crying throwing up etc yes you CAAANN thank you. and sorry it took me forever to type up this reply. it is,,,very long i'm so sorry i don't know how not to write essays when asked for a fairly simple explanation.

First of all, let me just say I'm not a pop culture historian and i don't live in the heads of anyone who's adapted Dracula, so I can't say with 100% certainty that any one thing inspired anything else unless it was explicitly stated.

OK! SO! I won't bore you with the entire history of Dark Shadows the television show. All you really need to know was that it was a live-to-tape Gothic soap opera created by a guy named Dan Curtis, who was a huge fan of classic horror (such as Legosi's Dracula films). The show adapted various horror classics like Turning of the Screw and Jane Eyre into a long running narrative about a rich family called the Collins, on the coast of Maine.

Initially the supernatural elements of the show were more subtle; but the show wasn't really landing and when the ratings started to tank around '67 Curtis and the writers decided to do something a little more bold and adapt Dracula. Just like in the book (spoilers for those reading for the first time!!) the vampire, Barnabas Collins, was meant suck some blood, kill some people, and die after wreaking the appropriate amount of havoc.

The thing about loose adaptations and Dark Shadows is that everything about it was made in an extremely adaptable format. The show was filmed live-to-tape every day and scripts usually only written a few weeks in advance; that meant that it gave the writers a lot of wiggle room to react to things the audience responded to well, and cut out things they didn't. And the audience really responded to Barnabas Collins; he was played by Canadian theater actor Jonathan Frid, who brought a lot of humanity to the part despite it being written in a very villainous way.

The writers had a prominent ghost around Collinwood named Josette Dupress who was often referenced in the early parts of the show; so they worked her into the story as having been Barnabas' doomed fiancé, who just happened to look exactly like a local girl named Maggie Evans. This kicked off the "Lucy" part of the plotline, but from here the writers began to deviate from the Dracula storyline. Once it was clear that the vampire was immensely popular (essentially saving the show from cancellation) the writer's began to tweak the character in order to justify keeping him around. They began introducing more human aspects to his character in order to make him more nuanced; one of the most prominent ones being his obsessive need to find and be reunited with Josette.

The show ran for over 1200+ episodes, and was a pop culture phenomena. By the end, Barnabas had firmly established himself as the main character of the series, and the Josette reincarnation plotline had been repeated several times. In 1974, two years after the series end, Curtis would go on to adapt Dracula into a television movie; he borrowed the reincarnated lover plotline from his own television show for that movie. Since then, it's become almost a trend in Dracula adaptations to follow this plot formula; sometimes with Lucy, but most often with Mina.

Not many people know about Dark Shadows these days, but the show had a huge cultural impact in the late 60's. Again, I'm not 100% able to say that every adaptation that features this trope is borrowing from Dark Shadows. Likewise, while a lot of the 'sympathetic vampire' or 'vampire as an affliction/disease rather than a creature of evil' may have have been inspired by something prior to Dark Shadows (Varney the Vampire is something to check out) it definitely helped to popularize the trope and bring it into the modern consciousness. (Sidenote; any adaptation that features 'curing' vampirism through medicine is, most likely, inspired by DS, but I'm not sure how common that one is)

The Madonnas rest high above/ The lion’s head watches the dove/ And in the womb beneath the hill/ A blazing light burns bright and still