Editor's Desk 
1966 WEEK! Vampires, warlocks and monsters — oh my!
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Welcome to 1966 WEEK — a 60th anniversary celebration of an extraordinary, landmark year in popular culture. For seven days, we’re bringing you a whole host of features on everything from Star Trek, to Batman, to the Beatles, to the Monkees, and much, much more. (Just check out Walt Grogan’s latest fab banner, above!) Click here for more of the far out fun! — Dan
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UPDATED 9/11/26: Dark Shadows premiered June 27, 1966. We’re reprinting this piece from April 2022 because we wanted to make sure we included it in 1966 WEEK. Dig it! — Dan
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Hey, dig this Shadowy ones – our man Jim Beard has a new book out: a series of essays on the classic TV show Dark Shadows called, appropriately enough, Running Home to Shadows.
The book, which is also edited by Charles R. Rutledge, is similar to Jim’s classic Gotham City 14 Miles and features a coterie of contributors, including a foreword by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played Maggie Evans on the supernatural soap.
You can get the 150-page paperback from Amazon for a startlingly affordable $8.99. Writers include Greg Cox, Mark Dawidziak, Dave Dykema, Bob Freeman, Ed Gross, Rich Handley, Nancy Holder, Tina Hunt, Katherine Kerestman, Mark Maddox (with Ed Catto), Elizabeth Massie, Kimberly Oswald, Martin Powell, Dana Pride, Mark Rainey, Michael Rogers, Chris Ryan, Frank Schildiner, Duane Spurlock and Jeff Thompson.
Cool, eh? Well with the book burning up the sales charts (it’s in Amazon’s Top 10 for TV guides and the like), Jim is here with a fun piece in which he pays tribute to 13 of the show’s grooviest characters.
Dig it.
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By JIM BEARD
Sometimes I wonder if most people who aren’t die-hard Dark Shadows fans realize how cool the show really was. Just like my beloved Batman ’66, there’s a lot of short-handing about TV’s first supernatural soap, but not a lot of digging below its surface. If you know anything, you know about Barnabas and Angelique and maybe some of the goofs and gaffes and the low-budget atmosphere, but I’m here to tell you there’s a whole lot more, stuff that may surprise a lot of genre fans. The show itself dug deep, even if many of us today do not.
Here’s a list of 13 of my favorite Dark Shadows characters, of which there was a virtual army over its six-year run and 1,200-plus episodes.
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Barnabas Collins. OK, yes; you can’t really have a list without him. What I find fascinating about Barnabas Collins is that he was many things over the course of the show: villain, anti-hero, hero, victim, force of nature. And actor Jonathan Frid was an unlikely romantic lead for a soap opera, but he gave the role a certain something that was often intangible.
Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins
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Maggie Evans. She began as a simple waitress who stumbled into the role of reluctant stand-in for Barnabas’ lost love Josette, but Maggie went on to grow into an ersatz heroine, a sometimes-ballsy young lady who tried to remain grounded in the middle of a supernatural bughouse.
Kathryn Leigh Scott as Maggie Evans
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Roger Collins. Actor Louis Edmonds played Roger as a richer-than-thou fuddy-duddy that I loved to see trod onto the set with his chin up and looking down his nose at everyone around him. It was a delicious part and Edmonds always looked like he relished it.
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Dr. Julia Hoffman. Here’s a character who was always in the middle of everything, her fingers dancing in the mayhem as she tried to look calm and cool and on top of the situation as she cared for monsters and played many games behind peoples’ backs. And she loved Barnabas, though it was unrequited.
Grayson Hall as Dr. Julia Hoffman
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Nicholas Blair. The show’s resident warlock, a guy who couldn’t not look evil even if he tried. Nicholas gave Angelique a run for most-wicked person in the room every time he was on the screen.
Humbert Allen Astredo as Nicholas Blair
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Reverend Trask. The holy man you love to hate. He would suffer no fools nor monsters, and when he called out to the Lord, he was really calling up fire and brimstone. Trask was so bad his ghost returned in the present day to wreak even more havoc than he did back in his original 1700s life.
Jerry Lacy as Reverend Trask
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Adam. The show had its own resident Frankenstein Monster, a dude stitched together from, yep, dead bodies by Dr. Eric Lang. Adam wanted a mate of his own and set his soulful eyes on young Carolyn Stoddard until he was gifted with an Eve.
Robert Rodan as Adam
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Diabolos. Did you know the Devil was on the show? Okay, maybe not the Devil, but definitely a devil. He was a hooded figure who was basically Nicholas Trask’s boss and pushed Angelique around, too. He wasn’t in more than a few episodes, but he really made an impression on me. How often do you get an actual demonic entity on a daytime soap opera
Lara Parker as Angelique and Duane Morris as Diabolos
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Mrs. Johnson. Ahh, Mrs. Johnson… The Collins’ housekeeper was always underfoot and was the textbook definition of “long-suffering.” Bless her cold, crabby heart.
Clarice Blackburn as Mrs. Johnson
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Dorcas Trilling. It doesn’t really matter who she was, what she did, or what time-period she appeared in on the show. All that matters to me is that name. That is, without a doubt, one of the greatest names for a fictional character ever.
Gail Strickland as Dorcas Trilling
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David Collins. David was “the kid” on the show. He was kind of whiny and sometimes a brat, but he was also kind of cool because he was in the middle of all the craziness from week to week—and he had a Major Matt Mason Space Station in his bedroom.
David Henesy as David Collins
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Burke Devlin. This guy was like a pulp character come to life on your TV set. Two-fisted, tough-talking, man-about-town. There was nothing Burke Devlin couldn’t do, and the late, great actor Mitchell Ryan proved it week in and week out.
Mitchell Ryan as Burke Devlin
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Willie Loomis. Think of Renfield in Dracula, and you pretty much have a picture of ol’ Willie. He took his knocks, especially after accidentally letting Barnabas out of his chained coffin. So, you might say almost all of what happened on Dark Shadows after that was Willie’s fault, and for that he will always be remembered fondly.
John Karlen as Willie Loomis
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Running Home to Shadows, published by Becky Books, lists for $8.99. Click here for more info and to order.
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MORE
— The Complete 1966 WEEK Index of Columns and Features. Click here.
— The DARK SHADOWS Playset You’ve Waited Decades For. Click here.
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JIM BEARD has pounded out adventure fiction since he sold a story to DC Comics in 2002. He’s gone on to write official Star Wars and Ghostbusters comics stories and contributed articles and essays to several volumes of comic book history. His prose work includes his own creations, but also licensed properties such as Planet of the Apes, X-Files, Spider-Man, Kolchak the Night Stalker and Captain Action. In addition, Jim provided regular content for Marvel.com, the official Marvel Comics website, for 17 years.
Check out his latest releases: a Green Hornet novella How Sweet the Sting, his first epic fantasy novel The Nine Nations Book One: The Sliding World, Running Home to Shadows about Dark Shadows, and the most recent Batman ’66 books of essays he’s edited: Zlonk! Zok! Zowie! The Subterranean Blue Grotto Essays on Batman ’66 – Season One, Biff! Bam! Ee-Yow! The Subterranean Blue Grotto Essays on Batman ’66 – Season Two and Oooff! Boff! Splatt! The Subterranean Blue Grotto Guide to Batman ’66 – Season Three.
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