That is exactly where it needs to go. You absolutely hit it on the head. I said this to Paul Schrader when Cat People came out. That was another one set in New Orleans. Angel Heart is set in New Orleans. The Skeleton Key is set in New Orleans. Yes. And when Dan Curtis was revamping Dark Shadows, I was working for him, and I said, “Dan, if you’re going to remake Dark Shadows, get David Bowie’s wife, Iman, to play Angelique. Don’t get a blonde, blue-eyed woman.” He said, “What are you crazy?” But you couldn’t change Dan’s mind at all.
I wanted to set Dark Shadows in Haiti, and start with Angelique’s curse on Barnabas, but all Dan wanted to do every time you would talk about Dark Shadows, he said, “Forget it. Here’s how it starts. ‘My name is Victoria Winters. I’m on the train to Colinwood.’” Blah, blah, blah. And you couldn’t convince him otherwise. Great lady, by the way, Lara Parker, but Angelique should have been a kind of sorceress. You know what I mean?
I always thought that Angelique was more important than Barnabas. She created him, she created Barnabas.
I think so, I think so. Of course, my favorite character on Dark Shadows was Grayson Hall as Dr. Hoffman. She was a scream, that woman. In fact, if you ever seen a TV movie of the week called Gargoyle’s, Grayson Hall is hanging upside down a telephone, with her hair in curlers, holding a cocktail. She was a hoot, that woman, and she and Jonathan Frid, what a couple. Very sexually ambiguous, shall we say. That was really the fun of Dark Shadows.
But getting back to your original question, I do hope that if zombies are going to be around for a bit longer instead of them just shambling along, eating brains, it would be nice to set it back into the history of voodoo, and to really use New Orleans, which is a marvelous, photogenic place. Isn’t it? I mean, yeah, I’d love to see more of that.
