Flasz On Film

The 1975 novel ‘Salem’s Lot, which solidified Stephen King’s stature as a strong voice in the space of genre writing, was an outstanding success that immediately garnered the attention of the movie industry keen to make some moolah on the back of its popularity.  

It was turned into a two-part miniseries directed by Tobe Hooper in 1979, which was also shortened to a two-hour movie version shown in some jurisdictions. It then spawned a sequel directed by Larry Cohen, titled A Return to Salem’s Lot, though the movie bore little relation to the source material. And then, in 2004, TNT commissioned another two-part miniseries based on King’s novel, starring Rob Lowe, Rutger Hauer and Donald Sutherland. However, up until now, nobody has attempted to willingly turn King’s ‘Salem’s Lot into a standalone movie. And now we can see, clear as day, why that is.  

The new adaptation of the novel was announced as far back as 2019 with Gary Dauberman (Annabelle, The Nun) set to write and direct it under the producing patronage of James Wan himself. We did, however, have to go through the COVID pandemic in the intervening years, which naturally delayed the project, however, the movie was allegedly complete in 2022… and then it was pushed back… before it was shelved by the studio until it was unceremoniously dumped on Max in October 2024, with some countries (like the UK) deciding to release it theatrically. Understandably, there has been a bit of speculation surrounding the release of this movie—why are WB shelving this? why have they decided to slam it on Max without as much as a how do you do?—especially since as far back as 2022, Stephen King himself released a bunch of tweets offering his endorsement for the movie. He said this adaptation had a “feel of Old Hollywood”, whatever that means, and called it muscular and involving.  

Look, I have seen this movie, and you can easily tell from the star rating adorning the top of this text how I feel about it. Equally, I feel incredible respect towards King and his opinions, which puts me in a state of cognitive seizure because I can’t honestly imagine why King would like it, especially because—as I shall outline in a second—Gary Dauberman’s film not only fails to capture the spirit of the novel, but openly acts as though it didn’t want to do so in the first place. Which means that either the filmmaker had no idea what he was doing while adapting the novel and King plays ball because he knows genre movies need all the support they can get (and that there’s a paycheck at the end of it all for him in it too), or I am the one who has no idea what the book was about. Which is possible, yet unlikely… because—in the immortal words of Jon Voight’s character of Paul Serone from the 1997 anti-masterpiece Anaconda, I know what I know. 

But then again, I looked again at King’s tweet up close, which reads as follows: “The Warner Bros remake of Salem’s Lot, currently shelved, is muscular and involving. It has the feel of “Old Hollywood,” when a film was given a chance to draw a breath before getting to business. When attention spans were longer, in other words.” 

The son of a gun… Can you see it? 

Although in later tweets King opines on disagreeing with changes made to the story, he isn’t incorrect in here either. And that’s because he isn’t calling the movie an adaptation of his novel. He’s calling it a remake. You don’t remake a book. You remake a movie. Therefore, the frame of reference of his analysis is not how he feels about this movie as a standalone piece, nor is it perhaps how he feels about it in relation to his novel. This statement only makes sense—unless of course King uses the term “remake” so loosely that it means “re-adaptation” in this context, at which point all I can do is throw my hands in the air in exasperation and hand in my badge and gun—if we look at this rendition of ‘Salem’s Lot as a remake of the 1979 miniseries. And even then, I wholeheartedly disagree with the qualitative assessment of it as a muscular and involving movie, despite the fact I also cannot be counted as a fan of the Tobe Hooper adaptation of King’s early masterpiece.  

But at least some decisions made by the Dauberman team make a bit more sense because Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward) looks as though his visage was inspired by the Tobe Hooper version, which was itself inspired by the look of Count Orlok from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Equally, Ben Mears seems partially modelled after David Soul. At the same time, I find it easier to explain—but not excuse—why Dauberman’s ‘Salem’s Lot seems to have completely ditched the main thesis of the novel too. And that’s because Tobe Hooper’s miniseries had already sidelined it to focus his efforts on giving the adaptation a Hammer Horror vibe. Therefore, the idea of a small town disappearing off the map and the truly dark notion that the arrival of a supernaturally evil character of Kurt Barlow (who by the way was described as taking after Bela Lugosi’s Dracula) drew the reader’s attention away from the fact that many of the town’s inhabitants were already cruel and evil on their own terms, was lost in translation. And Gary Dauberman seemed to have been more inspired by Tobe Hooper than King himself, so in order to trim the narrative to fit within the confines of a two-hour movie, he excised this idea completely.  

Therefore, the 2024 take on ‘Salem’s Lot looks as though its narrative had been retold multiple times in a game of telephone, as opposed to being based on the readily available source material. Instead of looking at the novel and attempting to extract what made it great, the filmmaker decided to take instructions from the previous adaptations of the work, perhaps trusting they were passing this information in a lossless format, or maybe simply not caring if they did or did not.  

