The original film is a masterpiece of course. It's hard to imagine a better (or equal) "Mrs. Danvers" to Judith Anderson, although I would expect Diana Rigg would have done the role justice, too (speaking of a BBC version I saw too long ago to remember very well).

I was really looking forward to last year's film of "My Cousin Rachel" after reading the excellent novel by DuMaurier, and the trailers looked very good. The more I read about that version, though, the less I wanted to see it, and never did. I learned about the book from catching the last 15 minutes or so of the Richard Burton-Olivia de Havilland film version which caught my interest, though I never watched the DVD after purchasing it a few years back.

I've never actually read "Rebecca," but I've heard that it is jarring and troubling by the end as far as the characters of Maxim and his wife, as is the case with "My Cousin Rachel."

I also remember somewhere way back in time on this forum we discussed the parallels with "Rebecca," and I'd be willing to bet that mention of Collinwood burning was compared to "Rebecca."

MB, I've found as I get older that I sometimes make "discoveries" that I later find in older notes I had made before but had forgotten ...

My former co-worker who retired a year and a half ago, had watched the entire original series not long before that with her brother, who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Her brother has since died, my friend retired and moved to a larger city nearby where she has rented an apartment in a Victorian home with a tower (same area I have talked about in the past). She e-mailed me recently that she has begun watching the series again from the beginning and will watch the entire series. Retirement has its perks! But I'm sure this current viewing has its melancholy associations for her, too.

Speaking as a casual viewer with casual interest - I found the Stanley Kubrick version very effective as a film. I vaguely remember watching the mini-series when it aired and remember being irritated by the kid. The TV version did not have the impact of the movie.

But ... if I were more of a Stephen King fan and had read the book, I might have felt differently. I am usually a purist when it comes to movie adaptations of literary works, and usually wonder why the screenwriter(s) seem to think they know better when they make significant changes to a work. Such changes are rarely "improvements," IMO.

So when I read in the linked article that the character of the father was all wrong in the movie version, I sympathize. It seems like the role was conceived as an "off-beat, Jack Nicholson part," rather than King's story of an ordinary man slowly unraveling ...

I've been affected by the movie versions of "The Shawshank Redemption," "Delores Clayburn" (sp.), and the original TV version "Salem's Lot." All told really good stories (credit to King, there) and were done very well. But the only one I've attempted to read is "Salem's Lot." I may go back to the book some day, but with all the many characters depicted, the writing was too "popular fiction" for me, not enough depth. I can see where many readers would really like it and think I might have liked it better at a younger age. Not to knock it, and I do think King has come up with some remarkable stories.

I'm posting this because if any of my friends might appreciate this, it would be Dark Shadows friends. I've met with only the mildest (to zero) interest from family members with the exception of my mother, who isn't actually affected by it. The subject of gypsies has come up many times on this forum, but I never dreamed I would have a personal connection to the Roma people. It's in the much distant past and I wouldn't want to overstate the case, either.

My genealogy pursuits in recent years have been supplemented by genetic genealogy, i.e. DNA testing. I'm no expert but I have given presentations and co-presented to genealogy groups on some basic aspects. Some results from testing have remained puzzling and it's easy to brush them off. One of these were filtered tests of my data that showed Spanish ancestry. Confident that I have no Spanish ancestry, I didn't pursue these curious findings for several years and only took another look at these results recently. They showed Basque, Andalucia, La Mancha, and a handful of other regions of Spain near the Bay of Biscay and along the French border. In my searches for what Haplogroups and subclades (more precise subcategories) these might include, I came upon an article from 2007 from a journal of genetic research that outlined 12 subclades that define the genetic profile of the Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese) Roma.

Almost in a spirit of following a lark, I began searching my data for each of these clades/SNPs (there is only one testing company that provides this analysis). Each one I checked for, it turned out I had – but the clincher was a specific subclade originating in northern India. For someone with Nordic and French heritage, that is hard to fathom. The administrator of this Haplogroup writes that in European ancestry, this subclade is found only in those with Roma heritage. So, yes, I have a gypsy ancestor somwhere, and more specifically one from Spain.

I've learned a lot about the Roma in the past several weeks, but have also found how much of their history remains a mystery – including in France. The DNA results indicate an ancestor within the last 450 years. Sounds like a long time, but my most likely ancestor was one from Auvergne in south central France who later migrated to the northeastern France of my great-grandfather. My seventh-great grandfather, he lived in the late 1600s and early 1700s. In the late 1580s, Spain decided to rid the country of the gypsies, and many likely fled into France. Within a couple of miles from my ancestor's home in the Clermont-Theirs region was a an area that seems to have been a refuge for the Roma. It is still found on some maps, and called "Bohemia," but in the Occitan form of the local language. A canon of the church living at the time of my ancestor and in the same city was also a poet who wrote sympathetically of the "Baumians," and I believe that this was an area where gypsies were safe for a few generations.

What has this to do with me today? Well, I still have a trace of his DNA. We don't have DNA from every ancestor – by 400-500 years we have too many ancestors to still carry DNA from each one. So I have inherited something from a Roma forebear - DNA, yes, but also a sliver of a heritage I never would have expected I had.

These are vivid personal recollections of David Thayer, wonderful to read - thanks for sharing! Interesting that in his case he actually was something like the character we most identify him with - Professor Stokes.

Also, at the end of the credits after each episode is a new credit and logo I have never seen associated with "Dark Shadows" before: "CBS Television Distribution."

When the series aired on the SciFi Channel, the owner of the series seemed to be "Worldvision Enterprises."

Funny, I don't seem to be familiar with "House of Dracula" from 1945. I've never cared for the original "Dracula" with Bela Lugosi, even thought the screenplay, I believe, was by John Balderston, who adapted a Henry James novel as "Berkeley Square." But I had read the novel at a young age and no movie ever came close to doing it justice.

I enjoyed revisiting two of the Lee Hammer Dracula movies on TCM, too, and hastened to make certain I had all of them on DVD (had to order "Scars of Dracula" and "Satanic Rites of Dracula" to complete my library.