They're sure not showing much, are they? Any idea of when this new series begins? Will they be covering the book in the 8 planned episodes?

I'm so disappointed I won't be able to watch live this evening ... but I'll be looking for the performance later.

I've had a little rare free time recently that has allowed me to catch up with viewing some of my DVD collection. Two movies I watched in the last week offered reminders of DS - and both movies are from 1967, perhaps not surprisingly . . .

The first of these is a movie I never forgot from childhood, and which instilled a childhood fascination with the guillotine (rather a leap from my earlier childhood obsession with hourglasses, a la "The Wizard of Oz"): "Two on a Guillotine." At a climactic revealing moment, a Julia Hoffman-type character (unrequited love and devotion to a mysterious stage magician) blurts out to the deluded magician (and his stunned daughter, played by Connie Stevens), that his wife, who everyone believed had left her husband and young daughter, was in fact dead (I won't say how) and the Julia-type character says "I buried her in the woods behind the house." Now the house in question is an old mansion, and a simple insertion of the word "old" would probably have made this line identical to more than one circumstance occurring on DS.

The second reminder of DS came only last night when I viewed another movie on DVD, a French film with English subtitles, the final film of a famed director (so I have read online) Julien Duvivier called "Diaboliquement vôtre" ("Diaboliquely Yours," the English title). The thriller, starring the handsome/lovely and talented Alain Delon and Senta Berger, is set at a French chateau, where the husband seeks to regain his memory following a car crash but finds that things don't add up, and he begins to doubt he really is who his wife and friend tell him he is ... No, it's not the plot per se that reminded me of DS (although as I think of it now, one can't discount some surface similarity to the storyline where Barnabas holds Maggie Evans prisoner in the Old House trying to convince her she is Josette Collins.

No, it's not the plot that reminded me, but the setting - specifically the chateau, that I mentioned. You will have to view the attached photo to see. The chateau in question where the movie was filmed is Château de Théméricourt in the beautiful Val-d'Oise department just northwest of Paris.

Anyway, I can recommend both movies as entertaining and suspenseful "flicks".

Last year shortly before Thanksgiving, the Hallmark Channel had a movie that I believed was new (but have since discovered is actually from 2015 and possibly made for the Lifetime Channel rather than Hallmark) that is the best contemporary (current) Christmas ghost story I have seen. It's called "The Spirit of Christmas" and given some dark moments (along with some gorgeous cinematography) seems a departure from Hallmark's usual fare. I wanted to let DS fans now about it here, but I searched TV listings for the remainder of the Holiday season, and the film wasn't scheduled to air again. I thought I would be more prepared this year and post about it before it aired again, as I optimistically supposed it would. Alas, I'm late again - I found out belatedly that "The Spirit of Christmas" aired on Hallmark this year a day or two before Thanksgiving. It is available on DVD and I readily purchased it and hope to re-watch it this Christmas season.

Does anyone remember the Scholastic magazines that used to be in junior high resource centers in the early 1970s? They frequently had features on supernatural themes, and I remember an article in one of these magazines on Dark Shadows. I specifically remember that this particular article opened with a behind-the-scenes description of the "Dark Shadows" set, which nonchalantly mentioned "a woman leaning over a coffin memorizing her lines for the next day" and then came back with: "A woman leaning over a coffin?" I believe the "woman" in question was Grayson Hall. I've been able to ascertain that there were three similar sorts of publications, Scholastic Read ("the magazine of reading and English"), Scholastic Scope, and Scholastic Voice. There was also "Jr. Scholastic," but that was mostly social-studies oriented. All of these publications, which came out either weekly or bi-weekly, were small, digest-sized, with non-glossy paper.

What I'm confused about is that I remember these publications from Junior High, which I entered as a 7th grader in the Fall of 1972 (true confession time!) Yet -- DS was off the air by then! I don't know how to explain the discrepancy as I really don't remember a magazine like this in elementary school, but maybe my memory isn't clear.

I'm also trying to track down which of these magazines had a fictional story about Edgar Allan Poe at this time, which I think must have been in 1972, 1973, or 1974.

Does anyone remember these magazines and which one might have had the DS and Poe features?
 

Glad you were able to get it On Demand, Patrick. I don't suppose that included host Eddie Muller's commentary? His before and after film commentary for "Hollow Triumph" were very informative, as expected. It was interesting to learn how the independent film company was set up for this film and how Bennett and producer husband Walter Wanger wanted to be part of it.

I thought Joan Bennett was perfect in the part and found Paul Henreid much more compelling than in anything else I've seen him in. And the noir look of the film was also perfect.

This is one of the most thoughtprovoking and insightful commentaries I can remember  -  thank you for posting it. I think many of us especially when we were newbies were influenced by various opinions especially if they were shared by numerous posters, and the conventional wisdom has been how bad a writer Marmorstein was. I remember having been enthralled throughout DS overall at this stage in my initial (adult) viewing, and was a bit surprised by the negative comments about him and tended to reluctantly accept that viewpoint without looking closer at things, as you have in this post. (I see this was posted on my birthday and I can hardly believe I haven't visited here in more than three months, how sad!).

I'm surprised how clearly memories of the early Laura storyline return upon reading your fresh commentary. I remember noting many of the observations you make, how so many events on DS recurr but in new contexts and with different characters. This practice seems to be denigrated by some viewers, but it never bothered me – instead, I've viewed this not as some crude "recycling" but as variations on striking themes as in historical music compositions. The recurrent patterns unify the composition, whether music or literary or other media.

Are you saying that Marmorstein was speaking "metaphorically" about having invented the character of Barnabas? If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that Marmorstein created a blueprint with the Laura sequence which was then adapted by subsequent writers and applied to Barnabas.