Now, in the children’s game of telephone, the entire object of the experiment is to teach kids about the ease with which information can be warped, embellished, altered or altogether supplanted when passed through a chain of people tasked with repeating it, all in a fun and accessible way. However, adapting a book that many of us (yours truly included) hold near and dear to their hearts is not an opportunity to play a game of telephone. Not when the book is available, ready to be consulted. It’s just not a good idea to risk pissing off a considerable contingent of book nerds, even if King himself tweets that he likes it… although I am starting to believe he didn’t like it all that much more than he liked the idea of sticking to whatever contractual obligations he may have had.  

Another possibility why this movie so terribly misses the mark is that the artificially imposed parameters of trying to confine the narrative into a two-hour feature film format may have required the filmmakers to trim the narrative considerably. Granted, the book looks as though it had a lot of fat and connective tissue, which might invite a reasonably skilled butcher to sharpen his knife and begin working it the way he would prep a brisket for a day-long treatment in an outdoor smoker. But ‘Salem’s Lot isn’t a brisket either and it takes a real chef to know which bits of fat are superfluous and which are indispensable to the movie retaining its flavour. Problem is that Gary Dauberman, based on what he did to the narrative of the book, is probably still an apprentice butcher. And this movie needed a screenwriter equivalent of Gordon Ramsay who would know instinctively that you simply cannot take out what looks like superfluous bits of the narrative and still see the movie work as intended or at least for it to carry the book’s essence in a detectable form.  

As a result, the Dauberman film is not an adaptation of King’s masterwork. It’s just a vampire movie loosely inspired by the 1979 adaptation of the eponymous novel. And that’s because none—I am being serious here: none whatsoever! —of the character work King peppered the book with was left in the movie. Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) comes back to his hometown for inspiration. Sure. Why? No idea. He wants to rent the Marsten house. OK. So what? Why is the house creepy? Who cares? Susan (Mackenzie Leigh) can tell me all about some of the town residents being a bit nasty, all in the span of five minutes while we hang out with them at a Chekhov’s drive-in. But we never even get to experience the fact the Marsten house loomed over the town with its evil energy. Or that it had a reason to do so. We don’t learn about all the sins and transgressions of the town’s inhabitants. And it mattered in the book. It was a central part of its thesis. In fact, the evil nesting in all those people—completely unrelated to Barlow and Straker (Pilou Asbaek) by the way—probably had something to do with Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) losing his faith. And this concept is only mentioned for a brief second before Barlow kills Callahan! Spoiler, by the way.

It is clear to me that either Gary Dauberman never read the book, or he didn’t understand where its greatness derives from. Or he didn’t think he needed to exert himself with picking up the book and thought that watching Tobe Hooper’s miniseries and trimming it more would suffice. As a result, his take on ‘Salem’s Lot is utterly abysmal and void of direction, not muscular and involving. Sure, as many well-budgeted modern horror films are, it has the look of a classy genre piece and tries to capture the 70s tone. But because the movie doesn’t necessarily know why it’s doing what it’s doing, it all looks performative and inauthentic, like an extended episode of Stranger Things nobody believed in putting together.  

It only goes to show that you can’t hire a butcher to perform a complex surgery and hand them instructions obtained in a game of telephone. What will happen is the butcher with a scalpel will remove the patient’s heart, fail to put it back in and then proceed to scratch their head in embarrassed confusion when the patient doesn’t wake up and is instead pronounced dead. Perhaps this is a gentle reminder that there is a reason why all other adaptations of King’s novel were produced as miniseries, not as feature films. Maybe this isn’t a book you could consider easily adaptable for the big screen without turning the project into a massive gamble because you’d have to either divide into multiple parts and ask people to buy the ticket twice or ask the viewer to sit through a Scorsese-esque experience and risk developing bedsores. For the record, I’d be OK with either of the two options, if the spirit of the novel is maintained, and the appropriate emphasis is placed on capturing the essence of what King was alluding to. Which is not so much that Dracula came to to live in Maine but rather that a supernatural evil came drawn to a place already drenched in evil, a town whose residents were wife-beaters, bullies, violent rapists, peeping toms, jealous brutes, baby-killers and worse. And where that Marsten house was more than an element of iconography, but a symbol of childhood trauma Ben Mears came back to face off against.  

That’s what ‘Salem’s Lot was about. That’s why Father Callahan was losing his faith. That’s why it mattered for Ben Mears to fight against the evil incarnate descended on the town. And that’s what Gary Dauberman wasn’t aware of when he was sharpening his butcher’s knife, preparing to trim the novel like a Sunday brisket.

Unfortunately, in this incarnation, ‘Salem’s Lot is nothing but a husk, a distant echo of a great story. Distorted by multiple iterations of a game of telephone played by other filmmakers taking a punt at adapting King’s work and mutilated horridly by a drunken butcher masquerading as a surgeon who was asked to perform liposuction on the patient but accidentally removed the patient’s heart and brain. Therefore, this may be one of those movies whose title should be found in the Oxford English Dictionary as a visual tongue-in-cheek accompaniment to the definition of “medical malpractice.”