David, the youngest member of the cursed Collins family, is back – played once again by Alec Newman.

“Alec’s performance as David in Kingdom of the Dead is fantastic,” says co-producer Joseph Lidster. “The character starts off as a lost innocent before heading down a much darker path. David has changed since we last met him though. No longer a doctor, he’s opened up a mine in the grounds of Collinwood...”

“We wanted to return to the core Dark Shadows idea of the Collins family owning a business that employed many of the townsfolk,” says co-producer David Darlington. “And of course mining was big news in the early 1980s... Whether David is a villain like JR Ewing or a good guy like Bobby Ewing is something we’ll discover throughout the series.”

Working in David's mine is Benjamin Franklin – known to his friends as Frankie. A new character to Dark Shadows, and played by Roger Carvalho, Frankie works hard and plays hard. He’s been a bit of a ladies' man in the past - but he  seems to have settled down. And his girlfriend is another returning character – Kate Ripperton (Asta Parry) from 2013’s Beyond The Grave. 

“Kate’s now the editor of local newspaper, the Collinsport Star,” says Joseph Lidster. “And she and her reporter, Andrew Cunningham (Matthew Waterhouse) are going to be kept very busy when a murderer strikes. As the former host of a television show in the UK, the reasons for her being in Collinsport are a bit of a mystery. Could she be a killer?”

You can hear David, Roger and Kate introducing themselves here, with some more images here.

Dark Shadows: Bloodlust is a 13-part miniseries released in January and February 2015. It's available to pre-order here.