I don't know if anyone has mentioned this before.
A couple of nights ago, after midnight, I caught the last 15 minutes of a "Twilight Zone" episode airing on the SciFi channel. I've enjoyed many of the Twilight Zone episodes I've seen, although I haven't seen all that many. I hadn't heard that the Dark Shadows writers borrowed from the Twilight Zone.
But in this episode, there can be little doubt that the DS writers were inspired not once, but twice, in the course of the Dark Shadows run.
The episode was called "Queen of the Nile" and starred Ann Blyth. It was about an actress who looked young, but a reporter interviewing her discovered evidence that she was far, far older than she appeared - generations older. I was immediately reminded of both the Laura Stockbridge Collins storyline, and the Olivia Corey character. The Twilight Zone character maintained her youth by means of an Egyptian scarab. I can't remember anymore what Egyptian object it was that Laura Collins had, but the concept obviously came form the Twilight Zone episode. Then the fact that the Twilight Zone character was an actress reminded me of Olivia Corey. I don't remember if Olivia Corey was generations old or if it was rather that she had rather unusual origins, but her character seemed to have been inspired by that of the actress in "Queen of the Nile." In the Twilight Zone episode, an elderly woman is an attendant to the young, beautiful actress, but she furtively reveals to the reporter that she is not the actress's mother, as she had been introduced - but her daughter. As I think more about it, I recall something about Olivia Corey claiming to be the granddaughter of an actress of two generations ago, but in reality she wasn't the granddaughter, but the original.
The writer of this Twilight Zone episode, which aired in 1964, was Charles Beaumont, who died in 1967, and thus probably never knew his story was reworked in DS. Interestingly, Beaumont also wrote the scripts for some of the Roger Corman Poe adaptations ("The Haunted Palace" and "The Masque of the Red Death").
It would be very interesting to find out how Charles Beaumont came up with the idea for his character - whether it was his own original concept, or whether he, too, was inspired from some earlier work.
Also, does anyone know why The Twilight Zone hasn't come out on DVD?