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I think it's fair to say that someone's lost their fucking bucket around here
I freely admit to a bias in favor of bog bodies, but I loved Michael Almereyda's The Eternal (1998). If the name rings no bells, the film was originally produced as The Mummy and released into theaters as Trance—all unhelpfully generic titles for a low-budget, lo-fi gem of atmospheric, deadpan weirdness that sometimes plays like an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and sometimes like a Seamus Heaney creepshow and at all times like itself, whatever on earth that is. An Almereyda movie. I've seen four now and I really like them. They just don't all have plots made of reincarnation and peat.
A dreamy prologue of rollercoasters and hip flasks and nighttime taxis through Manhattan introduces us to Nora and Jim (Alison Elliott and Jared Harris), a well-off married couple in the grand tradition of Nick and Nora Charles, by which I don't mean that they solve mysteries, just that they love one another deeply and they drink like the human liver is going out of style. Even when a blacked-out Nora takes a nastier spill than usual on the stairs of their expensively underfurnished loft, their glib solution is to turn a long-planned family trip to the west of Ireland—taking their much-loved young son to meet his mother's side—into an opportunity to detox. In the words of their doctor, calling shenanigans: "You're going to Ireland to dry out?" It doesn't look auspicious. The weather is an assortment of rain. They can't pass a pub without breaking their new-minted vows of sobriety over a pint and then a few more pints of Guinness, which Jim insists to his dubious offspring is "not strictly speaking alcohol—it's food." Then he loses a fight that gets them ejected from the pub and Nora, the only one of them who knows how to drive in left-hand traffic, experiences a hallucination of ravens mixed with the mysterious, upsetting images of her blackout—a dark-haired woman, a car door opening, a schoolgirl running, the sky full of smoke—and cracks up the car. By the time they arrive at their destination, led by the solemn Alice (Rachel O'Rourke) whose young voice narrated the opening scenes, we are almost unsurprised to find it a classic ancestral pile complete with marble stairwells and overgrown gardens, its half-forgotten rooms encompassing everything from a well-appointed library with a crackling peat fire to attic garrets where the mattresses are gashed and stuffed with snake-stones and driftwood. Nora's beloved grandmother (Lois Smith) has seemingly "lost the bucket," confined to her bedroom in a medicated haze under Alice's patient, chain-smoking preadolescent care. Her uncle Bill (Christopher Walken, sporting an Irish accent about as good as Harris' American) scarcely looks like a better contender for sanity, with his long hours in the raw fluorescent-lit basement tending to a plastic-wrapped body he swears once belonged to a female Druid, a witch-priestess of the Iron Age who lost her power for love of a faithless man and drowned herself after bearing his child and was laid tenderly to rest in the peat by her colleagues until such time as she should return. "The Egyptians were materialists. They believed the body was like a used car—it could be souped up and driven again in the afterlife. These people had the notion you can't drive into the afterlife. You have to get out of the car entirely." So what's the woman he calls Niamh (Niamh Dolan) planning to trade her peat-soaked chassis in for? A newer model like Nora, whose nosebleeds and headaches and dizzy spells are worsening even as the bog-rusted features of the long-dead woman on the deal table assume a disturbingly familiar, more modern cast? Is her behavior roughening just because she's back at the site of her adolescent trauma and rebellion or is there a component of her uncle's apologetic warning, "It was the Iron Age. You had to do a lot of nasty things just to get by"? And is her life so good to her that it's worth fighting for, if someone else who's been waiting two thousand years for a second chance wants it instead?
