"Haunted mansions are seen less and less in Horror as it increasingly leaves its European roots in the Gothic and adapts to American media."

"What about season 1 of American Horror Story? "

It is an interesting blend. It is very much about what the departed want rather than about the oppressive weight of history and tradition on Los Angeles, CA. But it does afford the writers a way to tap into the notion that there is some history, even there.

Interestingly, it is again the Europeans ( namely the Brits ) who tend to take the immortality element of Vampirism as a way to write novels about history. Brian Stableford's book Empire of Fear places Vampires as the ultimate conservatives when faced with the changes wrought by the enlightenment. And Kim Newman's series Anno Dracula are first and foremost historical novels.

"Like the ocean/planet Solaris in Stanislaw Lem's "haunted space-station" novel; the truly alien reveals nothing of itself and is purely a distorted mirror allowing us to be horrified by our reflections."

"This sounds more like Tarkovsky's adaptation than Lem's novel. Lem detested the Tarkovsky movie, accusing Aleksandr Arsenyevich of replacing an intellectual, philosophical story with yet another variation on Crime and Punishment."

To me Tarkovsky's version is a meditation on Guilt, Soderbergh's film is a meditation on Redemption and Lem's novel is a meditation on the incomprehensibility of the Alien; that when we encounter the alien we will understand so little that all we see will be ourselves.

Of course my problem is THAT English translation of the Polish novel from the "original" French. Feh. There ought to be a law against claiming that a translation of a translation is valid.

Dante