First, I need to point out that I co-wrote a book on Dark Shadows called the Dark Shadows Companion. I’m a first-generation fan. I’m one of those who ran home from school to see it. I am the audience that Depp and Burton will need to reach to reboot the franchise. I have bad news for them. They just spit in the face of a big portion of the audience. I ran home from school, my friends, and I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the triangle Barnabas/Josette/Angelique storyline that Depp-Burton focused on.

The whole show, for me, was about Julia and Barnabas. It was bad enough that the film turns Julia into an alcoholic (something she NEVER was on the series), but they show her smoking a cigarette. Yes, given what Grayson died of, I find this an incredibly bad creative choice, but I suppose that’s subjective nitpicking. HBC watched enough episodes to pick up a couple of her mannerisms, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Julia’s wardrobe is Mode o’Day if their fashion buyer was Bozo the Clown.

What they did was turn Barnabas into her murderer and utterly destroy their relationship as far as their franchise is concerned. Dark Shadows, at its worst, was about all the women obsessing on the vampire. From the end of the film and its stupid Godzilla ending, it’s clear they’re wanting to bring Julia back as a vampire to be the new villain, something she was for a brief time on the series.

Burton and Depp may as well burn the script for that one. They’ve already lost most of the Julia fans. I know they lost me. Admittedly, they barely had my interest to begin with, but yeesh …

As an independent film, I found it weird as hell. Visually, it wasn’t Collinsport for me. It was sort of Disneyland Collinsport. Collinwood itself looked like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. The woodlands looked like England, not Maine, which seemed as out-of-place as Beverly Hills did when Curtis used it for Collinwood in the 1991 series. The few bits I liked (Barnabas crashing on the rocks but not dying) were quickly overtaken by a lot more bits I just hated.

I gave it a 4 over at IMDB. I’m not thinking I was too generous.

Sorry, Johnny. You killed the franchise all over again for a lot of us.

I can’t believe the number of times this page has been accessed by people seeking “melody clark banned” — I KNOW I don’t have that many relatives. I’m not the suicide.com lady, I’m not the oceanographic scientist, I’m not the visual artist, I’m the gimpy writer in Los Angeles County. I don’t matter to anyone but my family and friends, and a handful of readers. There are far more important things to search for.

Some of my newer writer friends are feeling down because of the lack of sales for certain titles, versus other people and their four and five-star #1 books. It’s important to remember this — the more books you write, the more readers will find you, the more readers will like your books, and thus the more regular readers you’ll have. That said, Mark Twain never had a bestseller. William Shakespeare never made it to the NY Times Top Ten. Few readers read anything Emily Dickinson wrote in her lifetime. The only reader that counts is the one that “gets” what you’re writing. And to quote Cyril Connelly, better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. Now cheer up — you know who you are.

Yes, I’m the Melody Clark who co-wrote (along with Kathleen Resch and Marcy Robin) The Dark Shadows Companion, which was edited and published by Kathryn Leigh Scott, with forewords by Jonathan Frid, Lara Parker, Matt Hall and a cast of thousands. It’s still available on Pomegranate Press, Ltd.

Secondly, here is a mini-defense of the original TV horror soap Dark Shadows …

It was shot in real-time. In other words, no one could stop tape, outside Joan Bennett and (much later) Jonathan Frid. Whatever goofs happened, however the line came out, that’s how it was sent across the airwaves. No actor EVER got a second take. In the words of Robert Rodan, who played Adam, “If the stagehand stumbling in the background still had his pants up, they kept filming” — and he wasn’t just joking. On DS episodes, you can see multiple instances of stagehands and boom mikes, along with sets collapsing, firetrucks wailing past, people snoring, people sneezing, eyelashes dropping off, earrings being flung across the room, people reading the wrong lines off the prompter, Jonathan Frid walking with his laundry in front of the camera as it capture the end shot, and almost everything else that could possibly go wrong on TV. Dark Shadows was shot on a minuscule budget. The amount the actors made would barely qualify as middle class earnings these days, even with cost of living adjustments.

The scripts were written rapidly. The actors had to learn their lines nightly. They often forgot them. They were all directed WAY over the top. And at the end of the day, they’d all meet up at places, toss back a beer and say, “Wow, thank god no one is ever going to see THAT again!”

Little did they know.

You know what’s very sad, I blog about my episode of mental illness (which was a long time ago, relatively mild and very short-lived) and now a few usually chummy friends are keeping their distance from me or acting strangely toward me. I was warned by several people this would happen. I thought surely not my friends! But, sadly, many people will use others’ mental illness issues to shroud their own misdeeds. Anyway, if you don’t know someone who has had a problem with depression, bipolar or an addiction issue, I’d be very surprised. I had thought we had all moved past most of these issues, at least most of my friends had. If you feel I am somehow now an unstable presence in your life (as if), feel free to defriend me. I won’t take it personally. And frankly, you’re a friend I can do without. My special thanks to people like Margaret, Tami, Annie, John, Susan and all the others who’ve treated me just like always.

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…. when writing feels like taking dictation. And then there are the times when you can’t get a character to open his yap if you bribed him. Obviously, he’s not fully realized enough. Same old, same old.

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My Dinner with Barnabas … And Company

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The sad little urchin has nobody “liking” her at this point … this is where I’ll be building up info for my FB-based readers.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Melody-Clark/218759244830187

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Check out the advance reviews!

“Jumlin’s Spawn” is the story of three people banding together to fight an old Native American vampire myth come to life. While the horrific but fascinating plot unfolds, a love story between three old friends develops slowly and pleasantly. The author, Melody Clark, does a lovely job of painting a desolate landscape and creating an eerie atmosphere where darkness, fear and eroticism entwine. Her well-defined characters will stick with you even after the last page.”

Wendy Rathbone, author of Dreams of Decadence Presents, a collection of erotic vampire stories and poems.

Set in the Black Hills, this story by Melody Clark provides equally intense action and passion, as well as a likeable, complex and somewhat sceptical trio of heroes are pitted against ancient evil. Dead humans, dead cattle, all drained of blood; an old Lakota legend come to life; and two men and a woman, joined by ties of friendship, love and jealousy, looking to return sacred artefacts to the caves from which they were stolen. But the most dangerous things are those you cannot believe exist and what waits in the Angel Caves is horror beyond belief. The richness of Melody Clark’s writing fully complements the richness of setting and characters, as the mood swings between curiosity and disbelief, terror and passion.

Writer Lilian Shepherd/EPS

Check it out here!
http://www.evernightpublishing.com/jumlins-spawn-by-melody-clark/

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