Bewitched, The Munsters, The Addams Family and Dark Shadows

Our society has always been fascinated with the weird, the creepy, the occult.

Halloween has me thinking about creepy shows I watched as a kid. My introduction to the supernatural genre came from 1960’s television.  Fantasy, horror, and camp.

My favorite show of the time, my introduction to the genre, was Bewitched.   It turned the scary -- witches and witchcraft -- into the mundane and ordinary.    Samantha Stevens was a typical suburban housewife, who also happened to be a witch. The humor came from her zany relatives, from spells gone awry, and from Samantha's need to hide her supernatural status from ordinary mortals.   The show ran from 1964-1971, but lives on forever in reruns.

Two other  shows that premiered in 1964 expertly combined horror and camp into a sitcom format.  

 The Addams Family, based on drawings Charles Addams did for The New Yorker, focused on the weird extended family of Gomez and Morticia Addams, and their taste for the macabre.  Uncle Fester, Thing, Cousin It, Lurch...weird characters all. The humor came from a culture clash, Gomez and Morticia think the rest of the world share their values.

Similarly, The Munsters was a parody of a typical American family. Herman and Lily Munster and their family are firmly rooted in our concept of traditional horror movies.  Herman is Frankenstein’s monster, Grandpa is a vampire, Eddie is a werewolf, and poor Marilyn ...

The humor in The Munsters was a bit broader, but came from the same culture clash as The Addams Family.  Gomez Addams was wealthy, Herman Munster was a grave digger, but both found themselves at odds with what we consider “normal”.

A Munsters-Addams Family crossover would have been awesome.  Can you imagine Eddie Munster dating Wednesday Addams?

Both shows finished their runs in 1966.

1966, the year Dark Shadows premiered.

Dark Shadows started out as Gothic soap opera.  Victoria Winters travels to Collinsport, Maine, to be governess to a disturbed young boy named David Collins.  The show did not become successful until a year later, when a vampire named Barnabas Collins returns to his home at Collinwood.  Over the next few years viewers were treated to seances, ghosts, werewolves, witches,  time travel, alternate realities...

The show was meant to be scary, and to its target audience (children and teens who’d race home from school to see it), it was terrifying.  So very different from the humorous shows I watched before.

The “camp” came from overacting and from low production values.  The show was shot in a single take, flubbed lines and all.  Boom mikes and technicians could be seen in the background.  Doors stuck, cardboard shrubbery and tombstones got knocked over, actors called each other by their real names instead of by the character’s name ...

All of these series were revived, with new casts, as movies, with varying degrees of success.  But I prefer the originals.

My daughters' views of the supernatural were shaped by...other forces.  Very different from what I experienced, but just as spooky and weird and mysterious.

Give you one clue: