For long time fans of Stephen King, a rather severe case of deja vu has been going about lately concerning adaptions of his earliest novels. You see, after going through the first wave of King adaptations that took us through the entirety of the 80s, it seems that the cycle has begun all over again as remakes of those movies have started to spring up everywhere like some sort of creepy weed. We’ve had a glossy Carrie remake, a glossy Children Of The Corn one, a Firestarter one, a Pet Sematary one and, of course, an It one that all landed with varied results. Well guess what, we’ve now got a Salem’s Lot one too that’s been trapped in the suffocating coffin of delayed release syndrome for two whole years, that’s inly now finally been released.
But can the guy who made Annabelle Comes Home manage to do justice to what is considered one of King’s scariest novels? That drawn out period of release certainly isn’t helping matters, but join me now as we whip out our glowing crosses in an attempt to have faith…
Author Ben Mears has returned to his home town of Jerusalem’s Lot in order to do some research on his troubled childhood and while there’s the usual squinted looks and grumbled insults about the writer being an outsider, he manages to spark up a budding relationship with Susan Norton who yearns to shrug off her overbearing mother and leave the Lot for Boston. However, while life goes on in the sleepy town, darkness is about to intrude thanks to Straker, a strange, European man who has just opened an antique shop and moved into the long abandoned Marsten House that has a long an typically questionable history due to a string of bad shit that’s occurred within its walls over the years.
Well, it’s about to continue, because Straker’s “associate”, a monstrous, ancient vampire named Kurt Barlow, has chosen to mold the clueless people of Jerusalem’s Lot into his own image by first feasting on a couple of local boys and then letting his “infection” take things from there. However, as vampirism slowly spreads through the place, claiming more victims by the day, a small group of people mamage to notice that their town is gradually dying, citizen by citizen.
Of course, Ben and Susan are two of them and they’re soon joined by plucky young magic enthusiast, Mark Petrie, jovial schoolteacher Matt Burke and the no nonsense Dr. Cosy as the vampire threat soon starts to roll over all of their friends and neighbours turn them in to animalistic, supernatural killers. With only the daylight and rudimentary vampire lore to aid them, the rapidly dwindling group of survivors have to figure out how to end this infection at the source, but even if they can manage to get their way to Barlow through the glittering fangs that wait for them in the dark, can they actually stop a being so powerful?
There’s a lot to admire about Gary Dauberman’s take on one of Stephen King’s most famous novels, but it’s attempt to cram down a dense book into a flick that barely tickles the taint of a two hour runtime. Part of the reason that King’s book have such resonance is that he can accurately sketch out the intricacies of small town life in a way that feels realistic and intimate that make the inevitable destruction of it all the more terrifying; however, to pull this off correctly with a moving image, you need adequate room for the world to breathe in order to juggle all the characters you need. Tobe Hooper understood this when he adapted the book in 1979 to thrilling effect, which is why he attempted to deliver legitimate scares with all the limitations that came with TV of that era and later, in 2004, the Mikael Solomon version gave itself 181 minutes to play with in order to better nail the scale and detail that comes with the territory.
But with a hefty 80 minutes less, Dauberman has set himself an impossible task which makes the fact that it’s landed in most territories on a streaming platform actually incredibly frustrating as that is the perfect playground for a three hour horror movie that requires no financial risk. However, while the results are a pale refection of the source material, Salem’s Lot ’24 actually proves to be a fun – if inessential – addition to the King cannon.
Obviously a command filtered down from the studio to gut the fucking guts out of this thing to make it tight as possible, but the cost is thatvwe get virtually no sense of the town as a living, breathing entity and we breeze through all the character stuff at the speed of a vampire attempting the 100-meter dash and we never really get a chance to care about the townfolk before their red blood cell count drops alarmingly low. Also, we never truly manage to get a feel for Lewis Pullman’s Ben Mears either whose vanilla hero is weirdly sidelined by the action when he should be leading it and his growing relationship with Makenzie Leigh’s Susan never manages to get the traction needed to make the finale as gut wrenching as it should be. Also horribly under served is the character of Father Callahan who many King fans know has a shelf life that goes far beyond that of the Lot as he pops up later in the author’s grand opus, The Dark Tower, so to short change a character with so much importance to this story and beyond is a little jarring. Weirdly enough, the character who gets the least love is Pilou Asbæk’s Straker, who goes from being Barlow’s villainous mouthpiece to barely registering at all and fans of the book will most likely find this the most egregious ommission of all.
Of course, with the human drama being so firmly fast tracked in favor of the horror, one of the characters who manages to manage quite well is Jordan Preston’s Mark, who goes rapidly from a young horror nut into a capable, grizzled, survivor in a way that makes you feel that he should be the main character and any film that has Alfre Woodard standing in the doorway of a church, brandishing a glowing crucifix can’t be all bad, right? So with the character stuff in the wind, it’s down to the horror stuff to carry the load and it’s ultimately here that Dauberman manages to find his feet, delivering some legitimately slick imagery and shots that adds some of the mystique back into the bloodsucker genre. I love the fact the crosses glow in the presence of vamps like Sting from Lord Of The Rings and the look of Barlow sits somewhere neatly between Count Orlock and the vampires from Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain. However, while an imaginative climax set at a drive-in that sees the vamps using their cars as make shift coffins is awesome (if illogical), there’s a real feeling that Dauberman is trapped between finding his own vision, honoring King and trying to update as many iconic set pieces of Tobe Hooper’s version he possibly can – and while scenes like little Danny Glick taps on Mark’s window still seem creepy a hell, more seasoned King fans will no doubt find it all too familiar.
While a longer cut undoubtedly exists somewhere, Dauberman’s long delayed Salam’s Lot manages to keep your attention, but at its core it’s nothing more than 30 Days Of Night-lite – and we all know how much vampires hate the light.
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