Horror on Soaps

[Vee]

It occurs to me that though I am a major supporter of classic, down-to-earth domestic drama on soaps, I also feel there is a place for the outre if done right; this may be because I was raised on Dark Shadows.

Making the twain meet between that kind of gonzo fantasy and simple Labine-style soap is an insurmountable problem that has always fascinated me, pushed me to try and workshop. As a tween, I thought up an incredibly silly soap opera where the pilot episode would open with the teenage daughter killing her possessed father in their home, then burying him on the lawn in secret with the butler's help; by the end of the episode he would've been back taking tea with the family, with none the wiser except him and daughter dearest. There was also a strange subplot in which a Debbi Morgan-type would struggle to solve her husband's murder, and run his restaurant business - while also reuniting with him as a ghost, and the story would begin to actually chronicle their attempts to "make the relationship work" despite the minor inconvenience of his death. That was the way my feverish adolescent brain worked.

Today, it's a little different. As a kid, even though I liked Dark Shadows and enjoyed James Reilly's Days, I knew the latter show was largely crap in my book. The writing and scripts did not hold a candle to the '90s-era GH or OLTL, and I simultaneously gravitated to the gritty Linda Gottlieb OLTL, even as I was still consuming Dark Shadows. Later, I hated much of James Reilly's latter-day work, and didn't bother with Passions beyond the first month.

But the question that still nags me is, can soaps do horror stories? Ghosts, demons, or whatever? And if not, why not? Why has a soap never really attempted a haunted house story, or has one? Didn't Loving do some story when it started? Is there a way to fuse the two approaches in a way that makes it organic to the show itself? Please, lend me your two cents. It beats another thread in which Sylph browbeats people about his latest industry crush.

[DRW50]

I think it could work with the right amount of absurdity and realism. I thought the demonic possession storyline on Soap somehow held up well, even though much of the plotting was ridiculous, from the instapregnancy on. There were some great moments like when Jessica Tate led the exorcism, and we saw that the spirit was gone when Corinne's baby cried and an exhausted, weeping, laughing Jessica held the child in her arms.

The problem is you have to treat it as somewhat ludicrous but you have to take that ludicrousness seriously. People always take for granted how difficult this is, especially with Dark Shadows.

I can't remember if any soaps had this type of story or not. There have been some hauntings, but usually not taken seriously. Wasn't Megan Gordon involved in a haunted house story? Llana Flagg?

[Vee]

The storyline on Soap does hold up, partially because so much of that show walked a thin line between absurd comedy and actual pathos. The exorcism story is funny, but there are a number of classic, emotional scenes, especially Benson throwing down with the demon or whatever.

Malone did the Love Center ghost story in 2004, but that was dreadful, involved an insta-McBain ancestor and a Lord we'd never heard of, a mythology that came out of nowhere and no one cared about, was never explained, and when it flopped they wrapped it up a la Scooby-Doo with an "RJ Did It." Malone's second run dropped so many stories and left them without any discernable point.

[quartermainefan]

I would love a horror soap, but it has to be taken seriously. If you mock it the audience will mock it too. Audiences will accept anything as long as you play it straight, otherwise there would be no LOST, no TRUE BLOOD, and everything would be doctors and cops. If the writer tells the audience this is a world where werewolves roam the night, the audience will say "ok" and then judge the show on its merits. It doesn't have to even be something so out there even, it could be a Lovecraftian soap set in a small New England Town. I think shows like Dark Shadows, Edge Of Night, and specific stories like Casey the alien on GH, Clint Buchanan time traveling to the old west on OLTL, and Marlena's possession on DOOL show you can just as easily serialize those genres as you can a cop or romance angle. And some of the best uses of these genres are when they really tell the same stories every other genre tells, only with a lot of bells and whistles. There was an old noir melodrama with Edward G Robinson called "House of Strangers". It could basically be a soap about a patriarch, feuding sons, and family strife. Spencer Tracy remade it and it was called "Broken Lance" and now it was the same exact story but it was a western.

[DRW50]

Something I think would work well on a soap is a version of the Lottery storyline, from Shirley Jackson, and adapted on Dark Shadows. I thought that was a fascinating idea and helped keep the show going during the time everyone knew they were done.

