Shadows From the Land Down Under (Dark Shadows in Australia)

Abstract

This book chapter reconstructs a strange, formative encounter with Dark Shadows (1966-1971) in early-1990s Australia, when fragments of a cult gothic soap opera lodged themselves in a child’s imagination long before they could be named, contextualised, or fully understood. Moving between archival traces, remembered images, and literary echoes, it treats the show not as a text recalled after the fact but as a lived imaginative environment—one that quietly trained a sense of time, recurrence, parallel worlds, and haunted houses from the inside out. What emerges is an account of how a piece of mass television, encountered too early and half-accidentally, can hard-wire a lifelong way of thinking about narrative, memory, and other possible worlds.