The old gothic soap opera aimed at the after school crowd. My sister had a friend who would rush home from school to watch it. I watched some episodes when I was four or five. It took me some time before I could distinguish between it, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.
It gave me the impression that ALL soap operas were horror stories. I'd turn on The Secret Storm and shudder in fear. All the scenes were indoors and they saved money by not having widows showing the weather outside, so I assume all the episodes took place during a massive, terrifying storm.
It turns out there's a Dark Shadows channel on Pluto, the streaming video channel. Dark Shadows was on five days a week and is the only soap opera where nearly all the episodes were preserved.
Filmed like other soaps were in those days. Video tape was edited by cutting and splicing the tape. It was probably harder than editing film. So they filmed the thing "live on tape". They would perform each episode as if it were a live TV show. There were flubbed lines in every episode and you could see actors struggling to remember their lines. Sometimes a camera would pan too far or not move in close enough and you could see past the edge of the set.
And, like other soaps in those days, nearly every scene was a long conversation between just two actors. It's like an Eric Rohmer movie if Eric Rohmer had been a much simpler man.
An early episode is on as I write this. Dennis Patrick is heavily featured just a few years before he played the murderous bourgeois father in Joe with Peter Boyle and about ten years before he was on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
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