“It’s definitely going to be Gothic,” he offers to Blog of Dark Shadows.com. “I think that Sleepy Hollow is going to be your best comparison.”
Pierson, is extremely hopeful about the new version, believing that this specific combination of actor and director will result in a Dark Shadows for the 21st century. “I think that Johnny is such a charismatic and creative guy,” Pierson enthuses, “and very romantic for the women, and I think he’ll find a way to infuse the character with not only the mystery, but the romance as well. We’ve never seen him play a creature of the night who’s looking for redemption and salvation and love.”
That creature of the night, of course, is vampire Barnabas Collins, turned in the late 1700s and ultimately chained in a coffin by his father, who was unable to destroy him. Flash forward a couple of centuries, and fortune-seeking handyman Willie Loomis, an employee at the family estate of Collinwood in the fictional Collinsport, Maine, stumbles upon that coffin, opening it in the expectation of treasure. What he gets, instead, is a resurrected Barnabas Collins, who, now free, attempts to pass himself off to the rest of the Collins family as a cousin from England while secretly feeding on victims.
It’s the premise that introduced the character (as played by actor Jonathan Frid) in the 1966-71 soap opera created by the late Curtis, the 1970 feature film House of Dark Shadows, the 1991 prime time version that featured Ben Cross as Barnabas, and the 2004 WB pilot starring Alec Newman in the role. An additional point that needs to be emphasized is that long before Angel or Edward Cullen, Barnabas was the first reluctant and repentant vampire. He didn’t start off that way, but as Dark Shadows evolved and the character’s popularity grew, the decision was made to make him sympathetic — an approach to the undead that has been taken and evolved ever since.
For the rest of this interview, please click on the image below.
ComicBookMovie.com, and/or the user who contributed this post, may earn commissions or revenue through clicks or purchases made through any third-party links contained within the content above.