"Dark Shadows" was taped live, and editing video tape in those days was expensive and time consuming, so there were very seldom any retakes . Consequently, hundreds of goofs ended up on the air. Perhaps the funniest of them all occurred in a scene inside the Collins mausoleum, where the late Louis Edmonds was supposed to say, "Some of my ancestors are buried here." What came out was "Some of my incestors are buried here." To his credit, Edmonds not only kept his cool, but laughed and corrected the mistake in character.

In the 1795 flashback, as Barnabas confronts Angelique beside his coffin, a crew member in a short-sleeved blue shirt is sitting to the right, and can be seen hastily getting up and moving out of the shot.

1967: Barnabas and Vicky are talking in Collinwood's foyer when a great deal of noise starts interrupting the scene from backstage. You can hear coughing, several bumps and crashes, shouts, and finally, a fire extinguisher going off. Meanwhile, the distracted actors are completely blowing all their lines - but the unstoppable taping goes on.

1795: Angelique throws open a set of double doors to find Jeremiah's ghost in the hall. She cries out and steps back, and to the right of the screen, you can see a crew member's hand enter the shot to pull one of the doors open further.

1967: Barnabas selects a treasure from a jewelry chest while bad guy Jason spies on him through a window. Willie is supposed to put the chest away, but when Jason later breaks in to steal it, the chest is still sitting on the table in plain view, so Jason has to pretend not to notice it. The break-in scene is recapped the next day, only this time, the chest is no longer on the table.

1967: Burke mangles his line to Vicky, and instead of telling her to get off her history kick, says, "I just think you should get off that hickory stick for a while."

1968: Adam approaches David in the woods, and brushes against a large shrub. The bush teeters and then falls over with an audible crash.

1795: Ben, complaining that Angelique is always watching him, backs into a large, tall tree trunk in the cemetery. The "tree" wobbles and sways when he bumps it.

1967: The newly-cured Barnabas, wearing a red striped bathrobe, screams when Dr. Lang opens the drapes to let the sunlight in. When the same scene is recapped the next day, Barnabas is suddenly wearing a solid blue bathrobe.

1795: A black-and-white cat, supposedly the transformed Joshua Collins, was completely uncooperative in every scene he was in. He always started out on a bed or a chair, but got up and left every time, usually forcing the camera to pull in so that the actors could pretend the cat was still there.

1795: Reverend Trask is attempting to perform an exorcism when a (demonic?) fly aims straight for his mouth. He has to interrupt his incantation long enough to blow it away.

1968: When the psychic enters Quentin's haunted room, she stumbles over the wire used to "ghostly" open the door, and has to grab onto the gramophone table to keep from falling. The table almost falls over with her, but she manages to stay upright, barely.

1968: The now-vampire Angelique kneels beside Barnabas' chair to tell him he belongs to her now. When she tries to get up, her long white gown catches on something, causing her to muff her next line a bit as she gives the fabric an annoyed tug to free it.

1968: A shot of Barnabas and Julia taken through the small window in the cellar door apparently obscured Jonathan Frid's view of the all-important red light. Obviously thinking himself off-camera, Frid took a moment to clean the inside of one nostril with his index finger.

1897: Valerie Collins is supposed to praising Collinwood. But instead, she gushes, "Hollywood. I never imagined I'd see it!"

1897: Quentin walks away from Trask and exits through the door under the stairs. Unfortunately, that door was undersized, and David Selby was 6'2" tall. Quentin bangs his head on the doorframe hard enough to produce an audible thump.

1968: The basement's brick wall crumbles to reveal Trask's skeleton hanging in the alcove. Only it shouldn't be. Bodies do not remain assembled once the flesh and sinew are gone. Trask's remains ought to be a large pile of bones on the floor.

1966: Standing over the doctor's microscope, Burke blows his line to Woodward: "When you examine it under the microphone, it doesn't show any mystery at all."

1840: During a graveyard scene, the village bells are tolling the hour, but someone forgets to kill the sound effects tape. The chimes strike sixteen-o'clock

1968: Jeff Clark runs terror-stricken out of a cemetery and accidentally stumbles over a tombstone. The 'granite' marker falls over with a hollow thud.

