Salem's Lot (2023)

October 9, 2024 4:56 PM

Author Ben Mears returns to his childhood home of Jerusalem's Lot only to discover his hometown is being preyed upon by a bloodthirsty vampire.

Tonight's Halloween theme was Fancy Draculas. We chose this and wow, was it ever--as the kids say--"mid."

Now I admit that I haven't read the book in probably 20+ years, and I remember seeing the OG miniseries as a repeat on broadcast television, and fuzzily remember the Rob Lowe miniseries.

This is a very weirdly paced inert movie. We are asked to hit certain emotional beats and denouements too quickly. Nothing in the movie feels earned. Now I blame this less on the script and the director and more on the fact that the novel is a classic King doorstop. In the book, you spend a lot of time in the town and you find out why Barlow has relocated there. In the movie, there's a couple of throwaway lines that don't ever really add up to a reason.

The movie is slow AND too fast. I can't quite explain it better than that. Everyone does the best they can with the material they're given, but to us, the standout actor was the kid playing Mark Petrie, Jordan Preston Carter. He's a badass. His character is the best part.

I dunno. I just think you can't tell this King novel in a movie. I don't mind changes to the source material but it just didn't click? There's some nice minor scares, a quite fun use of a drive-in, and a banger of a needle drop, but alas, this Salem's Lot is a very big MEH.

posted by Kitteh (14 comments total)

I was pretty excited for yet another 'Salem's Lot until I saw this was IT people making it. Talk about mid (or perhaps I should say MID, Chapters 1 and 2). I'll get around to it. I at least like that they kept the '70s.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:27 PM on October 9

The idea of vampires using their cars as coffins at a drive-in is such a perfect Stephen-King-esque blend of horror and Americana that I bet King is kicking himself for not having thought of it 50 years ago.

I did enjoy that climactic scene, and also
The one where they stand vigil over the dead bereaved mother at the morgue. But you know they were cutting the story down to the bone when they couldn’t even fit in the iconic scene of Hubie Marsten’s hanging corpse.
posted by ejs at 8:21 PM on October 9 [4 favorites]

I enjoyed the heck out of this. It's not better than the '70s miniseries, but it's better than many, many vampire flicks. SL 2024 has nothing of the pacing of the book, and I do mean nothing. That's okay by me, though, insofar as I think translation means bringing things to new audiences with different expectations. I do agree with the criticism I've seen in other places that this would have been great as a single-season miniseries.

After watching this and being intrigued as to how it held up, I just finished rewatching the miniseries for the first time in maybe 30 years, and wowza, what a different experience. It made me think a lot about what gets added and what gets left out of depictions of past decades. The miniseries is a '70s production of a book set in the '70s, and this '20s production both gives some '70s vibe and... completely muffs a bunch of stuff.

Also, reposting from elsewhere, here's my...

'Salem's Lot, A Ranking
1. 1975 - HC
2. 1976 - Signet MMP 1st
3. 1979 - Miniseries (183 minutes)
4. 2024 - Film
5. [various editions with expurgated content from the novel]
6. 2004 - Miniseries
7. [various cuts of 1979 miniseries]
8. [various later editions reprinting 1975 edition of novel]
9. 1981 - Int'l theatrical version of 1979 miniseries
10. [various stickers, prints, other fan works]
23. 1987 - A Return to Salem's Lot
Not ranked: 1994 BBC radio adaptation (have not listened to)
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:01 AM on October 10 [6 favorites]

cupcakeninja, thanks for your perspective!

Shepherd said he would have liked to seen them use the vampire metaphor for Trumpers (but make it 1976!) or something.

Again, it feels so disjointed. I hate to agree with a studio but I can't see how this would have done any better as a theatrical release. It's not terrible! It's just flat to me. Like, okay so we drop the original reason Ben comes back to town! Fine. But the reason given feels forced? It's mentioned then dropped. So much of it feels rushed to the showdown (which is super anti-climactic, to me).

