[Dark Shadows] Episode 645: Spirited Away

[Ubiquitous]

https://darkshadowseveryday.com/2015/05/10/episode-645/

“We’ll go downstairs, and be ourselves again.”

Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw is one of Dark
Shadows creator Dan Curtis’ favorite stories. Dan used story
elements from the book twice on Dark Shadows, and then he made a
TV-movie adaptation in 1974.

It makes sense that Dan was fascinated with this story, because The
Turn of the Screw is about one of the major themes of Dan’s career,
namely how tedious and irritating governesses can be.

Here’s what Dan said about The Turn of the Screw:

A good deal of it went into Dark Shadows. I first saw it
as The Innocents as a play in some regional theatre in New
Jersey, and it scared the hell out of me. I was always
fascinated by it. Right after I saw the play, I read James’
Turn of the Screw and was even more fascinated by it.

Then, I saw Jack Clayton’s The Innocents [the 1961 film
adaptation], which I thought was absolutely brilliant, and
I was still in love with the story. I thought if I ever
got the chance, I would love to do my own version of it.

So that’s where we are now, kicking off the Dark Shadows version.
David and Amy have fallen under the influence of Quentin Collins, a
19th-century ancestor who’s communicating with the children through
a haunted telephone. The Collins family held a seance, and a
mysterious spirit named Magda has been issuing cryptic warnings
through dreams and mirror writing. David and Amy have followed the
sound of spooky gramophone music to a storage room in the abandoned
west wing of Collinwood, and now they’re breaking through a wall
with a crowbar to find the room where Quentin died.

The interesting thing about this storyline, considered as a daytime
television adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, is that absolutely
none of that has anything to do with the book. Seriously, the only
thing that matches up with the book in any way is that there’s a
boy, a girl and two ghosts. Everything else is 100% Dark Shadows,
and 0% Henry James.

Here’s how the story goes in the book.

A woman who we never manage to learn the name of takes a job as the
governess for two children — eight-year-old Flora, and ten-year-old
Miles. She instantly and worryingly falls head over heels for them,
because of their radiant, angelic beauty and their indescribable air
of knowing nothing in the world but love.

But Miles has just been expelled from school, for reasons that are
never made clear. When the governess learns this, she asks the cook
the crucial question: “Is he really BAD?” The cook says absolutely
not, just look at how charming and pure they are, and the defense
rests. The governess is satisfied, and decides it must be the
school’s fault.

That’s the kind of person we’re dealing with here. In her world,
you’re either the most amazing creature that ever walked the earth,
or you are irretrievably BAD, and that’s all there is. This is going
to lead to trouble down the line.

After a while, the governess starts to see strange figures looking
through the windows. When she describes her visions to the cook, she
learns about two former staff members — Peter Quint, the master’s
valet, and Miss Jessel, the children’s previous governess — who both
died of unknown causes in the recent past.

Apparently Quint and Miss Jessel had some kind of connection, but we
never learn any details. The cook indicates that they were BAD, and
that’s enough. The governess is on high alert.

And that’s kind of the whole story, actually. The governess sees the
ghosts several more times, usually when the children are around. The
ghosts don’t do anything but look at the children, and the children
never indicate that they’re aware of the ghosts in any way.

Somehow, in the governess’ head, this means that the children are
being mind-controlled by demons. She’s convinced that the children
are being corrupted — are _already_ corrupted — and it is her job to
battle with the spirits for her charges’ souls. She accomplishes
this by talking to the cook for page after page. She never mentions
any of this to the children, who go on with their lives as usual,
because everything is actually fine.

There are only two moments in the story when one of the children
does something that you could possibly classify as BAD.

The first one happens in chapter ten, and it goes like this: Miles
gets out of bed in the middle of the night, walks outside, and
stands perfectly still on the front lawn. That’s it, that’s the
whole incident.

Continuing this dastardly crime wave, we find out in chapter
twenty-one that Miles stole a letter that the governess was planning
to send to his uncle.

That is the entire extent of the children’s reign of terror. The
rest of the book is just the governess being high-strung.

The best moment of the book is when the governess is outside with
Flora and the cook, and the governess sees the ghost of Miss Jessel
nearby. She shouts, “She’s there, she’s there!” and everybody turns
towards her, and says, what the hell are you talking about?