I could see the Lords, or at least the Lords of the mid 90s, in a storyline like that. You can even have Powell as the nutcase who spent too long in the haunted room.

[Vee]

OLTL lends itself to gothic and always has. The problem is. I think Malone took that to its logical extension and then far, far beyond in 2003 and 2004. The show became absolutely ridiculous with Mitch and then Tico; it turned into utter camp, Reilly-style, and he would try to meld it with gritty social issue stories on the other side of the canvas, like it was 1992, except without Gottlieb he didn't seem to know how to construct a single week's worth of such a storyline. It would be plot point, social slogan, plot point, move on. So while I'm happy to see ol' Mitch, I don't know if OLTL will be able to keep the gothic/quasi-horror madness in check while also telling different, more reality-based stories. So far they have, and I think Carlivati is much better at it than Malone, but it's early days with Mitch this time.

I think it's possible to meld those types of stories on one soap, as I said above, but the mistake Malone made is that the stories have to be good - well-constructed, well-thought-out, and presented in a consistent way that makes their realities thread together across the canvas as the same show, just with different aspects of life. If the characters are down to earth, I think you can do both types of story.

It would be so easy, though, for a good soap today to tell a simple, down-to-earth haunting story a la Paranormal Activity with a family like Lily and Holden's, or Sami and Rafe. Have them move into a new home, and over a period of months, amidst other storylines for the character, show that the house is...strange.

[SFK]

I think it could work. To me, the challenge is in creating fresh material, and writing the story as realisitically as possible in a soap opera setting. I think The Exorcist was so effective (people walking out of the theatre early, crying and shaking and whatnot) because it dealt with religious themes and took itself dead seriously. Soaps are like the fat kids of television, they love to poke fun at themselves before anyone else does, and they'll go the camp (Passions) or lame schmaltzy (Marcie & Al/Michael) routes instead of trying something bold and serious. When you do an exorcism s/l on DAYS with cheap, bright lighting and camp it up soap style, it's just not going to have the same effect (whether they were going for that or not)... especially when it's soaps doing what they used to do so often and so badly: stealing from primetime and film. I think Gottlieb and Malone were on to something with their 13 Bourbon Street pilot though, not OTT Dark Shadows-type s/ls, but dark, moody, gritty, tales that sort of fall into a gray area of religion, the supernatural, horror, reality, fiction. I'm thinking of movies like Angel Heart or Crossroads. Then again, are we talking new series or established show? A 13-week summer soap series about vampires a la Twilight could certainly be a hit on TheN, but even given a show like OLTL's history, I'm not sure how I feel about Starr, Cole, Langston, and Markko teaming up with the new vampire kid in town and helping him ward off the werewolves living on Llantano Mountain (and of course Viki would have had a summer fling with the Grandaddy werewolf back in the '50s or something).

[Vee]

With a new soap, it's easy to do; you create the reality on day one. With an established soap it's much more difficult to do without warping the entire program unrecognizably, which is what happened to DAYS and PC - by the end, almost the entire cast was fuckin' vampires, and they had some sort of vampire blood bar to hang out in. I think it's an interesting dilemma, though. And yes, I think the way to do it is exactly as William Friedkin did, with harsh realism contrasted against unreal, otherworldly elements.

Then again, there is something to be said for the baroque gothic touch of a character like Mitch Laurence, so long as it does not throw the rest of the show off-kilter. It works for Mitch's storyline because the Lord family, his targets, have always been immersed in that kind of stuff. But that, too, has to be done right, and not turn into total camp.

[DRW50]

The early possession storyline on DAYS I thought was genuinely mysterious and somewhat scary, and effective at creating a mood. Especially the Desecrator phase of the story. Only later on did they start to get too campy.

I don't see why an established soap can't do a horror story, if it's done right. OLTL has revamped itself more often than Dracula. The main question is pacing and tone, which generally are a problem with soaps now whether they are gothic or not. I have my doubts about this working with a new soap because I think the new soap may be entirely shallow and depend solely on this gimmick, and what happens when the gimmick runs out? We would have what happened with Passions.

