There are haunted house movies that send a chill up your spine. Then there are haunted house movies that send you reaching for the remote, the bottle, or the business end of a fireplace poker—just to feel something. Night of Dark Shadows falls into the third category: a joyless, confused, meandering séance of a film where nobody seems haunted except the viewer, cursed with the task of sitting through 97 minutes of spiritual malaise and whispery melodrama.
Directed by Dan Curtis—the same man who brought us Dark Shadows the TV series and its far more watchable theatrical sibling House of Dark Shadows—this follow-up is what happens when you try to milk a gothic soap opera with no fangs, no bite, and the charisma of a soggy crouton.
We begin with Quentin Collins, played by David Selby with the enthusiasm of a man trying to remember his lines through a fog of NyQuil, inheriting the family estate, Collinwood. If you were hoping for blood-soaked portraits, angry poltergeists, or even a mildly annoyed bat, you’re out of luck. What you get is a gloomy mansion, a fog machine working overtime, and the slowest descent into madness since someone tried to binge the Hallmark Channel sober.
Quentin moves in with his new wife Tracy (Kate Jackson, fresh off the set of something better), and it’s not long before the place starts giving him dreams, visions, flashbacks, and possibly psychic indigestion. Turns out Quentin is the reincarnation of a former ancestor who may or may not have been in love with a woman who was hung as a witch. Or maybe he’s just bored and angry because no one in this movie owns a lamp brighter than 15 watts.
To be fair, the idea isn’t bad. There’s something eerie about the sins of the past haunting the present. But here, it’s executed with the urgency of a wax museum going out of business. The pacing is glacial. Whole scenes drift by with characters standing in shadowed corridors, looking concerned, whispering vague exposition like they’re afraid to wake the boom mic. The movie isn’t edited so much as it’s assembled, like someone dropped a pile of half-scripted dreams into a film reel and hoped it made sense in post.
And the dreams. My God, the dreams. There are so many flashbacks in this film, you’d think it was having a nervous breakdown. Quentin remembers past lives with the same emotional intensity one uses to recall leftover meatloaf. These scenes are meant to be ominous, but they mostly consist of people in 19th-century cosplay walking through fog and glaring at each other like they just found out who farted in the drawing room.
As for the haunting? That’s generous. There’s no blood, no real scares, and certainly no vampires—despite the franchise’s fang-forward reputation. Instead, we get some light possession, a bit of spectral brooding, and one hanging scene that was probably intended to shock but instead feels like someone accidentally wandered onto the set of Masterpiece Theatrewhile carrying a noose. Even the spirits seem over it, content to whisper in Latin and occasionally flip through old books like ghostly librarians with nothing better to do.
David Selby, bless him, is trying. You can see it in his eyes. He wants to sell this tortured descent into madness, but the material gives him nothing. He spends most of the film either rubbing his temples like a man battling an epic migraine or yelling at the walls like they owe him money. Kate Jackson fares slightly better, if only because her character occasionally seems like she wants to leave this house—and this movie—but no such luck. She’s stuck, doomed to wander dimly lit rooms in flowing nightgowns while ominous harpsichord music plays like it’s being performed by a depressed raccoon.
The rest of the cast is a grab bag of genre veterans and local thespians, all of whom deliver their lines like they’re being held hostage by the script. Grayson Hall appears as Carlotta, the housekeeper who’s clearly in on the supernatural shenanigans but reveals everything with the urgency of someone reading a grocery list underwater. And Nancy Barrett, usually reliable, plays a tragic reincarnated lover who mostly lounges on chaise lounges and looks sad—possibly because she read the rest of the screenplay.
Dan Curtis, known for his flair in spooky TV fare, seems here to be on auto-pilot. Visually, the film has its moments: sweeping shots of the countryside, oppressive architecture, and some atmospheric use of color filters. But no amount of production design can save a movie that feels like it was written during a nap and edited during a power outage. And that’s not entirely hyperbole—the original cut of the film was reportedly over 120 minutes, but MGM hacked out 40 minutes just before release, allegedly with a chainsaw. What’s left is a film that feels like it’s missing a beginning, a middle, and an end—like watching a haunted flipbook with pages torn out.
The music, composed by Robert Cobert, is actually quite good—if you like your soundtracks to weep gently in the corner while your movie slowly implodes. It’s all mournful strings and ghostly organs, giving the illusion that something might happen. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
Final Verdict:
Night of Dark Shadows is what happens when you take gothic horror, remove the horror, douse the gothic in beige paint, and stretch it across 90 minutes like a piece of stale taffy. It’s less a movie than it is a fog-drenched therapy session for a director who misses his vampire and a cast wondering how they got here.
Avoid unless you’re a Dark Shadows completionist, a masochist, or someone who really loves movies where the scariest thing is the wallpaper. If you’re looking for a ghost story with bite, style, or even a pulse, this night will leave you in the dark.