Obviously, the fact that Flora doesn’t register that a specter is
nearby means that she is entirely possessed by the devil. The
governess screams at her, “She’s there, you little unhappy thing —
there, there, THERE, and you see her as well as you see me!”

Here’s how the governess describes Flora’s enitrely reasonable
response:

She was literally, she was hideously, hard; she had turned
common and almost ugly. “I don’t know what you mean. I see
nobody. I see nothing. I never HAVE. I think you’re cruel.
I don’t like you!”

And then the little girl hugs the cook, and sobs, “Take me away,
take me away — oh take me away from HER!”

The cook does, and then the governess falls on her face and sobs
untl sunset. It’s pretty great.

The governess gets increasingly — well, I’d say “hysterical,” but
that isn’t strong enough; she goes beyond hysteria to Tea Party
chemtrails-truther level paranoia.

Miles tells the governess that he’s tired of her nonsense and he
wants to go back to school, which means that he belongs to THEM, and
the situation is even worse than we thought.

The governess tells the cook to take Flora and drive away. The
governess is left in the house with Miles for about four hours
before he’s in her arms, and she’s shouting, and all of a sudden
he’s dead, I wonder how that happened. End of book. The police
investigation and jail time are left to the reader’s imagination.

Much of the literary criticism about The Turn of the Screw is a
battle between two camps, the apparitionists and the non-
apparitionists.

The apparitionists say that the ghosts are real, while the non-
apparitionists interpret the book correctly, as the story of a
deeply mentally unbalanced governess who has hallucinations and
kills a ten-year-old. People in academia have seriously been arguing
about this since 1934.

So I would say that The Turn of the Screw is a legitimately scary
book, but only for the writers of Dark Shadows, who have to take
this 117-page lunatic rant and turn it into a soap opera storyline.

Because this, this is just… we can’t do anything with this.

If they’d actually tried to do an adaptation of The Turn of the
Screw on Dark Shadows, it would have gone like this: Amy comes to
live at Collinwood. Vicki sees Quentin standing outside the window.
She talks to Mrs. Johnson about it. Then she sees Beth standing
nearby while Amy is playing. More conversations with Mrs. Johnson.
And then I guess after a while Vicki kills David, and we move on to
doing The Wings of a Dove or The Bostonians, or whatever tedious
Henry James book they feel like tackling next.

This storyline is supposed to last us from mid-December through the
end of February. A straight adaptation wouldn’t last more than a
week, even going at Sproat speed. It’s just not going to happen.

Besides, they don’t even have a ghost-busting governess right now.
The current governess is openly and enthusiastically pro-ghost; she
even married one.

So they keep Vicki out of it, and they turn Quint into Quentin, and
rather than a recent employee, he’s a 19th-century ancestor. They
establish a backstory that involves Liz and Roger’s father, and they
add a curse, a cradle, a seance, a hit song, and that classic Dark
Shadows crowd-pleaser, a skeleton with a wig.

Once again, we see the basic Dark Shadows production dynamic in
action. Dan has a great idea, he tells the writers to go do it, the
writers roll their eyes, and then they write something crazy. And
somehow, it works. It must be magic; that’s the only way to explain
it.

Monday: The Turning.


Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:

Amy says, “I wish it wasn’t so musty in here. I can hardly breathe.”
Then someone in the studio coughs.

Liz tells Barnabas, “Well, you always know, you know how fascinated
David’s always been with this house.”

Amy tells David that they should go downstairs. David asks why, and
Amy says, “Nobody knows who we are.”

Amy runs to Barnabas for a hug, saying, “It’s so good to see you
again!” — but this is the first time we’ve heard that they know each
other. Barnabas says that it’s been several weeks since he’s seen
her, and he thought she was still at Windcliff. It’s not really a
blooper, because it’s not impossible that Barnabas met and
befriended Amy at Windcliff sometime when we weren’t looking, but
it’s very odd. Did he feel guilty about driving a stake through
Amy’s brother’s heart?

The production credits are crooked again today.


Footnotes:

The Dan Curtis quote at the top is from Jeff Thompson’s The
Television Horrors of Dan Curtis.

Also, if you find the idea of a decades-long scholarly battle
between the apparitionists and the non-apparitionists amusing, then
there’s an excellent survey of it on www.turnofthescrew.com.
Seriously, real website.

