Well, I agree with Jonathan Frid on this one. hoDS would have benefited from a lot more atmosphere and character development, and a lot less red stuff running out of every orifice onscreen.
As I've said before, as my sister and I were taking our seats in the theatre back in the Summer of 1970 when we saw the movie, I heard one guy ask his friend what he thought of it, and the latter summed the whole thing up with terse eloquence: "lotsa teeth, lotsa blood." Maybe that level of gratuitous violence helped make it a hit for MGM, but I have read that hoDS and the resulting parental protests led to a lot of ABC affiliates around the US dropping the series.
I read an interview that Mr. Frid gave in Baltimore's City Paper in the 1980s or 1990s, I believe, in which he characterized the violence in hoDS as pornographic (or words to that effect), and said that the "realism" of the movie robbed the story of its fantastic qualities that had made it so special in the first place.
I also have an interview with Grayson Hall from 1973 in which she says that Jonathan did not want to play a vampire any longer. I wondered whether he had it written into his contract that he would not have to do any further fanging scenes on the show since there were none after the Roxanne storyline in 1840.
In my opinion, the hoDS director's preference for sensationalism over storytelling was also what ruined the 1991 Dark Shadows series, particularly as it went on in the later episodes.
G.