This is all prime Gothic material and Almereyda presents it with same poker face as his previous foray into horror, the NYC-hipster-vampire remix Nadja (1994). Like that film, with which it shares a couple of cast members and a significant point about the transmigration of souls, The Eternal is difficult to describe tonally without making it sound broader or more dismissive than it is; it is not ironic in the spoofing or distancing senses, but in the sense of horror coexisting with absurdity, more in the tradition of James Whale's pitch-black camp than Abbott and Costello Meet. Uncle Bill gets one genuine moment of cracked poetry as he describes the nature of the bog woman he's become obsessed with: "This woman—Niamh—was of this kind. Not good. Not evil. But a creature of force unto her own will. She was simply, uncontrollably, herself." Then he snaps whatever credibility he's just achieved with that line about the Iron Age. Different parts of the house seem to belong to different genres, from the cavernous foyer to the bright-scrubbed kitchen to the candle-dim hallways, but eventually a resurrected Druid is stalking through all of them, wearing the face of her distant descendant whom she intends not just to double but replace. Characters say outrageous things about spells or souls matter-of-factly, but what's the alternative? Dramatically? At a fortuitous moment, a crack-shot stranger (Karl Geary) steps in through a ground-floor window with his similarly armed best mate like a couple of Connemara Van Helsings and is introduced as "Sean the gardener," at which Jim sputters that he "didn't see any garden out there" and the ponytailed man in the sunglasses growls back, "Just because there's no garden doesn't mean I'm not the gardener," which is nonsense worthy of Carroll and just as impossible to argue with. Death by flying fragmented vinyl may be WTF enough to jolt a laugh out of a keyed-up audience, but it still ends in bodies. Nora's struggle for her identity is not a joke. Nadja rendered its altered states in black-and-white Pixelvision, defusing its disaffection with unapologetic poetry; The Eternal uses Super 8 to similar effect, placing Niamh's ancient history and Nora's childhood memories in the same Jarman-esque continuity, a blurred home movie stretching back thousands of years, like all ancestry simultaneously root and chain. Single-minded and apparently unstoppable as she may be, Niamh is not an entirely alien thing to Nora. The same actor (Paul Ferriter) plays both their betraying lovers, like a charming curse come round again. The more we learn about the past that sent sixteen-year-old Nora to America, the more the question of children chimes strangely, too. By the time Elliott's playing both women, the contest between them feels less like a traditional interloping possession than a civil war. They swap partners, cling to the same child. They don't give up.
Having just finished watching AMC's The Terror (2018), I suspect it is unfair of me to think of Jared Harris as having carved out a niche as that guy who deals with murderous regional metaphors while drunk, but I think Jared Harris may have a niche. It was not as disorienting as the time I saw Roddy McDowall in The Legend of Hell House (1973) and then the next night in Lassie Come Home (1943), but it's still striking to see twenty years wiped off an actor just like that—just my age, with his wry scarred face and his flyaway coppery hair, I'd cast him as Loki. His Jim is a committed husband and father for all his fecklessness and the kind of natural clown who takes a backward somersault off a bed where anyone else would just get to their feet, but he is absolutely, gloriously useless as an action hero. He gets knocked down and/or out so many times over the course of the movie that I started to feel I should have been keeping score, with bonus points for falling down stairs on his own recognizance; his greatest contribution to his wife's cause is the time he buys her drinking with Niamh, who in the melting swirl of their personalities has trouble resisting a fresh bottle of Jameson's. But this is not a movie in which men save women, whether they're sympathetic husbands like Jim or territorial ex-boyfriends like Joe or apparently professional bog-vampire hunters like Sean. The Eternal is Nora's story because it's her life, to save or screw up as she chooses; it's female-forward horror, with a satisfying and not overplayed triple-goddess vibe to the eventual alliance of Mrs. Ferriter and Alice and Nora against Niamh who has been not only maiden, mother, and crone in her time but the black and waiting earth itself. "She's with you. I'm with you. You have all you need." Ginger-haired, glasses-wearing Jimmy (Jeffrey Goldschrafe) is a sweet kid, but he's a game piece, not a player. Uncle Bill is as disposable as a sacrifice. When it wasn't reminding me of other Almereyda, what this movie really made me think of was the fiction of Gemma Files and Caitlín R. Kiernan, with their fucked-up but not hopeless heroines contending equally with the supernatural and the ordinary damage of living. Everything comes down to Nora herself, barefoot on the mist-blown, stone-cobbled beach where her ancestor walked into the sea, holding her grandmother's black-hilted knife and the carved black stone that was her mother's, reclaiming herself by giving herself up. I suspect it works as a metaphor for addiction. It's also a great piece of magic and Almereyda accomplishes it with nothing more than the acting of Elliott and Dolan, the cinematography of Jim Denault and the music of Simon Fisher Turner. If the film has a flaw for me, it's an occasional choppiness in its second half; it doesn't have plot holes exactly, but it feels like it's missing some connective tissue around the second act. It fills out. Nothing is wrong with the finale, not one woman embracing her family in the blue dusk of the beach, not another woman sinking away into the blue dark of the sea, each of them finally, uncontrollably herself.
