Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, I’m recommending my current TV obsession, just in time for Halloween.

The fourth track of rapper MF Doom’s 2003 record, Take Me to Your Leader, opens with the eerie wail of an electric organ. The first time I watched Dark Shadows, I recognized the sample instantly. It came from the show’s iconic theme song.

The long-running soap premiered fifty years ago, on June 7, 1966, and continued for an astounding 1,225 episodes throughout its five-year run. For anyone doing the math: That’s an absolutely wild schedule of around five episodes each week. The Dark Shadows cinematic universe eventually expanded into movies, spinoffs, novelizations, and much more.

Dark Shadows was revived in the 1991, when the show’s original producer, Dan Curtis, helmed a moody, Gothic miniseries that conveyed the series’ major plot events across twelve hour-long episodes. (There was also a regrettable Tim Burton adaptation in 2012 that many fans don’t claim, as mentioned by Agatha Andrews in a previous newsletter.)

But today, I rarely hear horror fans discuss Dark Shadows—which is a shame, because it’s a Gothic delight packed with vampires, ghosts, and witches, and it’s easy to find on streaming services including Tubi, Pluto, and Prime. Today, I’ll make my case for why Dark Shadows is the perfect show to binge this Halloween season.

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Like many Gothic masterpieces, Dark Shadows begins when a governess arrives to her new place of work. Victoria Winters doesn’t have a family of her own; she was orphaned or abandoned and raised in a care home until she was old enough to venture out on her own. She accepts a job in coastal Collinsport, Maine, where she’s agreed to tutor the youngest member of the wealthy Collins family.

As soon as Vicki arrives in town, red flags immediately begin waving. The reclusive Collins family have a strange reputation among the townsfolk. But Vicki has to earn a living, and soon she moves into the family’s ornate mansion atop Widow’s Hill. She’s worldly yet innocent, and she’s about to stumble across a trove of long-kept family secrets.

The family’s matriarch, Elizabeth Stoddard, will be familiar to horror fans. Actress Joan Bennett’s career flourished in parallel to Hollywood itself, beginning with a role in a 1916 film. She eventually went on to play the original Madame Blanc in Dario Argento’s Suspiria.

But the show truly comes alive with the arrival of Barnabas Collins, played by Shakespearean actor Jonathan Frid. Barnabas is English, supposedly, and his foreign customs disguise a multitude of oddities that would otherwise mark him as a suspicious figure. Claiming to be a long-lost Collins cousin, Barnabas takes up residence in the “old house”—the original dwelling occupied by the 18th century generation of the Collins clan.

There’s no doubt that Barnabas is a member of the family. He looks just like his namesake, the original Barnabas Collins. In fact, the two are identical…

From this premise, Dark Shadows sprawls into a series of plotlines that ebb and flow throughout the series. Villains arrive, cause chaos, and exit; murders are exposed, marriages are arranged via blackmail, and ghostly dramas play out in mausoleums and hidden basement dungeons. There are kidnappings and asylums. There are seances and ghostly visitations. Dogs howl and oversized bats beat their wings against leaded windows. Collinsport is constantly buzzing with obscure, mysterious events that keep it perpetually off-kilter.

Beyond its Gothic atmosphere and melodramatic plotlines, Dark Shadows is equally engrossing and relaxing. Its daily schedule and short half-hour episodes meant that the plot had to advance slowly, with plenty of repetition that renders its complicated dramas very easy to track. If you miss something important, it will be repeated half a dozen times in the next few episodes’ introductions or dialogue.

It’s also charmingly full of imperfections. The mid ‘60s marked the tipping point from black and white TV into color, and the show trades back and forth between the two. Boom mics swing into view and cameramen step into frame. When actors stumble over their lines, they simply keep the scene moving forward. There’s a liveliness to the production that we just don’t see any more, not even on reality TV.

And although none of the actors or producers acknowledged it openly, Dark Shadows is super gay.

In 1966, being gay wasn’t simply frowned upon. It was illegal. Illinois was the first US state to decriminalize consensual gay sex in 1961, but laws forbidding private, consensual intimacy between two people of the same sex remained on the books until 2003. The Stonewall Uprising occurred in the middle of Dark Shadows’ run, on June 28, 1969.

Yet gay, trans, and queer people have always existed and persisted. Dark Shadows was co-created by Ron Sproat, a gay man, and its cast was full of queer actors. Though lead actor Jonathan Frid was deeply private and never out during his lifetime, he was known to haunt gay bars. His co-star Louis Edmonds lived more openly in private and came out publicly in his seventies. Joel Crothers, who played deeply lovable Joe Haskell, died at just 44 years old from complications of AIDs, and rounding out the main cast, Anthony George (who played Burke Devlin) was gay, too. All told, around a dozen queer actors and writers were involved in creating and producing the show.

There’s something innately queer about the kind of vampiric storytelling Dark Shadows explores, in which Barnabas Collins constantly faces the peril of having his true identity exposed.

As queer rights once again come under threat, Dark Shadows provides a glimpse of how queer people have always found ways to make art despite attempts to silence them.

In conclusion, Dark Shadows is relaxing yet suspenseful; melodramatic yet capable of embracing its own camp; and devoted to the Gothic tradition yet also a time capsule of coded gay culture.

To me, it is perfect, and maybe it’ll be perfect for you, too.

I’m still in the thick of covering new horror books over on Macabre Daily, so we’ll be making things up as we go through the end of October! I have a few interview requests floating around, plus a very exciting Halloween surprise…more soon!

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.