House of Dark Shadows - Production

Production

Dark Shadows producer Dan Curtis began pitching the idea of a film based on his gothic soap opera hit sometime in 1968. The project was finally given the greenlight at MGM by company president James Aubrey in 1970. Curtis decided to use the original Barnabas storyline as the basis for the film, but with a modified conclusion.

The film was shot in six weeks for a budget of $750,000. Principal shooting took place at several historic locations, including the Lyndhurst Estate in Tarrytown, New York, where the production had to work around the scheduled public tours of the house. Additional footage was shot at nearby Sleepy Hollow Cemetery: parts of the locals appeared on the Dark Shadows series as well. Some interior scenes were shot at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion in Norwalk, Connecticut. Along with the original cast, Dan Curtis added other actors: he added to the cast Terry Crawford, Jerry Lacy, and Michael Stroka, who did the Dark Shadows 1890s segments, Don Briscoe, who played cursed twins Chris and Tom Jennings, Dennis Patrick, who played Paul Stoddard and Jason McGuire, and George DiCenzo, who did more behind-the-scenes work on the last two years of the show.

Unrestricted by TV's censors, the film is far more graphically violent than its television counterpart, with dripping vampire bites and bloody deaths. The film was released at the height of the TV show's popularity to great commercial success.

Dark Shadows producer Dan Curtis's original idea had been to edit together footage from the original TV series into a feature-length film, an idea which was quickly abandoned. The TV series was still in production while the film was being made. Some characters had to be temporarily written out of the show so that the actors would be available to appear in the movie. Barnabas, for example, was trapped in his coffin on the TV show by a failed writer who wanted to use the vampire's life story as the basis for a novel.

The preview version of the film included a scene where young David Collins pretends to hang himself. It was removed because there were concerns some children might "try this at home". No copies of this footage are known to exist. Another scene that was shown in some theaters has Jeff testing out the crossbow before pursuing Barnabas.

A paperback novelization of the film by Marilyn Ross (who had written a series of novels based on the TV show) was published in October 1970. The novel is based on the original script, and contains some scenes which were either cut from the movie, or were never filmed.