In short, other than the fact that it went straight-to-DVD in the U.S. and the DVD cover according to IMDb is appalling, I have no idea why this movie is a cult object rather than a minor classic like its predecessor; it's funny in the right places and tense in the others and haunting whenever it needs to be, which is often overlapping with the first two. I've never seen Elliott in anything else to take note of her, but she handles her dual role so neatly that I'm looking for recommendations. I have absolutely no idea why Jim refers to Quaaludes as "the aardvark of drugs," but he's having a very bad night and the jubilation with which he says it made me actually laugh out loud. More movies should feature bog bodies. Thanks for introducing me to this one,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alexxkay. This reclamation brought to you by my starting-over backers at Patreon.
A dreamy prologue of rollercoasters and hip flasks and nighttime taxis through Manhattan introduces us to Nora and Jim (Alison Elliott and Jared Harris), a well-off married couple in the grand tradition of Nick and Nora Charles, by which I don't mean that they solve mysteries, just that they love one another deeply and they drink like the human liver is going out of style. Even when a blacked-out Nora takes a nastier spill than usual on the stairs of their expensively underfurnished loft, their glib solution is to turn a long-planned family trip to the west of Ireland—taking their much-loved young son to meet his mother's side—into an opportunity to detox. In the words of their doctor, calling shenanigans: "You're going to Ireland to dry out?" It doesn't look auspicious. The weather is an assortment of rain. They can't pass a pub without breaking their new-minted vows of sobriety over a pint and then a few more pints of Guinness, which Jim insists to his dubious offspring is "not strictly speaking alcohol—it's food." Then he loses a fight that gets them ejected from the pub and Nora, the only one of them who knows how to drive in left-hand traffic, experiences a hallucination of ravens mixed with the mysterious, upsetting images of her blackout—a dark-haired woman, a car door opening, a schoolgirl running, the sky full of smoke—and cracks up the car. By the time they arrive at their destination, led by the solemn Alice (Rachel O'Rourke) whose young voice narrated the opening scenes, we are almost unsurprised to find it a classic ancestral pile complete with marble stairwells and overgrown gardens, its half-forgotten rooms encompassing everything from a well-appointed library with a crackling peat fire to attic garrets where the mattresses are gashed and stuffed with snake-stones and driftwood. Nora's beloved grandmother (Lois Smith) has seemingly "lost the bucket," confined to her bedroom in a medicated haze under Alice's patient, chain-smoking preadolescent care. Her uncle Bill (Christopher Walken, sporting an Irish accent about as good as Harris' American) scarcely looks like a better contender for sanity, with his long hours in the raw fluorescent-lit basement tending to a plastic-wrapped body he swears once belonged to a female Druid, a witch-priestess of the Iron Age who lost her power for love of a faithless man and drowned herself after bearing his child and was laid tenderly to rest in the peat by her colleagues until such time as she should return. "The Egyptians were materialists. They believed the body was like a used car—it could be souped up and driven again in the afterlife. These people had the notion you can't drive into the afterlife. You have to get out of the car entirely." So what's the woman he calls Niamh (Niamh Dolan) planning to trade her peat-soaked chassis in for? A newer model like Nora, whose nosebleeds and headaches and dizzy spells are worsening even as the bog-rusted features of the long-dead woman on the deal table assume a disturbingly familiar, more modern cast? Is her behavior roughening just because she's back at the site of her adolescent trauma and rebellion or is there a component of her uncle's apologetic warning, "It was the Iron Age. You had to do a lot of nasty things just to get by"? And is her life so good to her that it's worth fighting for, if someone else who's been waiting two thousand years for a second chance wants it instead?
