One of my few memories of living on Cedar Street in the capital of Arkansas, which we left for the rural north-central part of the state when I was four or five, is arguing with my older sister about watching the series. Her position against it was that it would scare me, and of course, I argued that it wouldn’t. I need to check with her and see who won the debate. As I recall, it was me.
Now that Prime has included Dark Shadows and I’ve been watching it, I’m seeing it as a leader in the paranormal romance genre. The vampire Barnabas Collins has been reawakened and is seeking to transform a local girl into a recreation of his lost love. I’ve heard this motivation attributed to Dracula, but it’s not in Stoker — that’s Francis Ford Coppola’s invention from his 1992 film. Stoker’s count is a conqueror, not a romantic. The lost-love obsession is a later addition to the myth, and Dark Shadows was doing it years before Coppola got there.
Actually, Dark Shadows isn’t the point. I mean, sure, if you’re looking for a cozy kind of story and can enjoy the dated aesthetic, watch it. It’s in these nice little twenty-minute bite-sized episodes. After a few of them you’ll start muting or forwarding through the credits because of the music, but it’s a fun bit of nostalgia. The thing that I really want to share is an ad.
Dark Shadows was doing something the genre hadn’t named yet — the immortal haunted by loss, the ordinary world cracked open by the supernatural, romance twisted into something dangerous. Those elements didn’t start with Twilight or Anne Rice. They were in that little twenty-minute soap opera running five days a week in 1966.
I enjoy exploring that same territory. Stories set in the rural South, atmospheric rather than action-driven, where the supernatural intrudes on ordinary lives in ways that are unsettling before they’re explained. If you found your way here because something about paranormal fiction pulls at you — the gothic weight of it, the sense that the world is stranger than it appears — you’re in the right place.
A Strange Occurrence of Mayhem in Westminster
In this historical science fiction novel, an ambitious young doctor tries to succeed where Dr. Jekyll failed. His efforts unleash a terrible, communicable affliction of the mind. The result is an epidemic of madness that turns Victorian London’s august West End into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.