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When Barnabas Collins first grasped the throat of Willie Loomis, Dark Shadows found its Prime Mover, the axis around which everything else would soon revolve. Jonathan Frid's vampire kicked down the door that Diana Millay's phoenix nudged open, releasing a monster rally influenced by Dracula, Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Jekyll & Hyde, The Turn of the Screw and even Lovecraft.

And though Barnabas was a vengeful, possessive wraith at first, Frid would bring to the role a soul anchored in the literature and fine arts of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Romanticism. As Barnabas' past life was revealed to viewers Frid imbued his vampire and the show itself with romantic, melancholy and melodramatic energy. Julia Hoffman pining for her Barnabas embodied the suffocating pain of unrequited love found in The Sorrows of Young Werther. Josette, Maggie, Victoria and Roxanne, the lost loves of the eternally hopeful and hopeless vampire, are all Lenore from Poe’s The Raven.  Frid's Barnabas, Byronic to his core, did not lose his humanity when he was cursed into a vampire’s existence by Angelique, the show's Belle Dame Sans Merci. He lost it upon the craggy rocks below Widow’s Hill. Was it his vampire's existence he wanted to escape or his suffering?

Barnabas Collins was Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer in the Sea of Fog, giving the show the Sturm und Drang so aptly symbolized in the churning waves crashing against the rocks beneath the opening credits and accompanied by Robert Cobert’s evocative theme -- a perfect metaphor for a show depicting curse after curse pounding at the foundation of an old New England family. Jonathan Frid may rest in peace but thanks to him DARK SHADOWS is Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and the story of Barnabas Collins and Josette DuPres will live on, having become part of the American mythology.