This is all prime Gothic material and Almereyda presents it with same poker face as his previous foray into horror, the NYC-hipster-vampire remix Nadja (1994). Like that film, with which it shares a couple of cast members and a significant point about the transmigration of souls, The Eternal is difficult to describe tonally without making it sound broader or more dismissive than it is; it is not ironic in the spoofing or distancing senses, but in the sense of horror coexisting with absurdity, more in the tradition of James Whale's pitch-black camp than Abbott and Costello Meet. Uncle Bill gets one genuine moment of cracked poetry as he describes the nature of the bog woman he's become obsessed with: "This woman—Niamh—was of this kind. Not good. Not evil. But a creature of force unto her own will. She was simply, uncontrollably, herself." Then he snaps whatever credibility he's just achieved with that line about the Iron Age. Different parts of the house seem to belong to different genres, from the cavernous foyer to the bright-scrubbed kitchen to the candle-dim hallways, but eventually a resurrected Druid is stalking through all of them, wearing the face of her distant descendant whom she intends not just to double but replace. Characters say outrageous things about spells or souls matter-of-factly, but what's the alternative? Dramatically? At a fortuitous moment, a crack-shot stranger (Karl Geary) steps in through a ground-floor window with his similarly armed best mate like a couple of Connemara Van Helsings and is introduced as "Sean the gardener," at which Jim sputters that he "didn't see any garden out there" and the ponytailed man in the sunglasses growls back, "Just because there's no garden doesn't mean I'm not the gardener," which is nonsense worthy of Carroll and just as impossible to argue with. Death by flying fragmented vinyl may be WTF enough to jolt a laugh out of a keyed-up audience, but it still ends in bodies. Nora's struggle for her identity is not a joke. Nadja rendered its altered states in black-and-white Pixelvision, defusing its disaffection with unapologetic poetry; The Eternal uses Super 8 to similar effect, placing Niamh's ancient history and Nora's childhood memories in the same Jarman-esque continuity, a blurred home movie stretching back thousands of years, like all ancestry simultaneously root and chain. Single-minded and apparently unstoppable as she may be, Niamh is not an entirely alien thing to Nora. The same actor (Paul Ferriter) plays both their betraying lovers, like a charming curse come round again. The more we learn about the past that sent sixteen-year-old Nora to America, the more the question of children chimes strangely, too. By the time Elliott's playing both women, the contest between them feels less like a traditional interloping possession than a civil war. They swap partners, cling to the same child. They don't give up.
Having just finished watching AMC's The Terror (2018), I suspect it is unfair of me to think of Jared Harris as having carved out a niche as that guy who deals with murderous regional metaphors while drunk, but I think Jared Harris may have a niche. It was not as disorienting as the time I saw Roddy McDowall in The Legend of Hell House (1973) and then the next night in Lassie Come Home (1943), but it's still striking to see twenty years wiped off an actor just like that—just my age, with his wry scarred face and his flyaway coppery hair, I'd cast him as Loki. His Jim is a committed husband and father for all his fecklessness and the kind of natural clown who takes a backward somersault off a bed where anyone else would just get to their feet, but he is absolutely, gloriously useless as an action hero. He gets knocked down and/or out so many times over the course of the movie that I started to feel I should have been keeping score, with bonus points for falling down stairs on his own recognizance; his greatest contribution to his wife's cause is the time he buys her drinking with Niamh, who in the melting swirl of their personalities has trouble resisting a fresh bottle of Jameson's. But this is not a movie in which men save women, whether they're sympathetic husbands like Jim or territorial ex-boyfriends like Joe or apparently professional bog-vampire hunters like Sean. The Eternal is Nora's story because it's her life, to save or screw up as she chooses; it's female-forward horror, with a satisfying and not overplayed triple-goddess vibe to the eventual alliance of Mrs. Ferriter and Alice and Nora against Niamh who has been not only maiden, mother, and crone in her time but the black and waiting earth itself. "She's with you. I'm with you. You have all you need." Ginger-haired, glasses-wearing Jimmy (Jeffrey Goldschrafe) is a sweet kid, but he's a game piece, not a player. Uncle Bill is as disposable as a sacrifice. When it wasn't reminding me of other Almereyda, what this movie really made me think of was the fiction of Gemma Files and Caitlín R. Kiernan, with their fucked-up but not hopeless heroines contending equally with the supernatural and the ordinary damage of living. Everything comes down to Nora herself, barefoot on the mist-blown, stone-cobbled beach where her ancestor walked into the sea, holding her grandmother's black-hilted knife and the carved black stone that was her mother's, reclaiming herself by giving herself up. I suspect it works as a metaphor for addiction. It's also a great piece of magic and Almereyda accomplishes it with nothing more than the acting of Elliott and Dolan, the cinematography of Jim Denault and the music of Simon Fisher Turner. If the film has a flaw for me, it's an occasional choppiness in its second half; it doesn't have plot holes exactly, but it feels like it's missing some connective tissue around the second act. It fills out. Nothing is wrong with the finale, not one woman embracing her family in the blue dusk of the beach, not another woman sinking away into the blue dark of the sea, each of them finally, uncontrollably herself.
In short, other than the fact that it went straight-to-DVD in the U.S. and the DVD cover according to IMDb is appalling, I have no idea why this movie is a cult object rather than a minor classic like its predecessor; it's funny in the right places and tense in the others and haunting whenever it needs to be, which is often overlapping with the first two. I've never seen Elliott in anything else to take note of her, but she handles her dual role so neatly that I'm looking for recommendations. I have absolutely no idea why Jim refers to Quaaludes as "the aardvark of drugs," but he's having a very bad night and the jubilation with which he says it made me actually laugh out loud. More movies should feature bog bodies. Thanks for introducing me to this one,
alexxkay. This reclamation brought to you by my starting-over backers at Patreon.
