09-08-2008, 07:59 AM
paigenumber Wrote:I've never read any Marilyn Ross but I saw that they made a TV series called Dark Shadows based on one of his books, and the cover (showing the TV adaptation) looked so ridiculous I was not tempted to even begin reading it.
Actually it was the other way around. Dark Shadows was an American TV series 1966-1971. It was a daily serial which began as a straight gothic suspense, i.e. nothing overtly supernatural. By the end of the first year it had turned into a full blown supernatural/horror/occult gothic. By the end of it's five year run it had cribbed plot lines from Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Turn of the Screw, the Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as long-term time travel episodes, once to 1795, and later spent over a year of episodes in 1897. The original series suffers from poor dialogue, shoddy acting, malfunctioning special effects...all adding up to what we in the U.S. call "cheesy". Ridiculous as it seems now (the entire run of 1225 episodes is available on US DVD) the show was wildly popular, a forerunner of the modern vampire-romance motif (Anne Rice, Buffy, Twilight, etc), and certainly was in part responsible for the paperback gothic romance boom of that era.
The Marilyn Ross paperbacks were based (loosely) on the TV series. They remind me more of Scooby Doo episodes where the phantom haunting the west wing always turned out to be a disgruntled guest character in a mask. They are, as you might suspect, bottom of the barrel.
The show was revived for a half season in 1991 (also available on US DVD) and is a much more lushly romantic take on the story.
Johnny Depp purchased the rights to film a cinema version of Dark Shadows in 2007. There are rumours all over the Dark Shadows fansites, but to date a director has not been set.