With its missed lines and falling tombstones, 'Dark Shadows' was sometimes inadvertently funny, but what made the show work was the fact that the actors and the writers took it all very seriously.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
'Dark Shadows' was the spark that lit the fire of my childhood imagination. It wasn't polished; it wasn't perfect. But it gave us characters with real personalities and complicated motivations.
My job on 'Dark Shadows' was to make it fun and funny, first and foremost. It can still be dark and it can still even be gory and gothic at times, but it also needed to be fun and it needed to be an experience that people would enjoy having.
There's such a fan base for 'Dark Shadows'. I remember watching the show as a kid, but I wasn't an ardent fan. I didn't run home from school to watch it.
The movie wasn't really derived from Dark Shadows - they developed a whole new script for that particular one.
One of the reasons I think Dark Shadows still runs is that it's dependent on nothing else other than a story.
'Shadows' wasn't so difficult to get made.
The way the British 'Office' got away with being so dark was that it only had 13 episodes. There are realistic elements that people obviously enjoy, but they don't necessarily want to relive the trials and tribulations of their average work day.
We're kind of the comic relief of this movie because most of the stories are very dark. And that's why these plays were so great, because it's such a dark, dark universe that it becomes funny because it's just too pathetic.
My cameraman and I devised a method, which we started using from my second film, which applies mainly to day scenes shot in the studio, where we used bounced light instead of direct light. We agreed with this thing of four or five shadows following the actors is dreadful.
I think on 'Third Watch' that I was the comic relief on a lot of that. I mean, I definitely had dark moments, but people tended to think he was funny even if the character himself wasn't having a fun time.