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I have absolutely no idea why Jim refers to Quaaludes as "the aardvark of drugs"
Because they both have double As? That's all I can think of.
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... and I'm realizing I said short-a for "aardvark," but really it's not quite a short a. It's the a in "father," not the a in "hat."
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I do like that!
(I had a spasm of worrying that the line was just a mondegreen and I had set everyone in this thread on a wild goose chase of rationalizations, but I checked with the subtitles and the subtitles agree with me, so here, however confusingly, we are.)
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It may also be the sort of joke that's funniest inside your own head, which would be in keeping with about half the things Jim says.
I think I need to see both this and The Terror — I only ever saw Harris in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, which was fairly meh, but his take on Professor Moriarty was interesting.
Well, now I want to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. I enjoyed the first one much more than I'd thought I would.
I almost certainly saw Harris first in Smoke (1995), but since I can't place him in my memories of the movie, clearly he didn't make the same impression on me as Harvey Keitel or Forest Whitaker. I noticed him first with The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) thanks to a brief but memorable bawdy song and then the next time I saw him he was playing George VI in the first season of The Crown (2016). In between I seem to have missed him in both Fringe (2008–12) and Mad Men (2009–12) and a variety of movies which I may or may not care about seeing, although I am really entertained that Spielberg in keeping with the whole national metaphor thing cast him as Grant in Lincoln (2012). He's peculiarly sweet in Nadja, playing the estranged twin brother of the protagonist—the trust-fund children of Dracula. He is ridiculously good in The Terror.
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Their Moriarty, however, is a not-bad variant on the usual portrayal – rather than being an obscure genius known only among mathematicians and astronomers, this Moriarty hides in plain sight as a famous intellectual who gives popular math lectures and is friends with the Prince of Wales – Harris plays him as sort of a cross between George Bernard Shaw and Neil deGrasse Tyson. It does somewhat lesson his motivation for being a supervillain when he’s already famous and admired, though; and his ultimate scheme, though evil, is pretty banal (and was already used in the movie of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.)
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That's disappointing. I wonder if I heard about the fridging at the time and that's why I stayed away, or if I was just doing something else in 2011.
Their Moriarty, however, is a not-bad variant on the usual portrayal – rather than being an obscure genius known only among mathematicians and astronomers, this Moriarty hides in plain sight as a famous intellectual who gives popular math lectures and is friends with the Prince of Wales – Harris plays him as sort of a cross between George Bernard Shaw and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Okay, that is a neat idea and I haven't seen it; it reminds me of the local Othello where Iago was such a loudmouth that you wouldn't believe he could keep enough secrets to plot a man's downfall.
It does somewhat lesson his motivation for being a supervillain when he’s already famous and admired, though; and his ultimate scheme, though evil, is pretty banal (and was already used in the movie of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.)
I understand the impulse to fail better with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but the villain's motivation was one of the parts I already wasn't impressed with! Oh, well.
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Thank you! I'm really glad. It was good to be able to think about something.
I'm not a fan of horror, but you really made me want to see this one. I will have to see where it's available.
It appears to be streaming on Amazon, if that's convenient to you. (I just got loaned a copy.) You mentioned a while back that you were looking for horror without jump scares: if that's still the case, The Eternal should qualify. I don't think it has any of the jolting smash cuts associated with the style. The weirdness is all right there where you can see it happen.
Because they both have double As? That's all I can think of.
That makes as much sense to me as anything! Thanks.
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This sounds like a fun film. I'll look for it on Netflix.
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Thank you. They are the things about characters or actors that leap out at me: it just feels like describing them.
This sounds like a fun film. I'll look for it on Netflix.
Enjoy! I apologize in advance for any cover art you may encounter. This film deserved so much better.
(took out the quaaludes answer, as Swan Tower had already addressed it. Read the comments, self!)
Go away, Tiny Wittgenstein! People can observe the same things! It's all right!
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Why does this movie have such a low profile and such terrible marketing? What happened around its release? This interview from late '98/early '99 looks completely reasonable: "It's entirely in color, and it's almost entirely in focus."
[edit] At least Erich Kuersten of Acidemic loves it. And agrees with me about the unofficial Stoker!
