Dan Curtis

writer, director
TV Series

Dark Shadows

If you were a cool kid in the 60s, you ran home from school to watch Dark Shadows, a vampiresque soap opera that presaged Twilight by about four decades. I wasn’t that cool myself, but my sister Lynda was, and from time to time I overheard her and the cool kids talking about the inhabitants of Collinwood trekking to the late 1700s (in episodes from late 1967 through early 1969) and the late 1800s (in the March 1969 episodes). There may well be other time-travel escapades that have escaped me.
I’m afraid you must forgive me, miss. If we have met before, I’m sorry to say that I don’t remember it.
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  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Film

Dead of Night [segment 1]

Second Chance

For the first of three short segments of the TV movie Dead of Night, Richard Matheson wrote this adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1956 story “Second Chance” where a college student lovingly restores a 1920s-era Jordan Playboy roadster and takes it back in time. —Michael Main
I remember what someone once said; I think it was Einstein or somebody like that. He compared time to a winding river, with all of us in a boat drifting along between two high banks. And we can’t see the future beyond the next curve or the past beyond the curves in back of us, but it’s all still there, as real as the moment around us. To which I now add my own theory . . . that you can’t drive into the past in a modern car because there were no modern cars back then, and you can’t drive into 1926 along a four-lane superhighway, but my car and I—the way I felt about it anyway—were literally rejected that night by our own time.
Ed Begley, Jr., (as Frank) and Orin Cannon (as the old farmer) hike determinedly through a dry field.
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel