House of Dark Shadows (1970)
(On Cable TV, October 2022) The problem with spin-off films is that they can feel misguided if you’re coming to them absent the context. House of Dark Shadows, clearly, is a spinoff of the Dark Shadows TV soap opera, made to capitalize on the notoriety of the show and its characters. Stumble upon it cold sometime in the twenty-first century and… why am I supposed to care? Am I supposed to cheer for the vampire? And why does this feel like a bland take on every single vampire cliché? The point of the film was to let loose and tell a story that could not be told on TV with its content restrictions. But in doing so, House of Dark Shadows end up with a very, very, very tired story about a centuries-old vampire seeing his long-lost love reborn in modern times and pursuing a way to be with her. The kind of plot that’s more familiarly done as spoof than straight-faced horror these days. We cannot watch House of Dark Shadows in the same way audiences watched it then, seeing a popular TV character unleashed and working within a horror film setting. To us, Jonathan Frid is one weird pick as a lead actor, but to them he was the hotness crossing over from TV. It probably takes a strong affection for the 1960s soap series to fully appreciate House of Dark Shadows—absent that, it feels like a rehashed story, not particularly well-executed on a small budget.