How Did DS Influence Your Life?

 

A few of us mentioned on another thread how watching DS  influenced our goals, dreams, artistic pursuits.

I discovered DS in '67, about a week before 1795.
I loved the show on sight & love it still.

DS launched my lifelong love of classic horror films of the Universal/Hammer/AIP era.

Because of DS' costume stories I began checking out Masterpiece Theatre  & going to museums like the Met in NYC.

My fantasies about being on DS led to my producing two low budget feature films in the 90s & working as a film critic today.

How did DS influence you?

David

Watching all of the time-travelling on the show made me into a bit of a history nut....I started becoming interested in the way of life in the 1600's, 1700's, 1800's, early 1900's and all the inventions that came into being.

Once a year we go to Mackinaw Island, where they have houses and buildings from those centuries, and they have a huge fort. In those houses they have signs telling the history of who lived there, what they used for a certain purpose, they even have prototypes of the furniture, clothing and machinery of earlier times. I always look forward to going there.

Let's see...watching Dark Shadows as a kid prompted my love of period drama - seriously if it's a costume drama I'm there!   Also, I'm sure DS influenced my curiosity about gothic stories and the supernatural.  ever since I first discovered the show, I've enoyed reading about ghosts, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night, particularly if they're set in an old house with some of the other gothic trappings.  Lastly, I sometimes dabble in writing fiction - with some of the above elements in play.

Oh, and my love of Dark Shadows has also made me poorer - from buying the DVDs, and it's made my husband a more tolerant man - he has to put up with watching DS with me from time to time! 

I'm not sure that DS influenced my life so much as it enhanced some of the hobbies and things that I already had. I've always liked writing, ever since I was about 8, and watching DS turned me on to horror stories. I've liked horror movies since I was young, but DS probably set me up to become a fan of other shows that are similar to it, like Buffy and Angel.

I've also liked history ever since I was young, but that's because my Dad enjoyed it and I liked learning about it from him. He ordered me this huge box of Civil War fact cards that have pictures and like 3 paragraphs of information on them about specific events that happened during the civil war. DS probably made me interested in more of history, different time periods and stuff, or rather, gave me a glimpse into those time periods, even though I'm sure there were plenty inaccuracies in DS during those time periods.

Here lately, as I've focused more on screenwriting and scriptwriting, I've learned to appreciate DS in a new way because I can imagine the scripts being written and how they may have looked. And I can infer what characters were meant to say when the actors said it wrong. Not to mention that the two attempted revivals of DS have made me start writing a DS Pilot of my own, that will probably never be produced (hey, I have hope ) but that gives me great pleasure to write.

How DS effected my life.  As a teenager, it made a safe and fun place to go when like was difficult. It gave me an interest in reading and love of Shakespeare and interest in Renaissance period and English History.

Also learned to love American History and wanting to see early America places and architecture. Like when I went to Independence Hall it was like I had been there before. Maybe I have?? I sure really like that period.

I also have meet a great group of people that are DS fans here on line. We all seam to accept each other as we are. That is great.  It has hurt my pocked book and humor with some of my friends. I could really go on and on, but I think that you get the idea.

     I was going to say that DS has not influenced my life.  However, I live in Maine(9 months of winter, three months of damn poor sledd'n) and I am a recluse.  My neighbors also disappear for months.  We won't see each other until we all start mowing are lawns in July.  I also have a room in my house with a dirt floor covered by bricks(root celler) but my husband is not buried in there.  I don't think anyone else is under there either.

:-    it made me scared of werewolves....gave me nightmares for days.
    i got to discover grayson hall as an actress
    got me into the literature that they "borrowed" from
    got me to appreciate Dan Curtis movies
    Got me to know the whole collins family, which got me into family sagas.

probably the biggest and strangest impact that d.s. has had on my life is that i am not otherwise remotely interested in anything having to do with the occult.

not vampires.not witchcraft.not werewolves.nothing.

i've never watched 15 seconds of the sci-fi channel(other than this show).i don't in general watch films of the horror genre.

it was just something about this very particular set of actors and sets and costumes and music that hooked me.

While there was a host of things that influenced me to become a writer of scary things, DS is certainly one of the most significant. For so many years, particularly when it wasn't being aired, its mystique had a real hold on me. Oftentimes in my writing I've sought to convey the kind of allure that DS had for me, especially as a young 'un.

Being involved with the novel, which threw me sometimes jarringly into the business end of it all, was both a dream come true and a kind of climax to the mystique. Still, DS has a grip that continues to spark my own creativity.

I've never been interested in horror movies or shows either, but there is something about Dark Shadows that pulled me right in.

As for the influence it has had on my life, well, it gives me something to watch, since I don't like much of what is on TV anymore.

 Dark Shadows didn't really effect my life so much as my after life. After watching the show for so many years I've developed this fear of walking the earth for eternity as a supernatural creature. It's for this reason that I've instructed my next of kin to upon my death,"burn my ass". I figure if I'm cremated I cant come back. It should work, don't you think.