Honestly I do think they did the best they could with the material for the big screen.
posted by Kitteh at 6:23 AM on October 10 [1 favorite]

(i have to admit i may have howled with laughter in that the crucifixes/crosses glowed like Frodo Baggins' sword Sting in the presence of Orcs)
posted by Kitteh at 6:52 AM on October 10 [4 favorites]

I'm about halfway through it, and I agree that they probably should have made it a miniseries. The book is not a terribly long book, by King's standards (400-odd pages), but it's remarkable in how much and how well it dwells on the town itself, with its various characters and how they interact; the book is titled 'Salem's Lot and not, say, Second Coming (the original title) for a reason. It does seem rushed and a lot of characters have been cut; those characters helped introduce the character of Barlow as he started in on the misfits and loners first (with the exception of the brothers) and gradually grew his flock.

A couple of other complaints that I have is that, while it was interesting that the original miniseries harkened back to Nosferatu in how it portrayed Barlow, I would have appreciated if they'd gone back to something like the portrayal in the book, in which Barlow's appearance seems to be based on Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler. The conversations that he has with his early victims are pretty good, and he's also described as getting younger as he adds victims. Also, I didn't quite buy Lewis Pullman as Ben; I did like that his author portrait on one of the books seems to be based on one of Stephen King's, but he just doesn't seem to have the weight that Ben Mears has in the book.

(tl;dr--they should have kept more of the book's strengths)
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:06 AM on October 10 [1 favorite]

IIRC, Barlow in the books is quite chatty in that "a villain loves a monologue or chin-wag" way. With the exception of Rutger Hauer's portrayal in 2004 miniseries, it's weird that they keep making Barlow pretty feral? Like, how do you work for a vampire that kinda acts like a dog you forget to feed?
posted by Kitteh at 8:08 AM on October 10 [3 favorites]

Supposedly, part of the conflict with WB was that Dauberman actually did make it longer... and they made him cut out more than an hour. No way to know if that would have helped this without seeing that version, though.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:32 AM on October 10 [1 favorite]

Yes to all the above; the pacing is so choppy and loses a lot of the slow-build-of-dread that King does so well.

I rather liked the glowing crosses and I think there was a very practical reason they did that: it makes the moment that Callahan loses his faith visual rather than internal.

Although oof, that moment felt very unearned: is there any indication before this that he's struggling with his faith -- other than the repeated dwelling on his alcoholism? He has an entire scene in which he talks about "the awesome power of the church" -- "it's a force" but then his faith just snuffs out like a candle. Hrrmph. And having Barlow summarily kill Callahan, rather than defiling him, also undercuts that scene; so brief, so inconsequential.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:45 AM on October 10 [2 favorites]

I didn't love the It movies and I thought his scripts for the Conjuring franchise were... fine. So I don't want to come across as Gary Dauberman's personal defender or biggest fan or whatever.

BUT...

1. Why, if WB approved a 180 page script, did they then balk at a three hour runtime? One page = one minute is like page one in the Syd Field book everyone reads.
2. If they decided to forego a theatrical release, then why release the cut version? Horror nerds don't care if it's long. And this version is choppy and jumbled anyway. Add that stuff back in so at least it makes sense and flows.

Whether you like what he made or not, once you're in, you're in. Not a lot of historical examples of "And then we forced the director to cut it to pieces, which everyone agreed totally worked out. [High fives all around.]"
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:38 PM on October 10 [3 favorites]

DOT, I would have been happy to watch a three hour version if it allowed the story to flow better and give the audience a chance to invest in the story and characters!

As I said upthread, it isn't a terrible movie, but ultimately it will be a forgettable one. Shepherd said it was the kind of movie where in a year he won't remember he's seen it. I really liked the actor that played Mark so I will at least remember his refreshing pragmatic gumption.
posted by Kitteh at 2:20 PM on October 10 [1 favorite]

I'm not a 'SLothead -- I read the book, maybe, I think, in high school? So going in, I thought it was fuzzily about a kid who finds out there are vampires living outside town in a trailer park or something.