[Bill Steele]

Post by Ubiquitous
https://darkshadowseveryday.com/2015/05/10/episode-645/
“We’ll go downstairs, and be ourselves again.”
Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw is one of Dark
Shadows creator Dan Curtis’ favorite stories. Dan used story
elements from the book twice on Dark Shadows, and then he made a
TV-movie adaptation in 1974.
It makes sense that Dan was fascinated with this story, because The
Turn of the Screw is about one of the major themes of Dan’s career,
namely how tedious and irritating governesses can be.
A good deal of it went into Dark Shadows. I first saw it
as The Innocents as a play in some regional theatre in New
Jersey, and it scared the hell out of me. I was always
fascinated by it. Right after I saw the play, I read James’
Turn of the Screw and was even more fascinated by it.
Then, I saw Jack Clayton’s The Innocents [the 1961 film
adaptation], which I thought was absolutely brilliant, and
I was still in love with the story. I thought if I ever
got the chance, I would love to do my own version of it.
So that’s where we are now, kicking off the Dark Shadows version.
David and Amy have fallen under the influence of Quentin Collins, a
19th-century ancestor who’s communicating with the children through
a haunted telephone. The Collins family held a seance, and a
mysterious spirit named Magda has been issuing cryptic warnings
through dreams and mirror writing. David and Amy have followed the
sound of spooky gramophone music to a storage room in the abandoned
west wing of Collinwood, and now they’re breaking through a wall
with a crowbar to find the room where Quentin died.
The interesting thing about this storyline, considered as a daytime
television adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, is that absolutely
none of that has anything to do with the book. Seriously, the only
thing that matches up with the book in any way is that there’s a
boy, a girl and two ghosts. Everything else is 100% Dark Shadows,
and 0% Henry James.
Here’s how the story goes in the book.
A woman who we never manage to learn the name of takes a job as the
governess for two children — eight-year-old Flora, and ten-year-old
Miles. She instantly and worryingly falls head over heels for them,
because of their radiant, angelic beauty and their indescribable air
of knowing nothing in the world but love.
But Miles has just been expelled from school, for reasons that are
never made clear. When the governess learns this, she asks the cook
the crucial question: “Is he really BAD?” The cook says absolutely
not, just look at how charming and pure they are, and the defense
rests. The governess is satisfied, and decides it must be the
school’s fault.
That’s the kind of person we’re dealing with here. In her world,
you’re either the most amazing creature that ever walked the earth,
or you are irretrievably BAD, and that’s all there is. This is going
to lead to trouble down the line.
After a while, the governess starts to see strange figures looking
through the windows. When she describes her visions to the cook, she
learns about two former staff members — Peter Quint, the master’s
valet, and Miss Jessel, the children’s previous governess — who both
died of unknown causes in the recent past.
Apparently Quint and Miss Jessel had some kind of connection, but we
never learn any details. The cook indicates that they were BAD, and
that’s enough. The governess is on high alert.
And that’s kind of the whole story, actually. The governess sees the
ghosts several more times, usually when the children are around. The
ghosts don’t do anything but look at the children, and the children
never indicate that they’re aware of the ghosts in any way.
Somehow, in the governess’ head, this means that the children are
being mind-controlled by demons. She’s convinced that the children
are being corrupted — are _already_ corrupted — and it is her job to
battle with the spirits for her charges’ souls. She accomplishes
this by talking to the cook for page after page. She never mentions
any of this to the children, who go on with their lives as usual,
because everything is actually fine.
There are only two moments in the story when one of the children
does something that you could possibly classify as BAD.
The first one happens in chapter ten, and it goes like this: Miles
gets out of bed in the middle of the night, walks outside, and
stands perfectly still on the front lawn. That’s it, that’s the
whole incident.
Continuing this dastardly crime wave, we find out in chapter
twenty-one that Miles stole a letter that the governess was planning
to send to his uncle.
That is the entire extent of the children’s reign of terror. The
rest of the book is just the governess being high-strung.
The best moment of the book is when the governess is outside with
Flora and the cook, and the governess sees the ghost of Miss Jessel
nearby. She shouts, “She’s there, she’s there!” and everybody turns