It seemed like AW was always trying to blend in some horror or gothic elements -- they had psychic characters on the show from somewhere like 1987-1996 and then again from 1998-1999. I don't know of any other soap that had this for so long. And then they had hints of gothic stories that were dropped. I think at one point Tomas was in some vampirism story.

[Vee]

I thought the early period of the Possession (with the Desecrator) worked as well.

I think with a new soap, the key would simply be to do what is also needed with an established one; blend the fantastical stories with classic, homespun, down to earth soap stories on the same canvas that don't have supernatural elements. Thus you can immerse the show in an internally consistent reality with room for both.

[SFK]

And that's exactly why I used the example of a 13 week summer soap, because I'm not confident that such a soap can be long-running. Dark Shadows dipped into a number of things, but if your show is just about vampires, where do you go? Do you just do all of your regular soap opera storylines with a vampire twist? Mom and dad vampire arguing with pot smoking teen vampire at the dinner table, 'cept they're drinking cow's blood? Maybe shades of the occult is the better way to go, more subtle stuff, like a kid whose mom does psychic readings in their house for a living (based on a true story, my ex-gf's mom), or a pentecostal preacher and his family with a super-strict and religious grandma who's got the kids paranoid as hell because she tells them the Lord will show her when they're up to no good, and you know what, strangely enough, that seems to almost always be true. Or something creepy that I have heard stories of more than once, the "doubles"** phenomenon... a friend or loved one visiting your house and having a conversation, and later finding out that person was already dead. You know, stuff that isn't really black or white, stuff that both intrigues and creeps out the audience, makes them think.

**ETA: Okay, just did a little Googling, I didn't know that was the literal meaning of the word Doppelgänger.

[Vee]

Well, no one's saying anything has to be horribly permanent, either; various supernatural or horror elements could come and go, you could do different types of stories. For example, the silly story I mentioned in the original post would likely not have ended with the patriarch staying possessed by Pazuzu or whatever; he would've likely gone on to be your standard blustering soap businessman once the beastie was disposed of. And what you mention is, I think, also how AW got away with psychics - wasn't Frankie psychic? - it was an element of the character, but was not always overt, and did not drive every story. Such would be the same with anything else.

[DRW50]

You're both right. I think that where they might want to go is an anthology show, with some of the topics you mentioned. Then if the audience responds to certain elements, they can expand those elements.

I also wish they would do more with psychological horror. I would like to see this delved into, exactly what this is, and how people react to it. One of the reasons I stopped watching Criminal Minds, although I thought the cast was first rate, was I realized this was basically just a long snuff film, and someone almost seemed to be getting a thrill out of torture and death and insanity under the guise of psychological profiling.

Yes. Frankie was a psychic. This was weaved in and out of her story - she would get "feelings" - and I think it continued up to her death.

AW's first psychic was Lisa Grady, whose psychic powers were used in that horribly misogynistic story where she would see a man murdering women for being "sinful" (kissing in public, living with a man outside of marriage). This man turned out to be a psychiatrist, and one who had raped her when she was a teenage girl. After the story was over, she used her psychic powers to help Vicky Hudson out of her coma (then being rewarded by Vicky stealing her boyfriend). After that they dropped the psychic powers element. Of course Joanna Going got into all that again at Dark Shadows.

The last psychic was Remy, although being psychic didn't seem to help her realize Paulina was her birth mother or that her ex-boyfriend Tito was pretending to be Paulina's son so he could scam her.

[SFK]

Right, like Opal on AMC, or Jeremy and his visions years before her. But yes, if the precedent is set that these kinds of things happen on this show, and they may come and go, that's fine. It's just that something like Lumina doesn't work on the Another World of Rachel, Mac, and Iris, like it would on Passions, you know?

[DRW50]

I think Lumina would have worked with proper storytelling. Even in the days with Rachel and Mac, they had a storyline about a gift Carl gave Mac that, if you opened it, the dust inside would cause you to have a fatal heart attack. That is something which isn't far off of Dark Shadows or Passions.

Lumina was just such a last ditch effort, and it showed. I think supernatural stories on soaps became some sort of dumb trend, no one actually had any respect for them, aside from JER in some of his early DAYS work.