The Vampire Strikes Back

On a recent afternoon, Ben Cross' Barnabas, shivering in knickers and an open shirt, was being soaked by rainmakers and crying to unseen children, ''Sara! David! Don't run from me!'' amid eucalyptus trees on a slope behind the Doheny mansion. ''They've just seen me fanging our aunt,'' Cross explains matter-of-factly, a cigarette dangling from his blood-stained mouth. His Barnabas is a reluctant vampire cursed into his condition by a vengeful witch named Angelique. ''Let's just say Barnabas had an affair with the wrong person in 1790,'' says Cross, 43, who also wore fangs in 1989's made-for-cable comedy movie Nightlife. The English actor, who lives in Vienna most of the year, wanted ''to get back on the American map'' and saw Barnabas as just the vehicle to get him there. ''I wanted to do American episodic TV, and I didn't want to play a cop or a lawyer or a gangster,'' he says.

Cross' pointy-banged predecessor, Jonathan Frid, was the Ringo Starr of vampiredom: He was considerably less dashing than his counterparts, but his homeliness curiously enhanced his appeal. Cross, by contrast, is a strapping hunk of hemo-goblin and not nearly as repressed as Frid was. ''I'm playing this for as much eroticism and sensuality as I possibly can,'' he says.

In a cast of eerie eccentrics, the show's oddest character may be newcomer Jim Fyfe's Willie, the caretaker of the Collinwood estate. A simpleton with greasy hair and mottled brown teeth, Willie is ''like Larry, Darryl, and Darryl gone very, very wrong,'' Fyfe says. So far, Willie is not a biter, but his night might yet come. ''It would be good if being a vampire could help Willie get some babes,'' Fyfe says.

Despite the camp factor inherent in the series, the Dark Shadowscast is playing it straight. ''It's got a gothic romance to it,'' Cross says. ''I'm making a supernatural drama, not a soap. Dan says, 'Fine, fine, carry on with your Hamlet.''' But even with Cross' Shakespearean style, there seems little danger that Shadows will go pretentious. ''I don't know what the hell you'd call it,'' Curtis says. ''Once you enter the Dark Shadows door, you're in a whole new universe. It takes itself seriously, but you can laugh at the darkest moments.''

And the cast members do. ''Mind you,'' says the veteran Jean Simmons, ''we do get the giggles.'' That seems easy for her to say: She's not wearing fangs — yet.