Horror and the Soap Opera

[DRW50]

Wasn't it something about a woman who looked in a mirror and saw herself aged 100 years?

Did anyone mention the aging formula/grave-robbing/plague stories The Doctors did in its last year?

[Pine Charles]

Remember Myra and Nina with the crystal ball & Ouija board?

I loved all that!

"Nina calls! Nina calls to her MOTHHHERRRRRRRRR!!!!!!"

[Cheap21]

Does Octomom's face on GH count? I certainly was horrified the first time I saw it

[Pine Charles]

Or Grandma Boring's forehead!

[Cheap21]

LMAO! They could have ran the R&D testing for the nanotech surface technology on that

[Sindacco]

Since you mentioned Mitch I have to say that some of the background music playing in scenes with him were really good. They made the scenes feel so much darker.

[SFK]

I've only seen bits and pieces, but Brandon and Sharina Spaulding in Barbados seemed very gothic and creepy. Then there was the whole talking portrait/psychic connection with Sharina's brother/Victoria's uncle who had died...

[Dale]

I loved the Mansion Of The Damned storyline on Edge! What good times! Didn't Nola pretend to be a witch and place curses/spells on people?

[MichaelGL]

Douglas Marland had a certain knack for writing gothic oriented stories, such as a few of Quint/Nola stories on Guiding Light, and on ATWT he penned one of the most praised gothic tales of its time; the haunting of Duncan's castle, which turned out to be a very alive James Stenback.

[passionsfan]

I think the only time daytime truly got horror right was with Dark Shadows. As much as I loved and was in the minority when it came to Passions, I do think most of there superntaural stories verged more on the comical side. In the sense of horror related to non supernatural and non supernatural beings, that might be a different story for all soaps.

[teplin]

NBC wanted Another World to do a vampire storyline in the 90s and the show actually began to tease it on screen, in scenes with Tomas and Maggie. It was mercifully dropped, however.

I wouldn't mind seeing some soap do a good malevolent ghost story, though.

[Gray Bunny]

I can't imagine DAYS going back to the dark, gothic side. Not with their budget and starchy, fake looking sets. What once was will never be again... sigh...

[EricMontreal22]

I've always found it interesting when the soaps started copying the slasher films--I believe DAYS did it first (when Pat F-S wrote?) and DAYS have probably done it the most, though by now I think all the soaps have at some time--AMC being maybe one of the last with the horrible Satin Slayer story. It seems like a style of horror that *could* work on soaps, but it never really has in my mind... Maybe it worked best with the Loving murders but those had the advantage of being able to kill of a large part of the cast--and of course while a few of the stalking scenes were kinda scary to me as a 14 year old (I was terrified of any horror films anyway till I was 16 or so and became kinda oddly obsessed with them, so before then I really hadn't had much exposure to them). And of course the actual kills were done in an ironic, even comic "gentle" way.

I do think some of Dark Shadows, for all its campiness, has at the least had some genuinely *creepy* moments. And I think most soaps have had at least a few moments of genuine horror in terms of horrific ideas or situations, but... (I wonder if Malone/Griffith/Gottlieb's planned supernatural late night soap, 13 Bourbon Stgreet woulda been genuinely scary--Logan in TVGuide who has a copy of the pilot at least claimed it did).

Agnes Nixon has a weird relationship with the gothic. People rarely seem to mention it when writing about her work--you always hear about the social storylines as well as the broad Dickensian characters... But I think she loves gothic storytelling (I know of course she's mentioned her love for Jane Eyre, etc) though she's had decidely mixed results with it--everything from the Cortlands's initial arc (which was largely reiterated, at least in style, with the early Merrick's storyline, even though Nixon was less involved by then, she did start it)--to the infamous Faustian storyline on Loving, or the whole Dante and his "pet" (Curtis Alden) in the cage when she returned to Loving, a story I loved as a kid but few others did.

I think one reason it's hard to pull off is good soap opera largely depends on telling multiple stories at once (something Dark Shadows was less interested in). Horror *depends* on sustained tension (it's been argued that tv and its commercial breaks make horror harder to handle anyway with a film like Halloween playing far worse that way). When you have your standard soap opera stories playing at the same time as a mad slasher one, it's very hard to keep that up (witness ATWT's Friday the 13th hommage of a couple of years back--of course that simply wasn't very well done anyway...)

[Mr. Vixen]

I would love to see another haunted story. I mean ghosts have people appear in spirit form all the time (i.e. Alan GH, John Y&R) so it could easily be done in a "haunting" form. I think.

[EricMontreal22]

Soaps used to be hesitant to go all out and actually say a ghost is REAL--but now that so many have crossed firmly into the supernatural I guess that's less of an issue. I think to do a really good gothic horror storyline they'd have to devote a short time fram--maybe 2 weeks and focus almost completely on that--it's hard to have some characters afraid for their lives because of something supernatural, and meanwhile have another character battling something more mundane, or at least 'real world' like anorexia, or who's the daddy or whatever--it's hard to have thoise existing at the same time on the same level. But we all know that short term stories often lose more audience than they gain...