Review: Salem's Lot (2024)

Gary Dauberman delivers a defanged version of a Stephen King classic.

There’s a sequence at the end of Salem’s Lot that is a fantastic depiction of Stephen King’s ability to use Americana to breathe new life into old horror tropes. It’s a climactic showdown at a drive-in movie theater, as an army of vampires wakes up not from coffins but out of the trunks of their parked cars. It’s riveting, drawing suspense through the clicking open of hatches as the sun quickly sets and the heroes scramble to survive. 

It’s such a great evocation of King’s work that I was shocked to remember it’s not in the book at all. Rather, it’s original to the film, a compelling and creepy sequence imagined by writer-director Gary Dauberman. It works so well that it’s baffling that the rest of the film is so inert. 

Aside from its climax, the third adaptation of King’s 1975 classic – following two TV miniseries – is largely faithful to the original story, down to its 1970s setting. Writer Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) returns to the titular Maine town where he grew up to research a new book. He arrives around the same time residents of The Lot go missing, disappearances we’ll quickly learn are due to an invasion of a vampire named Barlow and his familiar, Straker, who have purchased the town’s requisite creepy house on a hill and opened a local antique shop.

There’s an inherent challenge to delivering an adaptation of Salem’s Lot in a way that feels fresh – even without the existence of two previous adaptations – because King’s original novel was deliberately derivative, reimagining Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1970s New England. The reason the book is still chilling is due to the writer’s knack for imagining the sordid secrets of small town America and his gleeful sprinkling of elements from horror comics and soap operas. 

Dauberman’s film, recently released to Max, feels like a Cliff’s Notes version, following the basic threads but tossing the details that made the story stick. Rather than a two-part miniseries, it clocks in at under two hours, and much of what it loses are the side plots and texture that turned a traditional vampire tale into a story of small-town rot and America in decline. Gone are the book’s cheating wives, abusive husbands and mourning families, replaced by tossed-off exposition that gives the appearance of community without creating the weight of King’s story, where vampirism was imagined as an epidemic overtaking the town. Ben’s traumatic childhood encounter at the cursed Marsten House is ignored – except for one line that is delivered and then completely forgotten – and such a crucial location in the original story is relegated to being just another abandoned house. Most damningly, Father Callahan, a priest with a faith crisis, is reduced to vampire fodder; the movie brings up his alcoholism only briefly and never delves into his faith struggle, robbing him of King’s tragic ending for something more pedestrian. 

While these subplots might not be necessary for the overarching story of “fighting vampires in a small town,” they’re very much crucial to the things that make Salem’s Lot what it is. Without them, the film relies a soggy center. Pullman does what he can as Ben Mears, but the truth is that the protagonist, a stand-in for the author, is a drip. King has always been best when writing flawed characters, but Mears is pretty straight-laced, and the film glosses over any of the personal demons he’s fighting. Likewise, Mackenzie Leigh’s depiction of Susan removes much of the feistiness of her novel counterpart, and the character is basically relegated to just being an obligatory sidekick and love interest. 

More interesting are the supporting characters like Bill Camp’s English teacher, Matt Burke, the first adult in town to understand what’s happening. Camp gives good gruff, and I bought him as a small-town intellectual who’s embarrassed to begin suspecting the supernatural at play. Alfre Woodard brings wry humor as the town coroner and resident skeptic, and it’s always a joy to see William Sadler show up in King adaptations; his role here is smaller than in The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist, but he gives the town sheriff a palpable world weariness. Jordan Preston Carter is fun as Mark Petrie, a monster-loving kid who goes out to fight the vampires on his own; if the character is the best-written and portrayed in the film, it’s likely due just as much to Carter’s light performance as it is to the fact that Dauberman co-wrote the script for It, the child-centric first part of which is one of the better recent King adaptations. And while Alexander Ward is lackluster as Barlow, I enjoyed Pilou Asbæk’s flamboyance as Straker, who could easily bunk alongside Lazlo from TV’s What We Do in the Shadows. 

These are good performances, but the time constraints leave the characters too lightly sketched. And while it’s enjoyable to watch the team come together and fight vampires – I particularly liked Woodard’s “oh hell no,” when a corpse rose from its examination table – in the end, they really aren’t anything more than vampire chow, and it never feels like Salem’s Lot is a full town with a slimy underbelly (it doesn’t help that the town looks empty and underpopulated even before the vampires get to work). The bones of King’s story are there, but the flesh and heart are missing. 

Which is a shame because Dauberman understands the value of atmosphere and knows how to build a frightening sequence. He approaches this as a bloody, fast-paced ‘70s B-movie. The cinematography is filled with bold colors, including deep red for blood and evocative greens and blues. There’s a sequence where two kids walk home, stalked by someone in the woods, and Dauberman films it completely in silhouettes in front of rich colors. A child sacrifice seen through a hole in a sack is chilling, and while the glowing eyes and translucent form of the vampires looks a bit silly up close, there are several eerie shots of vampires hanging out around rooftops across the town. The famous sequence where Mark is visited by an undead friend never hits the heights of Tobe Hooper’s adaptation, but it’s still plenty eerie. And while he’s never really a memorable threat, I like the physical depiction of Barlow as a monster, not the suave and seductive depiction of a vampire we too often get. At times, the low budget hinders these scenes’ effectiveness – CGI fire rarely looks realistic – but Dauberman largely delivers the goods in the vampire attacks. 

In terms of Stephen King adaptations, Salem’s Lot has too many things working for it to end up among the worst of the worst. But that makes it more frustrating. Dauberman proved with It that he understands how to bring King’s stories to life (although It: Chapter Two might be evidence against that), and that finale is an improvement over the house-bound showdown of the original tale. But it still can’t escape being a pale imitation of a classic already adapted better more than 40 years ago (that classic is also on Max right alongside this one; choose wisely).

Also on streaming

I had the chance to catch up with Kevin Smith’s latest, The 4:30 Movie. I’m going to chat about it a bit on an upcoming We’re Watching Here, so I’ll keep my thoughts brief. But I wanted to call it out because I really do think it’s the best thing Smith’s made in a long time — and I can say that without it being faint praise.

I thought Clerks 3 showed Smith could tackle serious material well, but the film still undercut itself with jokes a bit too much. The 4:30 Movie is a more lighthearted and full-on comedy, but the coming of age story’s a good fit for Smith. In telling a story of three teenage boys hanging out at the movies one afternoon in 1986, Smith leans on his hallmarks — dudes hanging out, chatting about pop culture, and fighting against growing up. But it’s charming, funny and sweet. And while it’s openly semiautobiographical, filtering it through fictional characters keeps it from feeling too much like more of Smith’s self-mythologizing (up until a final shot that made me groan).

Like I said, I’m going to chat a bit more with this with Perry, and we’ll hopefully have that for you early next week. But if you’re a fan of Smith, it’s nice to see him take a bit of a step forward.