Original ‘Salem’s Lot’ Star Lance Kerwin Has Passed Away at 62

Actor Lance Kerwin, best known to horror fans for playing Mark Petrie in Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot (1979), has passed away at just 62 years old, Variety reports this afternoon.

“An autopsy to determine the cause of death is being conducted, according to his daughter Savanah,” Variety reports.

Lance Kerwin was born on November 6, 1960 in Newport Beach, California, and he began his career as a prolific child actor in the early-mid 1970s. It was just a few years after his on-screen debut in the TV series “Emergency!” that Kerwin landed the role of young Mark Petrie in Salem’s Lot, the original mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s classic vampire story.

Lance Kerwin’s other credits throughout the 1970s include “Little House on the Prairie,” Reflections of Murder, “Gunsmoke,” Escape to Witch Mountain, and “Wonder Woman.”

Post-Salem’s Lot, Kerwin appeared in The Boy Who Drank Too Much, A Killer in the Family, Enemy Mine, “Faerie Tale Theatre,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “The New Lassie,” and Outbreak (1995).

His most recent appearance was in the 2022 film The Wind & the Reckoning.

Kerwin is survived by his five children: Savanah, Fox, Terah, Kailani, and Justus.