Dark Shadows (1966)
Dark Shadows is a 1966 drama series created by Dan Curtis. It stars Alexandra Isles, Joan Bennett and Kathryn Leigh Scott.
In the coastal town of Collinsport, Maine, the wealthy Collins family lives beside secrets no polite soap opera would touch. Dan Curtis's daytime serial began as straight melodrama, then let the ghosts in, and everything shifted once the reluctant vampire Barnabas Collins walked into the story. Werewolves, witches, warlocks, man-made monsters, time travel, and a parallel universe followed, all staged live on shoestring sets by a small company of actors who each played many parts. Strange, earnest, and genuinely eerie, it turned afternoon television into gothic theater and drew a devoted cult.
Quick answers
What is Dark Shadows about?
In the coastal town of Collinsport, Maine, the wealthy Collins family lives beside secrets no polite soap opera would touch. Dan Curtis's daytime serial began as straight melodrama, then let the ghosts in, and everything shifted once the reluctant vampire Barnabas Collins walked into the story. Werewolves, witches, warlocks, man-made monsters, time travel, and a parallel universe followed, all staged live on shoestring sets by a small company of actors who each played many parts. Strange, earnest, and genuinely eerie, it turned afternoon television into gothic theater and drew a devoted cult.
When was Dark Shadows released?
Dark Shadows was released on 27 June 1966.
How many episodes does Dark Shadows have?
Dark Shadows has 1225 episodes across 12 seasons.
Who made Dark Shadows?
Dark Shadows was created by Dan Curtis.
Where can I watch Dark Shadows?
Dark Shadows is available on Peacock, Peacock Premium, Prime Video, Amazon Freevee, Fandango at Home Free and Hoopla.
Where to watch Dark Shadows
Stream: Peacock, Peacock Premium, Prime Video
Watch free: Amazon Freevee, Fandango at Home Free, Hoopla, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, Tubi TV, Xumo Play
Rent: Google Play
Buy: Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango at Home, Google Play
Cast
- Alexandra Isles as Victoria Winters
- Joan Bennett as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard / Naomi Collins
- Kathryn Leigh Scott as Maggie Evans
- Nancy Barrett as Carolyn Stoddard
- Louis Edmonds as Roger Collins / Joshua Collins
- David Henesy as David Collins
- Joel Crothers as Joe Haskell
- Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins / Bramwell Collins
- Grayson Hall as Julia Hoffman
- Thayer David as Matthew Morgan/Ben Stokes/Dr. Timothy Stokes
- Jerry Lacy as Reverend Trask/Gregory Trask
- John Karlen as Willie Loomis
Similar series
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A few thoughts on Dark Shadows
Junji Ito's Tomie carries the same beautiful and cursed gothic dread onto the page. Arthur Miller's The Crucible channels the witch-panic and moral rot into stark American drama. For classic-monster atmosphere with modern teeth, Lee Cronin's The Mummy revives the Universal-horror tradition Dark Shadows loved. Each trades the sunlit world for something older and hungrier.
Vampires and the burden of living forever
Dark Shadows changed the game the day reluctant vampire Barnabas Collins arrived. These follow other creatures of the night, vampires caught between hunger and conscience, dragging centuries of memory and guilt through modern lives. Each treats immortality less as a power than a slow ache, romantic and cursed in equal measure.
Witches and the supernatural next door
Witchcraft ran through Dark Shadows alongside its vampires, curses shaping the Collins family's fate. These center witches, covens and old magic pressing into ordinary lives, from modern sisters hiding their powers to a town poisoning itself with fear, all sharing the show's sense that the uncanny lives quietly beside the everyday.
Small towns where something is deeply wrong
Collinsport hides its horrors behind a respectable New England face, and these do the same. Each drops a monster hunter or an ordinary person into a community with a rotten secret, where the neighbors are not what they seem and the dread creeps in from the edges of a quiet, familiar place.
Gothic horror in novels and manga
Dark Shadows played its ghosts, monsters and curses with earnest, eerie conviction. If you want that mood on the page, these deliver it, King's sinister institutions and haunted pasts alongside manga that make beauty and dread inseparable, each building the same slow, gothic unease the show wrung out of afternoon television.