Acting natural

[arashi]

I finally got my hands on boxset 8 today which really kicks off Adam's storyline.

I had just started watching it when my sister chased one of the cats into my room, then paused to check out what was going on.

Barnabas, Julia and Willie are standing around a sleeping Adam in the cell in the basement. (Why is there a cell in the basement abyway?!) Anyhow as Adam begins to wake up Willie freaks and asks what they should do now. Barnabas replies "Act natural."

We looked at each other and burst out laughing.

This show is great with an audience that appreciates the camp as much as you do. (Though I don't think anyone in my family appreciates the sometimes genuine creepy factor as much as I do.)

The scene later on with Mrs. Johnson on the terrace was a riot too. I guess there wasn't much room to move around on sets off camera because everyone just kind of shuffles to her rescue.

[stefan]

Some of the camp is funny but I much prefer Dark Shadows in its earlier years without much camp. I get sad when I see "camp" seeping its way into the later stories. My opinion is that camp is easier to write for than genuine horror or mystery. I still think the writers eventually got lazy.

[stefan]

Barnabas, Julia and Willie are standing around a sleeping Adam in the cell in the basement. (Why is there a cell in the basement abyway?!) Anyhow as Adam begins to wake up Willie freaks and asks what they should do now. Barnabas replies "Act natural."

One more comment about this...I wonder if the writers knew this was campy? Did they even know the difference between camp and genuine mystery at that point or were they so immersed in this horror soup they had lost their way. Did they understand that Barnabas replying "Act natural" was camp funny or were they completely serious?

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Did they understand that Barnabas replying "Act natural" was camp funny or were they completely serious?

Everyone connected with DS has always said that they treated everything seriously. Though they often had fun with the material when the cameras weren't rolling. 

[stefan]

Everyone connected with DS has always said that they treated everything seriously. Though they often had fun with the material when the cameras weren't rolling.

That I can believe. But, were the writers at that point intentially making DS a campy soap? Were they going in that direction? In other words, I never sensed 1795 was anythihg except straight storytelling of what happened to Barnabas. I never thought camp was involved. I started to sense camp during the Adam story. I just wonder if that was intentional or did they take themselves so seriously at that point they didn't know the difference?

[michael c]

i do think that with the adam storyline the show began to veer toward high camp.whether the writers did this intentionally or not is up for speculation.what i do think that they did intentionally with this storyline was for the first time to actively court those "kids that ran home from school" as it's intended audience.where as the earlier stories were probably aimed at a traditional "soap opera" viewer(housewives and perhaps teenage girls)this had a more adolescent sensibility.

even so most of the actors played it all very straight.i think there were two exceptions however.
humbert allen astredo as nicholas blair and thayer david as professor stokes always seemed to be winking slightly at the audience i thought.like they knew that the material they were playing was absurd.

[PennyDreadful]

The Adam/Eve/Blair storyline on DS was not "campy" - at least not intentionally.  However, it has been interpreted as such by some viewers.   At this point in the series, Dan Curtis and the writers were trying to attain a new level of strangeness by upping the ante, so to speak.  The over-the- top nature of these storylines, coupled with the the larger than life performances of certain actors, have lead some to label this segment of the series as camp (incorrectly so, IMO).  If you watch some of the Universal horror films, the stories are very grandiose and the acting can be way over the top.  I would not call these films campy though.  The genre we are dealing with involves an exaggeration of the natural. This is sometimes interpreted (incorrectly IMO) as camp.  The 60s Batman show is campy.  DS is not.  I will concede that as the show progesses, it increasingly relies on a willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer.

 That being said, the sequence you described is still pretty amusing.

~Penny Dreadful~

[stefan]

The Adam/Eve/Blair storyline on DS was not "campy" - at least not intentionally

I looked up the word camp in the dictionary " artificiality of manner or style, appreciated for its humor, triteness, or vulgarity" I my mind - vulgar for a Godfather montage ripoff of the mauling of the poor inkeeper crisscrossing with Nicholas Blair hexing Maggie, in addition to the vulgarity and absurdity of a Frankenstein ripoff per "Adam" including a blantant copy-cat sequence of the blind man (the "blind man" who used to be a viable character named Sam Evans with a real personality and life) in the cottage is very high camp. And both of those stories were occurring simultaneously. What were they thinking?

[PennyDreadful]

(the "blind man" who used to be a viable character named Sam Evans with a real personality and life) in the cottage is very high camp.

