'Salem's Lot

The archetypal haunted house represents unfinished business. Ghosts walk its halls; it’s walls—as Ben Mears says—hold old unhealed traumas. The Marsten House contains Ben’s unresolved feelings about death. He left ’salem’s Lot as a child without fully coming to grips with what he saw in the house.

The house is a marker for the unfinished business of Ben’s childhood. He remembers his summer in ’salem’s Lot as idyllic, but above it all broods the Marsten House, as if a child’s summer is always haunted by the fear of growing up.

The Marsten House also represents the potential for evil to fester—whether the house is the source of the evil or just the eruption of underlying evil under the skin of the world. The residents of the Lot go about their lives as if the house had no impact on them, but they seem to be subliminally aware of its poisonous influence.

The science-versus-supernatural motif is typical of the Gothic genre. Most of the vampire hunters come to accept the supernatural surprisingly easily, but they all come to it from different directions. Ben’s belief comes both from an imaginative and literary mind and his own childhood experience.