Salem’s Lot

A Stephen King town is always damned long before the vampires, werewolves, ghosts or cursed cars reveal themselves. 

King — a survivor of small town life — always understood the beating heart of little villages to be cruelty, racism and generational abuse. In his stories these problems exist alongside the few poor souls trying to be righteous in the land of the wicked. 

However, King had pages and pages and ever more pages to show us every sin and crime. He can build characters up, reveal their quirks, announce their fears and then knock them off the board whenever he got ready. 

But movies have limited time and space. A truly faithful translation of Salem’s Lot would require a multipart miniseries and would probably result in boredom. I haven’t seen Toby Hooper’s miniseries version from 1979 so I can’t comment. 

But I can say that the first half of writer turned director Gary Dauberman’s bite at Salem’s Lot is slow. 

It’s not boring, because it’s doing what it needs to do, but any audience member over say 12 already understands what’s going on and doesn’t need the well trod lore around vampires explained. 

But the opening is all plot and lacks character work as it rushes from one scare to the next. 

In the book Father Callahan’s fate seemed like the crux of the story. Here it happens note for note but the results just don’t linger like they should. 

There is also a whole section about the nature of a haunted house that ties into the main character’s past that is dropped as well.

Instead of a deep dive into characters we get … music. There is a harmonica that becomes important and effective use of Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown. King always wrote about music and used snippets of lyrics to open his books or at the beginning of each chapter to help set certain moods. The good directors bring that over to his best adaptations too. 

Sundown is a great choice for a vampire movie. I didn’t get tired of it even on the third or fourth go round. 

We also get Alfre Woodard delivering lines about vampires in a way that only Alfre Woodard can. It’s also great to see character work from Billy Camp and William Sadler. 

Hand them a juicy role and you can just sit back and get comfy. I smiled every time Camp lit a pipe or Sadler delivered another line about how all of society is headed down into destruction. 

Jordon Preston Carter is electric as a kid turned vampire hunter who understands the rules of the game and refuses to be bullied or talked down to by clueless adults. 

Lewis Pullman and Mackenzie Leigh do what they can with the bland main characters. But they don’t make much of an impression. 

Neither does Barlow, who is presented here as not much more than a creepy face and special effects. His servant Straker somehow makes even less of an impression. 

I remember King writing that with Salem’s Lot that he obviously wanted to do Dracula but that it was also informed by the gross out vampires he discovered in the horror comics of his youth. 

And I’ll tell you, as I keep considering this movie, I think the worst thing that happened to King is that he became respectable. 

Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption proved to even his harshest critics, that he was capable of high art. And then Frank Darabount made one of the greatest movies ever out of it. 

And then, slowly but surely, Hollywood has made a cottage industry out of tasteful adaptations of King’s novels. 

But there is a fine line between tasteful and bloodless and this movie just doesn’t have enough fangs