towards her, and says, what the hell are you talking about?
Obviously, the fact that Flora doesn’t register that a specter is
nearby means that she is entirely possessed by the devil. The
governess screams at her, “She’s there, you little unhappy thing —
there, there, THERE, and you see her as well as you see me!”
Here’s how the governess describes Flora’s enitrely reasonable
She was literally, she was hideously, hard; she had turned
common and almost ugly. “I don’t know what you mean. I see
nobody. I see nothing. I never HAVE. I think you’re cruel.
I don’t like you!”
And then the little girl hugs the cook, and sobs, “Take me away,
take me away — oh take me away from HER!”
The cook does, and then the governess falls on her face and sobs
untl sunset. It’s pretty great.
The governess gets increasingly — well, I’d say “hysterical,” but
that isn’t strong enough; she goes beyond hysteria to Tea Party
chemtrails-truther level paranoia.
Miles tells the governess that he’s tired of her nonsense and he
wants to go back to school, which means that he belongs to THEM, and
the situation is even worse than we thought.
The governess tells the cook to take Flora and drive away. The
governess is left in the house with Miles for about four hours
before he’s in her arms, and she’s shouting, and all of a sudden
he’s dead, I wonder how that happened. End of book. The police
investigation and jail time are left to the reader’s imagination.
Much of the literary criticism about The Turn of the Screw is a
battle between two camps, the apparitionists and the non-
apparitionists.
The apparitionists say that the ghosts are real, while the non-
apparitionists interpret the book correctly, as the story of a
deeply mentally unbalanced governess who has hallucinations and
kills a ten-year-old. People in academia have seriously been arguing
about this since 1934.
So I would say that The Turn of the Screw is a legitimately scary
book, but only for the writers of Dark Shadows, who have to take
this 117-page lunatic rant and turn it into a soap opera storyline.
Because this, this is just… we can’t do anything with this.
If they’d actually tried to do an adaptation of The Turn of the
Screw on Dark Shadows, it would have gone like this: Amy comes to
live at Collinwood. Vicki sees Quentin standing outside the window.
She talks to Mrs. Johnson about it. Then she sees Beth standing
nearby while Amy is playing. More conversations with Mrs. Johnson.
And then I guess after a while Vicki kills David, and we move on to
doing The Wings of a Dove or The Bostonians, or whatever tedious
Henry James book they feel like tackling next.
This storyline is supposed to last us from mid-December through the
end of February. A straight adaptation wouldn’t last more than a
week, even going at Sproat speed. It’s just not going to happen.
Besides, they don’t even have a ghost-busting governess right now.
The current governess is openly and enthusiastically pro-ghost; she
even married one.
So they keep Vicki out of it, and they turn Quint into Quentin, and
rather than a recent employee, he’s a 19th-century ancestor. They
establish a backstory that involves Liz and Roger’s father, and they
add a curse, a cradle, a seance, a hit song, and that classic Dark
Shadows crowd-pleaser, a skeleton with a wig.
Once again, we see the basic Dark Shadows production dynamic in
action. Dan has a great idea, he tells the writers to go do it, the
writers roll their eyes, and then they write something crazy. And
somehow, it works. It must be magic; that’s the only way to explain
it.
Monday: The Turning.
Amy says, “I wish it wasn’t so musty in here. I can hardly breathe.”
Then someone in the studio coughs.
Liz tells Barnabas, “Well, you always know, you know how fascinated
David’s always been with this house.”
Amy tells David that they should go downstairs. David asks why, and
Amy says, “Nobody knows who we are.”
Amy runs to Barnabas for a hug, saying, “It’s so good to see you
again!” — but this is the first time we’ve heard that they know each
other. Barnabas says that it’s been several weeks since he’s seen
her, and he thought she was still at Windcliff. It’s not really a
blooper, because it’s not impossible that Barnabas met and
befriended Amy at Windcliff sometime when we weren’t looking, but
it’s very odd. Did he feel guilty about driving a stake through
Amy’s brother’s heart?
The production credits are crooked again today.
The Dan Curtis quote at the top is from Jeff Thompson’s The
Television Horrors of Dan Curtis.
Also, if you find the idea of a decades-long scholarly battle
between the apparitionists and the non-apparitionists amusing, then
there’s an excellent survey of it on www.turnofthescrew.com.
Seriously, real website.

There was a movie version in which the children were actually possessed
by the ghosts -- among other things, acting out their love affair. That
would certainly be apparitionist...and a bit perverted.