Dark Shadows pdf

Dr. Harry Benshoff's research interests include topics in film genres, film history, film theory, and multiculturalism. He has published essays on Dark Shadows fan cultures, blaxploitation horror films, Hollywood LSD films, and Brokeback Mountain. He is the author of Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. With Sean Griffin he co-authored America on Film. He was also the co-editor of Queer Cinema: The Film Reader. His most recent books include Dark Shadows, A Companion to the Horror Film, and Film and Television Analysis: An Introduction to Theories, Methods, and Approaches. At UNT, Dr. Benshoff regularly teaches a wide array of film studies classes, including "Film and Television Analysis," "African American Film," "Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Film and Video," and "Gender and Sexuality in the Horror Film." He also teaches a graduate seminar in qualitative media theory every year, and a rotating series of "Film Authors" classes on such noted directors as David Cronenberg, Federico Fellini, Ken Russell, and Robert Altman. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Dr. Benshoff earned a BA in English from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Penn., in 1985. He attended Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia for almost three years before he decided to follow his primary interest in life: film and media studies. He then earned an MA and a PhD in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California's prestigious School of Cinema-Television. He taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for three years before coming to UNT.

Dark Shadows pdf by Harry M. Benshoff

While supernatural events have become fairly commonplace on daytime television in recent decades, Dark Shadows, which aired on ABC between 1966 and 1971, pioneered this format when it blended the vampires, werewolves, warlocks, and witches of fictional Collinsport, Maine, with standard soap opera fare like alcoholism, jealousy, and tangled love. In this volume, author Harry M. Benshoff examines Dark Shadows, both during its initial run and as an enduring cult phenomenon, to prove that the show was an important precursor-or even progenitor-of today's phenomenally popular gothic and fantasy media franchises like Twilight, Harry Potter, and True Blood. Benshoff demonstrates that viewers of all ages responded to the haunted world of Dark Shadows, making unlikely stars out of the show's iconic characters-reluctant vampire Barnabas Collins, playboy werewolf Quentin Collins, vengeful witch Angelique DuVal, and vampire hunter Dr. Julia Hoffman. Benshoff explores the cultural and industrial contexts of the mid-1960s that gave rise to Dark Shadows and how the show adapted nineteenth-century gothic novels and twentieth-century horror films into a televised serial format. Benshoff also examines the unique aspects of the show's casting and performance modes, its allure as a camp cult text, and the function of the show's many secondary and tertiary texts-including novels, records, games, comic books, and the two feature films, House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971).