Alumni from the campy, vampire-fraught ABC soap gathered in front of a packed house Thursday for the Museum of Television & Radio?s annual William S. Paley Festival at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles. Many of the diehard fans had attended conventions honoring the show and were versed enough in "Shadows?" complex plotlines to ask questions like, "Is Victoria Winters really the daughter of Elizabeth Collins Stoddard?"

Alexandra Moltke, who played the blushing governess at the show?s center, answered, "You bet I am."

"I wanted to be a vampire so badly. I wanted to be a monster ? anything but poor, boring Vicky," Moltke said.

The series began in 1966 as a gothic romance reminiscent of the Bronte sisters? novels. But when ratings slumped after 10 months, creator Dan Curtis figured he had nothing to lose and, at his children?s suggestion, decided to "scare the hell out of these people."

What followed was a five-year run that populated the gloomy Collinwood with ghosts, bloodsuckers and the occasional werewolf. Seances sent the cast back to the 1700s, where the manor?s inhabitants looked strikingly like their modern counterparts, and forward to 1995, where the manor?s inhabitants looked strikingly like their ?60s counterparts.

"The best part about ?Dark Shadows? was that whenever you got killed off, which you inevitably did, you could come back as another character," said Lara Parker, who played multiple characters named Angelique. "It was like being in a repertory company."

As the audience chuckled at clips that included stumbled-over lines, lengthy bouts of exposition, melodramatic close-ups and one not-so-groovy dance number, the cast and crew laughed at their own "Ed Wood" -esque disdain for retakes.

"I didn?t know what the hell I was doing when the show started," Curtis joked. "I just hired people I liked. I couldn?t tell if they could act. But they learned. When [Kate Jackson] came on she couldn?t say her own name."

But Curtis? instincts served him well, namely in his initial venture into otherworldly phenomena, casting Jonathan Frid as brooding vampire Barnabas Collins.

Lela Swift, who directed 580 episodes of the show, said the move took her by surprise.

"I was just handed a script with a dead person walking down the hall in it," Swift said. "I called Dan and said, ?Dan, are we going supernatural?? He said, ?We?re gonna try.?"

Curtis planned to kill Barnabas after six weeks, but the fan mail was overwhelming.

"I thought, ?Great, now I?ve got to figure out how to keep this guy alive,?" Curtis said. "So along came the reluctant vampire and women went wild."