  I disagree.  How is employing the "blind man" from Frankenstein any different from employing Quint and Miss Jessel from "Turn of the Screw"?  DS cribbed characters and plots from a variety of classic sources.  Singling out the blind man doesn't make the premise camp.  One thing you left out of your definition is the fact that camp is generally a deliberate attempt at eliciting humor through affectation, vulgarity etc.  The writers and actors were most certainly not attempting to create humor through camp.  Yes, there were several supernatural stories occuring simultaneously.  This is the case with the majority of DS sequences post-1795.  I don't understand why this would be considered campy.  Does it require a major suspension of disbelief? Yes, of course.  Is it funny or foolish?  In my opinion, no it isn't.  To buy into DS, it is essential to believe that there is in fact a monster made of dead people running around, as well as a warlock who's in love with a waitress and his witch "sister" who's putting dream curses on people.  The DS storylies do in fact become increasingly convoluted and fantastic as the series progresses.  This is not an attempt at camp, however.  Dan Curtis wasn't creating a comedy.  In fact, some of the people involved with the show have taken offense at such a perception, and I'd have to side with them on that, since they were genuinely making an attempt to create a fantasy in the tradition of classic gothic literature and films.

~Penny Dreadful~         

[Miss_Winthrop]

I agree that the show is not intentionally campy.  I've read many of the interviews where the actors say that they were very serious about their work. John Karlen said how he loved the show because he got to act out with such intense emotions that actors don't often get the chance to do so. I think what Barnabas meant when he said to act natural was to not show fear.

 

[stefan]

Well, in any case they were sure taking liberties in stealing from different sources. I saw some of their story-ripoff tricks even during 1795 when Nathan Forbes was trying to deceive Millicent that there was NOT a light in the tower window and that she WAS loosing things - straight from the old-time classic thriller "Gaslight" two versions, one staring Charles Boyer and the other Anton Walbrook both with nervous wives. I recognized the "outsourcing of material" but didn't mind really as it was subtly done and did somehow fit in with the plot at hand which was fresh and original. But, I think this is veering from the subject of this thread....

[michael c]

this is starting to get off-topic but let me ask this.

like "ugly" or "beautiful" is "camp" subjective?can one person perceive it and another not?or is it something more concrete?

i've read articles about the show that describe the entire thing as a classic piece of high camp. :-

[Raineypark]

"Camp" is something you have to set out to be....it's not something you stumble upon by accident.  Think of the early "Batman" series with all those crazy "villains" like "The Penquin" and "The Riddler".  The show was WRITTEN TO BE THAT WAY!!

Dark Shadows was never WRITTEN to be "campy".....but some have used that term because of certain actor's mannerisms and vocal delivery.  The plots may have been outlandish, the acting idiocincratic, the directing highly stylized.....but the show was not written to be camp!!

[Gothick]

Christopher Isherwood in his novel The World in the Evening has a section where two of the characters discuss "camp."  I believe that this predates Susan Sontag's much better known Notes on Camp.  The Isherwood novel is one of the first mainstream texts to discuss what began life as a very gay concept (I am using the word "gay" here to refer to homosexual people and our culture, not "stupid" as has become the meaning of the word in  high schools and chatrooms around North America).

In it, Isherwood distinguished between high (or highbrow) camp, and low camp, as saying that high camp is like a production of the Tschaikovsky ballet Swan Lake--so stylised as to have a certain ridiculous grandeur, which only really "works" if everybody involved performs their parts with the utmost seriousness.  Isherwood would have argued that something like a production of Swan lake by les ballets trocaderos de Monte Carlo (a celebrated all male ballet troupe with some brilliant dancers in their own right) was low camp if not burlesque because they are deliberately "sending up" the material.

I think the increasingly outre storylines of Dark Shadows required a more "elevated" stylistic positioning of actors and direction.  There is also the factor that so many of the people involved in DS had worked either in theatre or from a tradition (such as Fifties Playhouse 90 or Studio One type anthology television) that was more informed by theatre.  In my opinion there is an over-emphasis today on "naturalistic" performance due to the fact that it requires far less technique to bring this off than a really stylised performance of complicated material such as the typical DS script presents.

Besides, YOU try and find a "natural" way of saying this line:  "Nobody and nothing will stop me from letting everyone know exactly What You Are!"

G.

[michael c]

"Camp" is something you have to set out to be....it's not something you stumble upon by accident.  Think of the early "Batman" series with all those crazy "villains" like "The Penquin" and "The Riddler".  The show was WRITTEN TO BE THAT WAY!!

Dark Shadows was never WRITTEN to be "campy".....but some have used that term because of certain actor's mannerisms and vocal delivery.  The plots may have been outlandish, the acting idiocincratic, the directing highly stylized.....but the show was not written to be camp!!

rainey,i disagree

camp is absolutely NOT something that one has to set out to be.it often only happens in retrospect.

silly shows like 'batman" aside look at the work of the great mid-century actresses.bette davis,judy garland,joan crawford,gloria swanson and even joan bennett.if you asked any of these actresses in 1945 if they intended to produce a volume of work later perceived as "campy" i can assure you the answer would have been no.they intended to turn in good performances in the style of the period.

movies like "all about eve" and "sunset boulevard" only achieved camp status later when new audiences saw them and the world around them had changed.camp often does happen by accident.

that said,i doubt that the d.s. writers set out to write a campy show.but one has to accept that there is that perception out there.