SALEM’S LOT (2024)

Delayed several years, Gary Dauberman’s version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot is now going straight to streaming in the US, and only a few countries (including the UK, where I saw it) are getting a cinema release. But King fans in parts of the world where the new Salem’s Lot (even posters are inconsistent on whether its title should, like the book, start with an apostrophe) is confined to the small screen, can be reassured they aren’t missing much. Indeed, they’d be better advised to seek out the relatively chilling 1979 miniseries from Tobe Hooper than waste time with this pedestrian, unscary adaptation that manages to be simultaneously rushed and tedious.

That is, of course, a problem with many screen versions of King’s work. His novels are mostly long and packed with characters and incidents, a lot of it serving to build up a believable world into which horror can be inserted, rather than to develop the main narrative. Filmmakers who try to get it all in find they have no time to let characters and scenes breathe: all they can do is hurry from one thing to the next, and in the process lose the atmosphere which is King’s greatest strength. It’s no accident that the best King adaptations tend to be based on shorter novels (Carrie), narratively simpler ones (Misery), or short stories (Stand By Me). Nor is it any surprise that the two TV adaptations of Salem’s Lot—Hooper’s and another in 2004—worked better than this new version; they had three hours to play with, where this comes in under two.

Even moreso than most of King’s tales, Salem’s Lot doesn’t stand up well to being hurried. The torpid, dead-end mood of the small town in which a vampire arrives, the reluctance of the townsfolk to recognise that something is very wrong, and the eventual almost resigned acceptance that the undead is real—these, as much as the vampire himself, are what make Salem’s Lot so powerful, and for King the analogy between an economically dying small town and a dying one was intentional and important. The fact the vampire’s human assistant opens an antique shop as a cover is no accident: it’s the kind of tourist-oriented business that crops up in towns that have lost their long-established blue-collar employment base.

The vampire in King is a symptom of decline as much as a cause, yet another outsider comes to take what he can from a community, without a care for the people trying to hang on to it. Indeed, the word “vampire” is not even used until almost halfway through the novel.

Not so in Dauberman’s film, though. While the storyline is much the same as King’s, only slightly cut back, he—unlike King—exposes the premise in full from the beginning. The opening sequence shows shipping documents and a map; a bloodstain spreads across the Atlantic, from London to the east coast of the United States (the vampire of Salem’s Lot, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, travels by sea). The film cuts to a close-up of a coffin arriving by truck at a large, old home in Maine (looking very like it’s based on the Psycho house), heavily accentuated by dramatic music.

Very soon we even see the face of the vampire, clearly based on Reggie Nalder’s in the Hooper version, which in turn drew on Max Schreck’s visage from F.W Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). Of course, any viewer of a Salem’s Lot adaptation nowadays probably knows already it’s a vampire tale—so it’s not going to be a surprise as it might have been in the ’70s—but spelling out so early where he keeps his coffin, and showing us exactly what he looks like, isn’t conducive to suspense.

Now, as we start meeting the main human characters, it becomes clear it’s the 1970s (probably the autumn of ’75, judging by the New England leaves and the programme at the local drive-in). Central among them is Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), a local boy who left the town to become a successful writer but has just returned to research his next book. Audiences familiar with the novel will pick up on clues that Ben’s book is going to be about a terrifying experience he had in the same long-deserted house as a child, though this backstory of his (and his hometown’s history) is less developed by Dauberman than by King. That, at least, is a sensible omission from the adaptation: the story can stand up without it.

Looking for somewhere to live, Ben meets Susan (Makenzie Leigh), a local realtor’s assistant; they quickly fall for each other. Further characters, including a high-school teacher (Bill Camp), a doctor (Alfre Woodard), and Catholic priest Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey), are gradually introduced as the vampire’s predations begin. Several children are prominent too—most importantly young Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter), who, along with Ben, Susan, the teacher, the doctor, and the priest, will eventually form a vampire-killing team—and the famous scene from the Hooper version of the boy-turned-vampire Danny (Nicholas Crovetti) hovering at an upstairs window is repeated, but to less creepy effect.

The literal-mindedness of the opening persists. We not only see the vampire’s first victim abducted by his human assistant Straker (Pilou Asbæk) but also then, needlessly, see Straker deliver him to the house. The dialogue even spells out the undead agenda: “The master needs a sacrifice before he can begin to transform the town to his image.” There is no room for fear of the unknown because there is no unknown.

What interest Salem’s Lot does have mostly comes from the visuals and the cast. It’s nicely lit and photographed by the director of photography Michael Burgess, though an extended silhouette scene and a couple of overly clever match cuts (from opening a book to opening a sandwich, for example) draw a bit too much attention to themselves. The acting is generally not nearly as bad as the film itself, either, and the cast makes the most of the limited opportunities for normal human conversation before characters get lost in the hurry to include as much narrative incident as possible. Pullman and Leigh, an old-fashioned hero and heroine, are both likeable; Camp as the schoolteacher is always watchable, and this outing is no different; Hickey renders the familiar stock character of the self-doubting priest plausibly, and Carter—who’s now 16 but comes across successfully as much younger—injects much-needed life into many scenes.

Unfortunately, major overacting from Debra Christofferson as Susan’s mum and from Woodard as the doctor doesn’t help with credibility, and nor does Asbæk as Straker: there’s something effectively unpleasant (a hint of sadistic sexuality?) about him at a few moments, but at other times he seems to belong in What We Do in the Shadows (2014) rather than a serious vampire tale. (Though King’s novel is populist, it certainly is serious too.) Several passages not featuring Straker also feel like they’ve strayed from a horror-comedy: Mark reading up on vampire-killing techniques beneath his bed sheets, for example, or a glaringly bad scene where characters are trying to ward off a vampire using medical equipment. They have the bright idea of making a crucifix from tongue depressors, but then can’t find the surgical tape to fix them together. Yes, seriously, and the very 1970s way that operative crucifixes (as well as vampires’ eyes) glow throughout Salem’s Lot also makes other confrontations with the unutterable darkness seem a little ridiculous.

Back in February 2024, King tweeted that this version of Salem’s Lot was “old-school horror filmmaking: slow build, big payoff”, adding that it was “not like it’s embarrassing, or anything”. His enthusiasm seems rather lukewarm, and rightly so. The build-up is certainly slow, and while there are (at last) a few moments of excitement and surprise at the climax, they come far too late to engage us with the storyline. Even more important for a horror movie, there is—with very few exceptions, notably a brief scene of vampires swarming a treehouse and another of them massing on a nighttime street—a complete lack of dread. There were even some chuckles in the cinema where I saw Salem’s Lot, and they weren’t, I suspect, at the movie’s own occasional self-referential humour (a “No Drinking in Cars” sign at the drive-in).

Dauberman comes with decent horror credentials: he wrote or co-wrote the Annabelle series, the original The Nun (2018), and both the adaptations of King’s It (2017, 2019), which were not quite satisfying but at least were well-made. This, though, isn’t. It should be added in Dauberman’s defence that he’s claimed, in an interview, that his original vision for the movie extended to three hours; perhaps with all that time, he could have done much more justice to the filmic potential of King’s novel. But as it stands, this is surely one of the worst King adaptations to reach either the big or the small screen, which is saying something.

USA | 2024 | 114 MINUTES | 2.35:1 • 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Gary Dauberman.
writer: Gary Dauberman (based on the novel by Stephen King).
starring: Lewis Pullman, Makenzie Leigh, Jordan Preston Carter, Alfre Woodard, Bill Camp & John Benjamin Hickey.