The Stars of “Dark Shadows” Remember TV’s Most Uniquely Gothic Daytime Soap Opera

The haunting theme music plays as the lilting gothic graphic title floats across the crashing waves, and it all becomes poetic, romantic and terrific, with an emphasis on “terror” — and yet not.

Such is the opening credit sequence for Dark Shadows — a television show ahead of and before its time, present, past or parallel time.

Initially screened on ABC-TV from 1966 to 1971, Shadows was a spooky weekday soap opera that took the world of afternoon viewers by storm — literally, thanks to its coastal New England setting.

The brainchild of prolific producer/director Dan Curtis (The Night Stalker, The Winds of War), the series gained a massive following (peaking at 20 million viewers) that originally consisted of the era’s then-significant population of stay-at-home moms.

Joining these early home-engineers were countless new-color-TV-buying members of America’s work and education force, including droves of elementary, high-school and college students who hurried home at day’s end to gaze into the Shadows.

Loyal fans of the show (dubbed “DS” in certain Shadows circles), young or older, made certain not to miss one bit of the melodramatic bite provided by its expansive cast, which served as a repertory group playing multiple roles over a compelling five-year-run.

What began as a Gothic suspense serial, embellished by murders and mysteries, morphed into strikingly unusual territory, especially for daytime TV: the periodically horrific but somehow always inviting lives, demises and curses of various vampires, witches, Frankenstein-like monsters, werewolves, and assorted other supernatural beings.

Such unique ghouls and goings-on were set within the isolated confines of their own little world: Collinsport — a fictitious seaside community in Maine named for the wealthy, eccentric and eerie Collins family whose ominous cliffside estate — Collinwood — consisted of a large mansion and a smaller, creepier, abode referred to as the “Old House.”

The elaborately engrossing plots switched centuries from then-contemporary 1960s/1970s existence to life in 1795 to 1897 and back again, with the added wrinkle of alternate-time frames…