, my adolescence, my entire life at home. I’m happy to say that I was actually watching when Vicki rode that train into Collinsport on June 27, 1966. 

For me, Dark Shadows began with the 1991 remake, which aired when I was a freshman at UCLA.  I fell in love with the story and the characters, and was especially fascinated by the interactions of Ben Cross’ Barnabas and Jim Fyfe’s Willie.  I took part in campus protest rallies against the first Gulf War, but I have to admit that the conflict’s most vivid impact on my life was when TV war coverage pre-empted Dark Shadows episodes from airing.