Shouts out to those who remember "The Thing that Couldn't Die!" It's SO funny to watch now, but it scared the bejesus out of me as a little kid.
In an attempt to respond to Vlad's comments, I too was amazed that the head showed up so early in the 1840 storyline. This is my second viewing of 1840, and it's hard to believe all this madness with Judah Zachery has already started.
As to how much of this the writers had planned, it's so hard to tell. Part of me agrees - maybe they had this whole thing intricately plotted out months in advance. The events of 1840 are pretty convoluted, and it's hard to believe there wasn't an overall vision. Perhaps DC or other persons in authority asked for a story that lent some insight into why the Collins family kept having these supernatural problems every generation.
Even PT1841 goes in this direction. Without going heavily into spoilers, much of the story centers on an ancient curse against the family. Later in the current storyline, we will discover that such a curse also drives most of the action in 1840. To me, this hints at an overarching plan by the ptb.
That being said, there are several inconsistencies (i.e. family history) that I don't think can be readily explained. So much happens, and it's happening so fast that it seems like someone was telling the writers to speed up the action and they simply lost track of what had come before in effort to keep up the breakneck pacing of 1840.
The disembodied head itself taps into a primal place of fear. It's the kind of thing that haunts our nightmares as children. That's why "The Thing that Couldn't Die" ruined me so much as a kid. I definitely see the macabre fascination though, as back then I was also quite taken with the story of Anne Boleyn's sad fate and her headless ghost.
The idea of of a living/dead severed head (that rhymes!) is horrifying. You've done your research, Vlad. There's obviously some tradition of severed heads in the horror/fantasy genre, as well as in mythology.
Although I'm not familiar with the Norse or other myths you referenced, I do remember that in one of the old Oz books (and the 1985 movie "Return to Oz") there was a similar motif, involving an evil witch who had a whole cabinet full of severed heads that she kept in jars. She would change her own head with the ones in the jars, in the way other women change their hats. I read the Oz books when I was 10 or 11 and this is the image that stayed with me most.
An aside - doesn't Judah's head eventually have to go with a body other than his own? Do I sense the shade of the Oz story here?
And haven't some of us heard stories about victims of the Reign of Terror in revolution-era France who, once guillotined, had lips or eyes that kept moving for some time after death? Also I remember reading that when they executed Mary, Queen of Scots, her lips moved in prayer for maybe ten minutes after her head was stricken from her body. Can her conciousness have survived that long too? A chilling image. One would never want to be that living/dead disembodied head, but to be left alone in the dark with it?
Anyway, there are just some mental pictures so frightening and macabre that they become objects of fascination to us - archetypes of horror, if you will. Add to this disturbing symbol the idea that a living dead severed head could force people to do it's bidding, and well...you pretty much have as chilling a story as ever there was.
Considering that "The Thing that Couldn't Die" (1958) and another cult fave "The Head that Wouldn't Die" (1962) had been fairly recently released, the writers may have had this idea about a menacing severed head reinforced many times. Who knows, perhaps one of the writers heard about the Norse or Celtic myths, read the Oz books in childhood, learned about the Reign of Terror in history class, and then saw one or both of the aforementioned mentioned movies and just couldn't shake the scare that a mean old animated severed head can put into you. And voila, Judah Zachery!
Kudos to Dark Shadows that they tried this, and that they ultimately pulled it all off pretty well! Yeah, things got a little muddled along the way, but the actors (for the most part) rose to the occasion, investing this story with fever-pitched performances that really put the grand back into Grand Guignol. For my money, it's one of the best pure horror storylines of the whole series.
And oh yeah, that wax head is excellent! Sometimes the only way I can tell the difference is that the glass on the box fogs up when it's the real deal.
