39: Halloween
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"Every Monday, John and Thacks and Erica get together at John's apartment to watch dark shadows." "You know, dark shadows?" "Surely, you've heard of it." "It was the most popular thing in the whole world, at one point." "No, it was." John used to watch four or five hours of dark shadows every day, back in January when he was unemployed. Now he only watches four hours a week, and only with his friends, and there no way his hard core about it is when he used to watch with his friend, Catherine. "When Catherine was here, she insisted that we watch it, and it would be hard to get her to stop, actually. I mean, honestly, it would, it would be like 12 midnight, and she'd go, "Please, one more, one more episode." And I'm like, "You know, I've got to get it for work tomorrow." She's like, "Please, just one more, you know, it should be begging, you know, it got really sad." "Dark shadows is slow, the sets are cheap, the writing is bad, the acting is still dead." It's a gothic horror soap opera produced five days a week from 1966 to '71, and of course it is not scary. It is never scary. Though when John was a kid, he was so scared of dark shadows, he'd get scared of the actress's lipstick. Even the lipstick could do it. Welcome to WBZChicago, it's This American Life, and it is the special Halloween edition of our program. Today, we bring you stories of things that are supposed to be scary, but are not. Act one, dark shadows, act two, scientist in a haunted house, act three, vampire girl, act four, discovering evil, act five, gang girl, and act six, screams. Those are your screams. Those are your screams as left on our voicemail. I'm your ghost, I mean host, I regret it, stay with us. What I learned at John's apartment about dark shadows is that the main point of it, the main pleasure of it, is watching things mess up. It's like watching car races for the car crashes, you know, if the car crashes came, every ten minutes nobody got hurt. This American Life producer Nancy Updak and I were in John's apartment for, I don't know, ten minutes when a werewolf exited a scene and through the open door, we could all witness this figure, not a shadowy, mysterious figure from the year 1896, but instead. Wait, did you see the prop guy, did you see the prop guy, wait, here look. Oh yeah, a prop guy. There's a lot of rewinding and replaying this video, which John taped off the sci-fi channel. John and Thax and Erica have watched actors forget lines, they've seen scripts left on beds, they've seen props fall over and smash, periodically there's an offstage cough and what Thax describes as the sound of a giant zipper, mysterious and explicable and not part of any story. When the vampire Barnabas Collins enters the foyer of Collinswood Manor, he closes the door behind him and a moment later it swings open again. Oh there goes the door. There's something wrong with the lock on it and it's always swinging open after somebody closes it.
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