(I can't tell from his review if I would enjoy Szamanka (1996), but I guess if we find a third example it's a genre.)
[edit edit] Thanks to Fangoria, I have discovered what happened to The Eternal. Short answer short: the studio blew up at just the wrong moment. The film was a hit at festivals (Jared Harris won an award at Sitges!), but the question of a theatrical release had not yet been decided and anyone who might have championed Almereyda at Trimark had been fired; it got dumped to video. What a shame. I wish it could get even a decent home re-release.
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I'm pretty pleased about that! I like knowing that my pattern recognition is not just apophenia. The Almereyda-Jarman link was also validating.
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There is at least one other bog body movie, but based on the few clips I've seen on Youtube, it's absolutely terrible. It's The Bog (2009) (also released under Legends of the Bog, also released under Assault of Darkness). On the other hand, its poster, while bad, is not quite as bad as the poster you linked! So I suppose there could be hope for it? It seems unlikely.
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Enjoy! I am happy to signal-boost. I just wish I had a less embarrassing home release to point to.
It's The Bog (2009) (also released under Legends of the Bog, also released under Assault of Darkness).
Oh, wow. That does not look good. Maybe I should have specified that more good movies should feature bog bodies.
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Did you watch it for the bog body?
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It definitely does have, as advertised, a bog body, and even a few interesting peat-digging-based locations, but it isn't a very good *movie*.
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Makes sense to me. I ended up re-reading this story.
We had low expectations going in, but hope springs eternal in the heart of the cheezy horror movie fan
I really need to get hold of From the Dark (2014), which
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I really liked it! I can see how it would disappoint viewers looking for traditional horror, but I really feel it should have found its niche with everyone else.
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Jared Harris was wonderful and heartbreaking in Mad Men.
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I truly cannot explain its obscurity. I don't think it would ever have been a box-office hit, but Nadja remains an arthouse darling and I would imagine the two movies appeal to the same kind of audience. I mean, they did for me. Now I wish the HFA would screen a print of The Eternal. I wonder where you could even get one.
Jared Harris was wonderful and heartbreaking in Mad Men.
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TV is a much greater time investment. I've been rewatching Dark Shadows and wishing it were possible for it to be more easily digestible for friends of mine who haven't seen it, because it is simultaneously awesome and a vast time sink.
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Can you write about it, so that I get at least some sense of it without the timesink?
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Curtis had intended to kill off Barnabas rather quickly, but soon it became apparent that was impossible. Frid, a Canadian stage actor who was literally on his way out the door to begin a teaching job when his agent called about the soap opera gig, had a hard time memorizing the vast swathes of dialogue he was given. He frequently stumbled over lines and mangled them. Somehow he managed to transmute this difficulty into the character of fish-out-of-water Barnabas, resurrected after nearly two hundred years chained in a coffin. Curtis had planned for Barnabas to be a typical creature of bloodlust, and Frid could certainly play cruelty to the hilt--but his Barnabas was conflicted and vulnerable in a way that vampires typically were not, in popular culture, for another few decades.
Another terrific cast member was John Karlen as Willie Loomis, a swaggering young thug turned into a tormented Renfield when he inadvertently frees Barnabas from his coffin. Then there's Grayson Hall as Dr. Julia Hoffman, who plays a cat-and-mouse game with an increasingly disconcerted Barnabas when she figures out his vampire secret; she wants to experiment on him to see if she can, via blood transfusions, make him human again. (This goes spectacularly wrong when he abruptly ages nearly two hundred years, courtesy of Dick Smith's stellar makeup job.) Plus there's Joan Bennett, and some fascinating character actors (Thayer David is a favorite of mine).
A little later, the show made its first foray into period drama as it traveled back in time for Barnabas' origin story in 1795, allowing much of the cast to play different characters. At this point Lara Parker joined the cast as the witch Angelique, in an electrifying performance...and I could go on all day, but I'll stop here.
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Please come back and write more later, then, because this is great. I don't know any of these actors besides Bennett (I had no idea!) and I love the idea of a Gothic soap that turned into a proto-Penny Dreadful phenomenon.
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Towards the end of the show's run, Dan Curtis made two feature films, House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows. They are visually beautiful but completely lacking in the charm that the TV show possesses. House of Dark Shadows, especially, is nihilistic in a sub-Hammer vein; Barnabas is a much more purely brutal character, and almost the entire cast gets vamped and/or killed off!
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That is a wonderful sentence.
I'm sorry neither of the films was any good. How does the remake/reboot movie fit in?
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