1970: Barnabas fends off a werewolf by striking at it with his silver-headed cane. Unfortunately, the cane bounces off the resilient werewolf and hits Barnabas in the head. (Jonathan Frid reportedly had to have a few stitches afterwards.)

1968: When David and Amy discover Quentin's sealed room, the youthful performers forget to stop on cue and skip to lines from their next scene. The view cuts to Liz and Roger in the drawing room, but the voices of David and Amy excitedly continue from the set next door.

1967: The apparently miscued Burke enters the foyer set through a door and starts across the stair landing. You can then hear the director say, "Try it again," and he turns, goes back out the door and comes in again.

1970: When the sheriff knocks, Jeb opens the antique shop door and the jangling shop bell falls off and crashes to the floor. They pretend that nothing happened and go on with their lines.

1795: When an angry Lt. Forbes rushes out Collinwood's front door and tries to slam it, the flimsy set door not only doesn't slam, it bounces back open. The supposedly in-a-hurry lieutenant comes back and gently re-closes the door.

1966: Elizabeth is thwarted by a set door that refuses to open when she tries to make her exit. She struggles with it, tugging several times, but winds up just standing there, exasperated, until the scene ends a few merciful seconds later.

1969: David blunders his line to Cousin Amy: "Don't feel too bad, Amy. I don't like to feel my relatives, err, I don't like to see my relatives."

1967: A persistent fly insists on clinging to Barnabas' forehead as he plots to kill Dr. Hoffman. He tries to ignore it, tries walking briefly out of camera range, then comes back and tries shooing it away *on* camera, but it keeps coming right back.

1897: Barnabas forgets his verbal 'shopping list' of five potion ingredients as he delivers it to a servant. He says, "Now go into town and collect Magda's herbs and, uh, herbs and, well whatever else it is she needs."

1967: The dying Dr. Lang fumbles with a reel-to-reel recorder, making a tape that we'll hear over and over again later on. Only he "records" his message with the machine turned off: the reels aren't moving. The cameraman must have noticed. He pulled in until the recorder was no longer visible.

1967: A stuck oxygen tent zipper foils Dr. Woodward. After he and Julia unzip it to take a pulse, the doctor is supposed to close the tent and leave the room. He struggles with the zipper in vain before abandoning his critical patient with the adlibbed remark, "Hmph. Zip that up, will you, Julia?" before he hurries out.

1990s: When Barnabas and Julia time travel into the 1990s, they find Mrs. Johnson's body tied to a tree. While a crazed Carolyn accuses them of killing her, the "corpse" blinks several times.

1840 Parallel Time: Julia Collins suffers from a bad case of tangle-tongue syndrome when she says, "Don't you think that I would like to help Bramwell gill the coast of Brutus Collins?"

1967: During the closing credits, a crew member walks by outside the supposedly-second-story window of Josette's bedroom - twice.

When "Dark Shadows" did its version of "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde," the Hyde character, John Yaeger, had prosthetic nose trouble during a fight scene. His rubber schnoz came unglued and nearly fell off. He was subsequently given a nose job.

1967: No one at Collinwood is supposed to know that Julia Hoffman, who's "undercover," is a doctor, but David greets Dr. Woodward with the line, "Good evening, Dr. Hoffman. Oh -- I mean Dr. Woodward."

1897: Pansy comes to see Charles Tate. When he lets her in and closes the door, the set wall shakes just enough for the nearby window to fall shut with a loud bang.

1970: A suspicious Quentin snatches a decorative sword off the wall to threaten Sky Rumson with. But the sword dislodges the whole display when he grabs it: it falls off the wall and hits a glass-globed lamp. The camera pans away, but you can hear the glass falling and shattering over the actors' dialogue.

1970: Jeb opens the antique shop door when the sheriff knocks -- and the jangling shop bell falls off and crashes to the floor. Both actors glance down at it, then go on with their lines.

House of Dark Shadows

Vampires don't show up in mirrors in the DARK SHADOWS movies or tv series. In this film, Julia first confirms that Barnabas is a vampire by sneaking a look at him in her compact mirror -- which reflects his human companions, but not him. Unfortunately, the producers seem to have forgotten this fact when, near the end, we see the recently-staked vampire Roger Collins -- reflected in a mirror. Not even "dead" vampires ever appeared in mirrors in the series, so they shouldn't do so here, either.