Angel Bay Seafood

In Tim Burton's 2012 film adaptation of Dark Shadows, Angel Bay Seafood is the company owned and managed by Angelique Bouchard, the central nemesis of Barnabas Collins and the Collins family. Though Angelique, adopting various identities to conceal her true age, has used the company for nearly two centuries to establish herself as a highly respected member of the community of Collinsport, she is in reality a powerful witch whose primary motive appears to be hatred of the Collinses. When Barnabas realizes that Angel Bay is owned and controlled by Angelique, he confronts her: "So it is you who has sent the Collins family business into the abyss!" and later remarks, of the ironically named Angel Bay, "the very audacity of the name summons vomit to the recesses of my mouth!"
Angel Bay (and, indeed, Angelique's use of business competition to further her revenge on the Collins family) constitutes one of the few major story elements of Burton's re-imagining of Dark Shadows that is entirely without a counterpart in the original television series or even a true equivalent in the other Dark Shadows variants of the Dan Curtis era. Angel Bay Seafood appears to be entirely a newly added story element for this version of the Dark Shadows saga.
At the outset of the film, Angel Bay is portrayed as one of Collinsport's principal employers. When Angelique (called "Angie" in 1972, when most of the film's events occur) is reunited with Barnabas -- after he escapes the coffin she imprisoned him in, as a vampire, for 196 years -- she boasts that the townspeople "worship" her because Angel Bay is the "only big fish left in their itty-bitty pond."
The fast-paced, well-lit and prosperously humming environment of the Angel Bay operation contrasts markedly with the darkly idle, rat-infested shell of the Collins Canning Company just across the wharf. Having used spells to murder Barnabas' father, mother, and fiancee just before imprisoning Barnabas in 1776, Angelique has continued using her knowledge of black magic to develop Angel Bay as a rival to the founding family's business and - even during an extended period when women were widely excluded from business management - has successfully driven the Collins family to the edge of ruin. Elizabeth Collins Stoddard tells Barnabas the Collins company is "all but gone" and Roger Collins says the rival fishery "has taken just about every port on the East Coast." Later, one of Angel Bay's board members confidently observes that Angelique's company now controls "95% of the nets dragging the Grand Banks ."
Despite these overwhelming odds, Barnabas vows to revive the Collins family business. In conventional terms, this would seem to pose an almost impossible challenge but Barnabas' supernatural abilities, along with the hidden wealth he alone knows about beneath Collinwood, provide him the resources to revive the Collins Canning Company with sufficient success to infuriate Angelique.
The Angel Bay Seafood company headquarters serves as the setting for several key scenes in the film:
- On the bustling factory floor of Angel Bay, Angie first hears of the multiple killings of the construction crew near a location where she realizes she had led the townspeople of 1776 to entomb Barnabas in a chained coffin. This is her first indication that Barnabas may have escaped his imprisonment, and sends her rushing to the Collinwood mansion to confirm her suspicion. It is also in this setting that the personality of the modern (1972) Angelique is first revealed: Though she has arrived smiling and waving to the townspeople from her convertible, her demeanor as she strides briskly past the Angel Bay production lines is that of an uncompromising and cold businesswoman, insisting the factory workers work faster and initially expressing indifference ("Accidents happen!") to the report of the multiple overnight deaths in the town that have unsettled her employees.
- The Angel Bay board room is the setting where Angie convenes her (otherwise all male) executive staff to plot strategy against the Collins Canning Company (after Barnabas manages to revive it with his hypnotic powers and Collinwood's long-hidden wealth). The board room decor has several interesting aspects: The walls prominently feature the painted wooden nereid (or mermaid) figurehead from the ship which had brought the Collins family and their entourage -- including Angelique and her mother, who were at that time servants to the Collinses -- to Maine from Liverpool in 1760. The figurehead, which is one of the first memorable images seen as the film begins, clearly serves as a kind of trophy of Angie's triumph over her former masters. The board room also displays six full-figure portrait paintings, in various period styles, of "the Bouchard women" through the prior 196 years, all of them actually Angelique herself in her various generational guises. Another interesting aspect of the Angel Bay board room is its external view: From one window, the room looks out to the distant Widows' Hill and, above it, the towers of Collinwood; from another set of windows, the Collins Canning Company is seen just across the wharf. Like the ship's figure, these views are reminders of Angelique's past victories over the Collins clan.
- In Angie's office at Angel Bay, she first tries to buy the rejuvenated Collins Canning Company from Barnabas, then attempts to blackmail him into cooperating with her, and eventually succeeds in seducing him, briefly, into a supernaturally destructive sexual romp that both clearly enjoy, but which leaves their estrangement unresolved and Angie's office largely destroyed.
- The Angel Bay board room again figures prominently in the plot, and is the last interior setting at Angel Bay seen in the film, when Barnabas arrives there to demand that Angie lift his curse. There, Angie offers him a glass of blood to drink and a final offer to become her lover and business partner, or "I'll put you back in the box." Barnabas summarily refuses her "merger proposal," and as he attempts to exit the Angel Bay board room, indeed finds himself re-imprisoned in a coffin being carried by Angel Bay executives - now acting, essentially, as Angelique's "henchmen." As they speed away with the trapped Barnabas, in vehicles emblazoned with the Angel Bay logo, Angie pauses outside just long enough to magically ignite an explosion across the wharf at the briefly reinvigorated Collins family business.
With Angelique's apparent death at the end of the film, and presumably no biological heirs to the company she had controlled with seeming unilateral authority, the future fate of Angel Bay Seafood is left unresolved.
Category:Locations
Category:Dark Shadows (2012)