Dark Shadows and Beyond: The Jonathan Frid Story Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		2.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		3.5

Dark Shadows and Beyond: The Jonathan Frid Story Blu-ray Movie Review

Fangs for the memories.

Reviewed by Randy Miller III October 8, 2021

Mary O'Leary's Dark Shadows and Beyond is a warm, intimate documentary celebrating the life and career of actor Jonathan Frid. Linear in structure with a treasure trove of rare personal items and first-hand interviews with friends, relatives, and colleagues, it plays as a nice companion piece to 2019's Master of Dark Shadows (a similar look at the show's creator Dan Curtis, which O'Leary also appeared in), although it never quite reaches those heights.

As revealed by pictures and stories from his childhood in Hamilton, Ontario, Frid was clearly bitten by the acting bug early in life: he struggled in school but excelled in plays, leading to appearances on stage -- where he enjoyed playing Shakespearean characters -- that remained a constant during most of his long and prolific career. His eventual move to America, where he settled in the New England area and later, New York, led to multiple performances on Broadway (Arsenic and Old Lace, Roar Like a Dove), the Williamstown Theatre Festival (The Rainmaker, The Crucible, and Time of the Cuckoo), and two seasons at the American Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut. Yet despite his love for the stage, Frid is overwhelmingly best remembered as Barnabas Collins, a vampiric character added to ABC's floundering "daytime serial" (read: soap opera) Dark Shadows in 1967. Its shift towards the supernatural basically saved the show and it thrived on the air another four years, spawning over 1,200 episodes, three full-length films (House of Dark Shadows, Night of Dark Shadows, and Tim Burton’s 2012 adaptation), and a short-lived 1991 television reboot.

Not surprisingly, portions of Dark Shadows and Beyond address Frid's struggles to return to "serious acting" after the fluke success of Barnabas Collins, which catapulted him to superstardom and even made him an unlikely sex symbol who received truckloads of mail from admiring fans. It also touches on his status as a closeted homosexual for much of his life, through testimony of close friends and colleagues who shared his secret and were likewise hesitant to reveal that part of their lives to the public. Yet the bulk of Dark Shadows and Beyond is a drama-free affair that celebrates his lifelong love for acting through personal effects (vintage playbills, candid photos), vintage TV appearances, and even a few reflective interviews with Frid himself, likely recorded during the last decade or two of his 87-year life.

It's an enjoyable production, all things considered, although somewhat dutifully straightforward and obviously put together on a tight budget with a few amateurish visual elements and other related drawbacks. Still, die-hard Frid fans will certainly get their money's worth here, as MPI's Blu-ray edition -- much like its unofficial companion piece, Master of Dark Shadows -- serves up a passable A/V presentation and a well-rounded collection of bonus features.

Dark Shadows and Beyond: The Jonathan Frid Story Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Much like Master of Dark Shadows, Dark Shadows and Beyond goes for a patchwork visual approach but, in my opinion, falls short of an optimal presentation. This is not necessarily any fault of MPI Video's 1080p transfer; the dual-layered Blu-ray runs at a high bit rate and is capably encoded, with most of its persistent problems (softness, chroma noise, artifacts, banding, etc.) being either a direct result of the mostly videotaped source material or questionable decisions by the creative team to add foggy borders to some of the narrower photos and clips. The biggest problem stems from another decision by the creative team: nearly all of the 1.33:1 material is cropped to fill the 1:78:1 frame and this does absolutely no favors for the vintage clips, which are often framed poorly with exacerbated source material issues due to the blown-up images. (One clip from an early Frid stage performance even lops off the upper heads of two performers.) This short-sighted decision remains a naggine problem with most decades-spanning documentaries and, while it doesn't negatively affect most of the material here, it's still painful to see in action. Yet much of the newer footage and still photos look sharp as a tack, with good color saturation, clean edges, and almost no drawbacks mentioned above. Again, there's definitely room for improvement here, but mostly nothing the Blu-ray could've fixed.

Dark Shadows and Beyond: The Jonathan Frid Story Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Perfectly in line with its interview-heavy format and vintage television broadcast clips, Dark Shadows and Beyond gets by with a plain but serviceable LPCM 2.0 Stereo mix that features strong, solid narration and on-camera speaking parts, with some older footage suffering from format limitations including slight hiss, crackle, and distortion. Normally I'd have rated this track a little higher but there are a few persistent volume leveling issues between interview subjects -- nothing major, but you might have to keep your remote handy at certain points, a complaint usually reserved for action films. A more careful touch in post-production could've easily fixed this, but it's hardly a huge distraction.

Speaking of distractions, the optional English captions are perfectly in sync but suffer from a few embarrassing typos and grammatical errors, including the ever-annoying grocer's apostrophe and regular misspelling of "role" as "roll".

Dark Shadows and Beyond: The Jonathan Frid Story Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This one-disc release ships in a standard keepcase with striking cover art and no inserts of any kind. The extras expand on Frid's legacy with rarely-seen TV material and other goodies that should tempt die-hard fans.

• The Play of the Week: Henry VI, Part 1 Highlights (22:20) - Selected scenes of "John Frid" playing the Earl of Worcester in New York's Phoenix Theater off-Broadway production of Henry VI, Part 1 in the spring of 1960, which was videotaped for NTA Film Network's long-running anthology series.

• "Dark Shadows" PBS & Festival Promotional Spots (3 clips, 5:07 total)

• "Dark Shadows" PBS Special - Jonathan Frid Interview​ (7:40) - A short segment from an excellent vintage PBS interview with Frid that, unfortunately, doesn't include his memorable monologue of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Telltale Heart" and other clips. (You can see the full-length version here, though.)

• Jonathan Frid Reads from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"​ (3:21, audio only)

• A "Dark Shadows" Letter From Jonathan​ (0:38) - An excerpt from a March 31, 1967 letter Jonathan wrote to his mother, as read by Frid's long-time friend and colleague Ian Buchanan.

• "Dark Shadows" Promo (0:30)

• Jonathan Frid Photo Gallery​ (5:46, self-playing)

• The Best of Barnabas (28:40) - Selected scenes from the original Dark Shadows TV series, presumably taken from an MPI Video DVD released in 2012.

• "Dark Shadows and Beyond" Trailer (2:04)

• "Master of Dark Shadows" Trailer (2:06)

Dark Shadows and Beyond: The Jonathan Frid Story Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Mary O'Leary's Dark Shadows and Beyond is a capable but slightly vanilla documentary about beloved actor Jonathan Frid that should nonetheless please die-hard and casual fans alike with its warm tone and personal touch. That said, a few questionable visual decisions (cropped footage, ugly design elements) may hamper your enjoyment of this one, as well as technical oversights in the audio mix (volume leveling issues) and even the subtitles (typos and grammatical errors). MPI's Blu-ray does what it can with these mostly source-related issues, but luckily its subject matter and nice collection of extras makes Dark Shadows and Beyond a solid enough collectible for the Frid faithful.