There are two schools of thought when it comes to adapting Stephen King novels for the screen: First, there’s the approach that Stanley Kubrick took in The Shining (1980), using the source material as a starting point and allowing the cinematic interpretation to mutate into its own monster. But there’s also the strategy that director Lewis Teague adopted in Cujo (1983) and Cat’s Eye (1935), remaining as faithful as possible to both the plotlines and spirit of King’s original work. It’s this latter option that the team behind Salem’s Lot (2024) appear to have settled on.
Coming Home to Stephen King’s Maine with Salem’s Lot (2024)
Writer-director Gary Dauberman sticks fairly close to King’s original story in which writer Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) undertakes research for his new novel by returning to Jerusalem’s Lot, the small town in Maine he left as a child.
Little does Mears know, however, he isn’t the only new arrival in ‘The Lot’ and he will soon have to contend with the Bram Stoker-inspired vampire that has commandeered a dilapidated mansion and is gradually converting the town’s inhabitants into the undead.
Gary Dauberman’s movie has no ambitions to transform King’s work, or even to add anything terribly new to the horror movie lexicon. Instead, his Salem’s Lot is refreshingly old-fashioned. There is no desperation to set new gore and body count records, no meta self-awareness and winks to the audience, and no contorted attempts to subvert expectations and reinvent genre conventions.
What Salem’s Lot does do, however, is to truly nail the look and feel of a Stephen King story.
Firstly, it understands the visual nature of King’s writing and delights in resurrecting the famous iconography: the Maine scenery and gabled architecture, the dusty antique stores, the redneck bars, the dog-eared paperbacks and 1950s horror posters. Even the original novel’s cover design makes a welcome reappearance. As soon as the writer-protagonist returns to his New England home town and witnesses the looming Gothic mansion, lazy high street, and wooded outskirts, audiences reared on Stephen King novels might feel as if they too have come home.
A Period Piece That Understands the Era
The 1970’s setting helps transport those audiences ever further into the familiar embrace of a Stephen King story. Thankfully, Salem’s Lot has not followed other recent adaptations of classic King novels in updating the action to the modern day.
Stephen King has never stopped writing but, for the most hardcore fans he refers to as his “constant readers,” his work will always be synonymous with the ‘70s and ‘80s settings of his most iconic novels.
Part of Salem’s Lot’s charm is the opportunity to once again watch a King story unfold against a backdrop of polyester shirts, boxy Oldsmobiles, and drive-in movie theatres. All of this is enhanced even further by Michael Burgess’ superb cinematography, which lends the picture the kind of nostalgic glow that King’s early novels have come to possess themselves.
Salem’s Lot (2024) Remembers the Spotlight Is Meant for the Average Not the Aberrant
Perhaps the most crucial element of any Stephen King story, however, is not its visual elements, or even its villains, but its human characters. For a writer so obsessed with the inhuman and the monstrous, King has always been motivated by a fundamental faith in regular people. The author is, at heart, a humanist – which explains why he so despised the cold, cynical nightmare that was Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Unlike Kubrick’s film, Salem’s Lot shares Stephen King’s belief in the average man and woman.
The likeable group of strangers who assemble to defeat the movie’s evil are a classic King motif. There may be darkness — and it may be very dark indeed — but in the final telling the good will outweigh the bad. When decent folk come together they can overcome whatever evil has wandered into town. This is what the filmmakers have attempted to capture in Salem’s Lot – while the vampires are cold blooded, that flowing through the heroes’ veins is still very warm.
But Salem’s Lot (2024) is Not Without Its Flaws
There are some themes in Salem’s Lot (2024) which go woefully unexplored. At one point the film suggests, intriguingly, that the vampire invasion is symbolic of the town’s more general downfall, but this is barely touched upon elsewhere.
There was a missed opportunity here to explore one of the central threads running through King’s novels. In the writer’s best works there is always the suggestion that the real evil is not the demonic creature but the decaying, small town communities that allowed it to thrive.
In It for example, the villain Pennywise is not just a murderous clown but a manifestation of the paranoid New England town he has made home. In Stephen King’s novels, the vampires and werewolves may be doing the killing but it is the wider community that is providing them with their energy.
Despite alluding to it briefly, we never really get a sense of this in Salem’s Lot.
The town looks less like a breeding ground for monsters than something the Maine tourist board might have dreamt up. Ultimately, the movie is too nostalgic for its 1970’s setting to suggest that the small town and its social malaise might be the deeper and more underlying evil.
Instead of becoming a character in its own right, Jerusalem’s Lot is rarely anything more than an attractive backdrop – meaning that the vampire in Salem’s Lot remains just a vampire, rather than the collective sum of the community’s fears and prejudices, rising from its subconscious in physical form.
Worst of all, this is clearly a movie that has been butchered in the editing room after a tortured post-production. Against director Gary Dauberman’s wishes, the picture has been condensed into a two-hour cut and much of the complexity of King’s original novel has been left on the editing room floor.
Alongside this are a few awkward interactions between the cast, the occasional piece of clunky dialogue, and a rather muted finale that limps home to the finish line – the story eventually dies with a whimper, rather than the full blown, blood soaked, chest-bursting implosion it needed to.
Mainstream Audiences May Shrug, But Stephen King’s “Constant Readers” Will Smile
Nevertheless, none of the issues in Salem’s Lot (2024) prove to be a stake to the heart and this is still a picture that will draw maniacal grins from the author’s devoted followers, even if it struggles to find a more mainstream audience.
For the most insatiable King fans who were bitten by his novels long ago and are still in thrall to the head vampire’s power, Salem’s Lot might be exactly the dose of fresh blood they needed.
Where Salem’s Lot (2024) Is Streaming Now:
If you decide to watch or rent Salem’s Lot (2024) with any of the JustWatch affiliate buttons below, you’ll be helping to support HorrorFam.com at zero additional cost to you!
Images from Salem’s Lot for this review were purchased via MovieStillsDB and CineMaterial.
