Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

His celebrity, unfortunately, was every bit as lasting as Vaughan Meader's (and if you don't remember Vaughan Meader, send me a stamped, self-addressed postcard and I will enlighten you).

One turned in to Dark Shadows every day, convinced that things could become no more lunatic . . . and yet somehow they did. At one point the entire cast of characters was transported back into the seventeenth century for a six -week turn in fancy dress. Barnabas had a cousin who was a werewolf. Another cousin was a combination witch-succubus. Other soap operas have always, of course, practiced their own bemusing forms of madness; my own favorite has always been the Kid Trick. The way the Kid Trick works is this: one of the characters on a soap opera will have a baby in March. By July it will be two; in November it will be six; the following February it will be lying in the hospital, comatose, after being hit by a car while returning home from the sixth, grade; and by the March following its birth, the child will be eighteen and ready to begin really joining in the fun by getting the girl next door pregnant, or turning suicidal, or possibly by announcing to his horrified parents that he's a homosexual. The Kid Trick is worthy of a Robert Sheckley alternate-world story, but at least the characters on most soap operas stay dead once their life-support machinery is turned off (following which there will be a four-month trial with the turner-offer in the dock for mercy killing). The actors and actresses who "died" picked up their final checks and went job hunting again. Not so on Dark Shadows . The dead simply came back as ghosts. It was better than the Kid Trick.

Dan Curtis went on to make two theatrical films based on the Dark Shadows plot and using its cast of undead characters-such a jump from TV to the movies is not unheard-of ( The Lone Ranger is a case where it also happened), but it's rare, and the films, while not great, were certainly viewable. They were done with style, wit, and all those buckets of gore Curtis couldn't use on TV. They were also made with tremendous energy . . . a trait which helped to make The Night Stalker film the highest-rated made-for-TV movie ever telecast up until that time. (It has since been surpassed in the ratings eight or nine times, and one of the films that has outpointed it was the pilot film for-choke!- The Love Boat .) Curtis himself is a remarkable, almost hypnotic man, friendly in a brusque, almost abrasive way, apt to hog the credit for his enterprises, but in such an engaging way that nobody really seems to mind. A throwback to an older and perhaps tougher breed of Hollywood filmmakers, Curtis has never had any noticable problems in deciding where to plant his feet. If he likes you, he stands up for you.