Scream to Screen: Digging Up The Gay Origins Of Dark Shadows

From QUEERTY

Tim Burton’s re-imagining of the 1960s spooky soap Dark Shadows swoops into theaters tomorrow and as an old-school fan of the original, I’m not convinced he’s gotten the tone right: There’s something about Johnny Depp’s Barnabas Collins that feels like a vampire version of Austin Powers —and an insult to the source material.

Dark Shadows was a monument to campy goth melodrama—and that’s where the humor should come from: The flubbed lines, the boom mics and crew members showing up in shots, sets falling apart during deadly-serious scenes—not stale fish-out-of-water jokes. That unintentional campiness was a huge part of what drew me to DS when I watched it on the Sci-Fi Channel back when I was a kid (and it was still called the Sci-Fi Channel).

Revisiting the show, though, I wonder if it was just Dark Shadows‘ ridiculous grandiosity that sucked me—in was it the preponderance of homos on set? On a fan forum, someone once posted that it’d easier to list the Dark Shadows actors who weren’t gay rather than those that were. That’s an exaggeration, but there were plenty of gay ghouls haunting Collinwood. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Full story here: http://www.queerty.com/scream-to-screen-digging-up-the-gay-origins-of-dark-shadows-20120510/#ixzz1utdQPw4q