Heart of 'Dark'-ness

"She was beautiful and evil and had this laugh that went down your spine," Steve Phillips, a 31-year-old Las Vegan, recalls, describing the bewitching witch Angelique, his favorite character on "Dark Shadows."

Dark Shadows, if you dare to recall, was the ABC "Gothic romance" soap opera that had children of the late '60s running home after school to tune in to the afternoon antics of the vampires and demons of Collinsport, Maine.

But Lara Parker, the actress who played Angelique, remembers her laugh slightly differently.

"I would ask people to tell me jokes, so I'd have something I thought was funny," Parker, now a screenplay writer and occasional actress, says from her Los Angeles home. "They used to say, 'Can't you do it any better? You're terrible! You have to laugh really long and really hard and really loud.' It always sounded so false to me -- but people love it now."

The two sides of the story -- on screen and behind the scenes -- come together this weekend, when nearly 1,500 fans and dozens of former cast members are expected to swap memories at the 15th annual "Dark Shadows" Fest, being held for the first time in Las Vegas, at the MGM Grand.

The whimsical soap opera, created by producer Dan Curtis, featured a cast of vampires (especially Jonathan Frid as 200-year-old bloodsucker Barnabas Collins) witches, ghosts and werewolves, and storylines the writers cribbed directly from classic Gothic novels such as "Turn of the Screw" and "Jane Eyre."

"I've been on several soap operas where the whole idea is to be real and as natural as you can be," Parker says. "But the idea on our soap opera was to be supernatural."

Almost an icon of its time, "Dark Shadows" was as beloved by its fans as it was condemned by its enemies -- the religious right.

More than 30 years after its cancellation in 1971, "Dark Shadows" still has a cult following almost as loyal as the famed "Star Trek" Trekkies. "Dark Shadows" has spawned a cottage industry of memorabilia, merchandise, newsletters, websites, a new line of paperbook books (with the first penned by Parker) and video rentals of its 1,225 episodes and its two big screen flicks.

Second generation viewers have joined the bandwagon, thanks to reruns on PBS in the 1980s, on the Sci-Fi Channel last year, and a short-lived prime-time revival on NBC in 1991.

Plans for another reincarnation are, as Parker puts it mysteriously, "always in the wind."

Die-hard fans

Despite its propensity to rise from the TV graveyard, long-time fans such as retired Las Vegan Harriet Stich have never quite gotten over "Dark Shadows' " first demise.

"I wanted to picket ABC, I was so mad," she says with no small agitation. "When you have a place in your day for something, you say, 'How am I going to fill the gap? What am I going to watch tomorrow?' Then they put on some game show in its place! 'Password' with Allen Ludden! I'm not into game shows," she says darkly.

Parker, though, remembers the cancellation differently.

"None of us were all that unhappy, because we all expected that our careers would take off -- and of course, they didn't," she sighs. (The show did spawn a few stars, such as Kate Jackson ("Charlie's Angels"), David Selby ("Falcon Crest") and Donna McKechnie ("A Chorus Line").

"We didn't appreciate it," she says, "because we all saw it as a TV job, and we all thought, 'someday, we'll all be movie stars or on Broadway.' This is so dumb and not really good. We had boxes of fan mail, and most of us never really bothered to read them, let alone answer them. We didn't value it, and I think now we do."

That may be why most of the cast members (except the really marquee names, of course) faithfully return to the "Dark Shadows" conventions, where they sign autographs and greet fans who are still sewing needlepoint pillows for Parker, showering her with paintings and sketches and showing up with daughters named Angelique in her honor.

"The fans become far more valuable, more precious as the years go by," she says. "I take them less for granted."

Indeed, it would be hard for anyone to take these fans for granted. "Dark Shadows" enthusiasts have been known to show up at conventions dressed in period garb for the Costume Gala, while others perform amateurish skits based on the show's plot lines.

Stich, a 10-year convention veteran who has seen all the episodes "three or four times," has been studying her lines all week in preparation for Sunday's sketch.

"People think you're weird," she laughs, "but my family understands me, because they think I'm weird anyway."

Parker, though, sees the fans differently.

"They're not just people who have no life," she says, defending their virtue. "They're professors, musicians, actors -- people from all walks of life."

Why has this show persisted in the hearts of its fans? Everyone has theories, but no one really knows.

Some say it is the show's complete originality. Others attribute it to a sign of the times -- the counter-cultural swing back to the late '60s.

Mind you, it's "not that everyone watching 'Dark Shadows' was stoned," Parker contends, "but there was something in the air that embraced a show that was unconventional and unusual."

Serious quirkiness

"The supernatural and horror stuff attracted me originally, but once I started watching episodes, I was surprised to see how much really like a regular soap opera it was," Phillips, who started watching the show during college in the '80s, says. "The characters may have happened to be a witch or a vampire, but they had the same problems everyone else had."

Sure, if you count as typical problems a jealous lover's curse turning you into a vampire or long-deceased relatives returning from the grave.

Undeniably, much of the devotion stems from the camp factor. Children might have been fascinated by the horrific aspect, but adults often found it a hoot.

"On the show, they were really tongue-in-cheek," Stich says. "They weren't too dramatic about it."

Parker, though, remembers the actors' intentions quite differently.

"No one ever played it for camp," she contends. "It was done in complete and total seriousness, and that's why it turned out to be campy. All of the actors were from the theater, a lot had done the classics, and they brought that kind of acting to the show."

A large part of the show's quirky charm was its low-budget, live-to-tape production values -- so much so that a tape has been released featuring "Dark Shadows" bloopers.

"It was done so inexpensively, there were times it didn't come off like they thought," Phillips says. "The set would literally fall down or a gravestone would fall over, and they'd have to keep going. It was unintentionally funny, but that's part of the charm, I think."

On this point, Parker's recollections match up precisely with her fans. "All our special effects were primitive, and looking at them now, they seem endearing," she affirms.

"Some of the things were really ridiculous -- the arm would come off from someone's hand and it would be so obvious it was from a mannequin. Sometimes, it was really hysterical -- we'd watch a tape of the show and laugh until we were sick."

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