I've instructed my next of kin to upon my death,"burn my ass". I figure if I'm cremated I cant come back. It should work, don't you think.

Maybe not. Being turned to dust never stopped Dracula from being resurrected in the Hammer films. 

I began writing a response to this post a long time ago, but the more I thought about the question the more involved my thoughts became.  I had actually been thinking about this very question before the thread first appeared.

The responses here are amazingly varied and interesting.  In my case, the influence of DS has meant finding correspondences between things on the show and events or places in my life.

After initially seeing DS at scattered times while in elementary school in the 1970s, it later dropped from my memory.  Occasionally when some reference called the program to mind, I felt a sense of excitement combined with a sense of loss for something from the past that was gone forever.  While attending graduate school in California in the mid-1980s, I happened upon several late-night broadcasts on a PBS station, which were sadly short lived.  They were episodes from the Leviathan period, and I dimly recalled having seen some of that storyline as a child.  This was the first time since childhood when I had really thought of Dark Shadows, but the influence quickly evaporated when PBS stopped showing it.

More recently, I was able to view the entire series thanks to the SciFi channel, and its importance in my life has increased.  Viewing the series as an adult, I now saw correspondences from my childhood that I hadn't considered at the time I lived them.  These were things such as a mansion we had visited during childhood, complete with an old adjoining cemetery, along a rugged, rocky lake shore, yet I don't recall ever thinking of that in terms of DS at the time.  I don't remember it being at all spooky, but now looking back I think of this location as my version of Collinwood and Eagle Hill cemetery.  My aunt lived in a Victorian era house nearby, but I didn't really appreciate the Victorian design or architecture at the time; yet now I look back and think of this memory in terms of the 1897 storyline.  We had a grandfather clock at home, but it is only now as an adult that I see these things through a Dark Shadows lens.  Collinwood was another world when I was growing up completely unlike the ordinary world I inhabited.  So how can I look back now and find similarities between my life and Dark Shadows?  I suppose it's a combination of escapism and a nostalgic imagination.

On my walks in the bigger city where I lived only a few years ago I was always finding houses that reminded me of those on the show, including one that I would describe as Jeffersonian that I always thought of as the Old House, another one that I imagined as Angelique's home during the Leviathan period, and a mansion that looked very much like Collinwood where I almost rented a room in the carriage house.

During the past year while living again in the town where I grew up, I've imagined similarities between the town and Collinsport.  Touring some other old towns with another aunt, she told me about the old newspaper office she had visited and read many of the town's newspapers from the turn of the previous century.  They even let her take many of the newspapers home to read, with a promise to return them!  I immediately thought of the newspaper office in Collinsport where Barnabas and Julia sought information on more than one occasion.  My aunt also talked about visiting a few years back with a man in his 90s at a bakery where he had worked since the early 1900s, and he claimed to recall my maternal grandfather's parents who were immigrants there in the 1890s.  This reminded me of some of the elderly Collinsport residents such as the cemetery caretaker and the jeweler who had old records of dealings with the Collins family from earlier eras.  One of the original jewelers in town here now no doubt has records going back a century, at least I would have that sense from my memory of the store as a childhood, and how ancient the store was even then.  To step into the store is to walk into the past.

My interest in the past and in family history are something I share with Barnabas and other Collins family members.  This was not an influence that came from watching Dark Shadows but something I was always fascinated with as far back as I remember, instilled by things I heard from family members, along with old daguerreotype and photo albums of ancestors.  I was mesmerized by a tin type of my great-grandfather who died very young in 1897, the same year as a favorite DS storyline.  Digging into the past of my ancestors has been one of my major occupations over the past few years, and I've come across people and events that have occasionally called to mind the Gothic genre in general.  Some of the correspondences I can make with a movie that has touched a deep chord with me, "Eye of the Devil," seem almost uncanny (similarities with names, occupations, and locations).  Not long ago I found a record in Latin of an old ancestor known as "M_______us Lupus."  My heart almost stopped when I stumbled on that, because I seriously entertained the notion that this ancestor might have been thought to have been a werewolf; later I realized this was simply the Latin form of his surname, which was Wolf.  Only a few years ago, when looking at the Collins family tree in one of the Pomegranate Press books, I was impressed with a family lineage known into the 1600s, which seemed the unfathomably distant past.  Little did I realize that I would be able to research to that point, and earlier, in my own ancestry.

These are many of the parallels I draw now as an adult between my life and Dark Shadows; in making these parallels, I see how DS has influenced me.

My Mom got very annoyed when I was most intensely involved with DS and my conversation was mainly a super-heavy rotation of these three sentences:

"I don't understand!"

"I don't know what you're ... TALKING about."

"I MUST."

twinkles,

G.

Passing through an airport, in the gift shop, I begged my parents to buy a thick paperback about the I Ching for me.