Gothic horror has quietly become one of the safer bets for studios or filmmakers hoping to revive an established property. AMC turned Interview with the Vampire into a widely praised series nearly half a century after Anne Rice’s novel was first published, and 2024’s Nosferatu showed that a remake of a film from 1922 could still draw a crowd at Christmas. What has often been overlooked in recent years, though, is the daytime show that brought gothic horror into the mainstream decades ago. The show in question is Dark Shadows, which celebrated its 60th anniversary on June 27, 2026. In the weeks around that milestone, Warner Bros. Animation announced a new reboot project, and the original series was finally confirmed for a long-awaited home video upgrade after years of fan speculation. Now, there’s a more concrete update on that front. MPI Home Video is bringing the show to Blu-ray for the first time with Dark Shadows: Volume One. The 3-disc set collects 40 restored episodes beginning with the 1967 arrival of Barnabas Collins, the guilt-ridden vampire who turned a struggling gothic soap into a cultural phenomenon. Dark Shadows had run for 209 episodes as a moody but vampire-free melodrama before a greedy caretaker pried open a chained coffin in episode 210 and unleashed Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas on Collinsport, Maine. Wisely, the set begins at that exact turning point and runs through episode 250, as Barnabas installs himself at Collinwood posing as a long-lost cousin from England while the family somehow fails to notice he’s the same man in the portrait hanging in the foyer. Dark Shadows was shot on videotape, the standard for daytime television in the 1960s, and videotape has a hard ceiling on resolution that film simply doesn’t. You can rescan a film negative in 4K, but a tape master is what it is, which is why the series has lived on DVD for decades while its contemporaries shot on film made the HD jump. What’s changed is the restoration technology. The new set uses modern video enhancement work by specialist Zach Smothers to clean and sharpen the original masters, an approach that has already worked wonders for other tape-era shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus. MPI has reportedly framed this volume as something of a test case, with hopes of restoring the entire archive if it sells, so fans who want the remaining 1,000-plus episodes upgraded have a fairly direct way to vote. The extras carry over from the corresponding DVD volume, and they’re a solid package for a first dip.
CloseDan Curtis ProductionsVampire Barnabas stares at the audience in Dark ShadowsABCJonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins in Dark ShadowsABC
There’s a 15-minute featurette catching newcomers up on the pre-Barnabas episodes and a nice curio in a kinescope version of episode 210 presented with its original ABC commercials intact. The set lists for $44.98, although MPI’s store currently has it discounted. One small note for anyone perusing the credits: the packaging lists David Selby, Grayson Hall, Jonathan Frid, and Nancy Barrett among the stars, though Selby’s Quentin Collins doesn’t actually turn up until much later in the run, so his presence here is more about the brand than these particular episodes.
While the home video upgrade is good news in its own right, it isn’t the only reason Dark Shadows is back in the conversation. The property is also getting an adult animated reboot, which may actually be the right fit for this material. Previous revivals, including the 1991 NBC series and Tim Burton’s divisive 2012 film with Johnny Depp, arguably struggled to translate the show’s strange velvet-draped atmosphere into modern live action, and animation could sidestep that problem entirely. Dark Shadows: Volume One arrives September 15 from MPI Home Video.
Dark Shadows
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