TEAM BARNABAS

With the departure last week of Canadian actor Jonathan Frid...


Monster-of-the-Week: …the obvious choice for this week’s honoree is Barnabas Collins, the conflicted New England vampire antihero of Dan Curtis’ cult-favorite horror soap opera. I mean, of course, the original Barnabas, played by Frid, not Johnny Depp's interpretation in Tim Burton's upcoming Dark Shadows movie.

I could be wrong (if anybody can think of a later example, correct me) but I think Frid may have been the last actor to become a horror star the old-fashioned way, by putting on evening clothes and a cape and fangs…

…instead of a hockey mask or finger knives, the last of the Lugosi-style old-school boogeymen rooted in 19th-Century stage melodrama. The role defined Frid’s relatively short career; within a few years of the soap’s end he’d mostly left showbiz, the occasional theatrical venture or one-man tour excepted.

But for a few years this slight, hollow-cheeked journeyman ham had serious fans, some with ardent crushes on him. Earlier this year, I happened to pick up one of the many Dark Shadows tie-in novels, Barnabas, Quentin and the Grave Robbers…

…and found Barnabas entirely whitewashed into a Gothic-romantic hero.

The character remains a minor cultural icon forty-odd years later. The reason, I think, has less to do with Frid being scary than with the same factor that made Lugosi, Karloff, Chaney, Price, Lee and the rest into stars: He was peculiarly likable, even lovable. In the end, the monsters that last are the ones for which we feel affection.