House of Dark Shadows
"Dark Shadows," as almost everybody knows, was a short-lived though wildly successful cult gothic television soap opera that aired in the late sixties, getting canceled comfortably one year before this feature film was made. It was the immensely long and rambling saga of the Collins family, who were haunted by an endless variety of gothic horror tropes, from the iconic vampire Barnabas (played so excellently by the quintessential bloodsucker Jonathan Frid) to the green-skinned Frankensteinian Adam (Robert Rodan); to werewolves, ghosts, demons, witches, and what-have-you. "Shadows" danced all the gothic, Lovecraftian, Stokerian, and Poesque skeletons out of the closet, played with them awhile, got bored, and then put them back before moving on to a new story arc. Stephen King, in the pages of his horror monograph Danse Macabre, called it a "Mad Hatter's tea party." He was not far off.