As mentioned above, I found the whole thing weirdly inert. There were some flourishes I thought showed promise (the brothers walking through the woods, treated like shadow puppet theatre, was cool as hell). But -- maybe as a consequence of the book being overcondensed, studio interference, whatnot -- it felt like it had too many characters, the plot kept herky-jerking forward, and the ending was very unearned.

A few random observations:

After the old timey maps of the intro, and the interior of the first scene being so yellow-lit it was sepia, it took me a long time to realize that the first scene of the movie wasn't set in the 1800s. Two guys in suits, one with a Fancy Accent (what was that?), talking about shipping minutia for, like, five minutes. I thought it was Colonial times! And then Frick and Frack are delivering the coffin in a truck, so I thought it was a hyper-stylized "vampires are timeless so this movie is set in every era at once," and I was like "wow, cool," and then it had to be patiently explained to me that no, the first scene wasn't set 200 years ago, it was just really, really yellow and featured two men in suits talking very stiltedly.

I get that the drive-in car-trunk thing is cool, but... why? The vampires own the town! They are the town! Why in God's name would everyone leave their nice houses and pleasant surroundings and all drive to one place and sleep in a trunk? What happens if they're a family of four, are the trunks just packed to the rafters? "Hey, fellas, we've 100% taken over this town so let's all drive somewhere else and do something really uncomfortable for no reason" just didn't land.

I would have been much, much happier if the English teacher and the plucky kid had made it and Forehead Man were killed off.

Why in the blistering fuck are they not festooned with crosses all the time? "Hey, we've discovered that a simple piece of wood in a shape can destroy these things! Also, a rabies shot cures you if you've get bitten! Now let us go forth and fight them with none of these things!"

And finally: okay, the glowing crosses were pretty cool. But those aren't science crosses. Those are God crosses. I've seen a lot of movies where there is very indirect divine intervention and it works. The wind blows a leaf a certain way. The sun comes out from behind the cloud at the right moment. Was it God, or just good luck? Mystery! But this... so God is giving our heroes exactly enough power to make crosses into weapons that work under very specific circumstances: they must be held, they have a range of about six inches to two feet, they only work in the direction they're facing. It's clearly God doing it. So, uh, fuck you, God. You're clearly already intervening! There's no ambiguity! Why would you callously fuck with these people by giving them a squirt gun to fight a forest fire when you've got a fleet of fire trucks right there? Is it character-building? Fuck you, God! You shithead! If you're gonna intervene, just muck in there and deal with the dang vampires!
posted by Shepherd at 5:11 PM on October 10 [3 favorites]

There's a really funny bit in an Alan Moore comic that lampshades that whole "vampires are so vulnerable to so many things, why aren't they easier to beat?" thing in kind of a hilarious way.

It's set in one of his Top 10 comics, which are basically police procedurals in a city where literally everyone is a superhero. (Bear with me.) One of the super-police is called the Maid; she's basically Joan of Arc and the equivalent of a D&D cleric--she's just really holy. That makes her especially powerful against vampires, which is handy, because the city is undergoing a serious vampire infestation. Things are coming to a head with the vampires planning to ambush all the cops at the local train station, and, just before things start to go down, the Maid disappears. Bad timing, right? Except that the police chief has arranged with her to go to the city reservoir and bless the city's entire water supply.

And then the super-cops turn on the fire hoses.

posted by Halloween Jack at 5:42 PM on October 10 [2 favorites]

I just watched a chunk of the OG miniseries (Max has it), and it's much better; the only thing that I didn't particularly care for was the music, which is almost like a parody of old-fashioned horror movie music at points. Comparing it to this movie is almost a study in the difference between recreating the 1970s decades later and having a movie actually shot during that decade; they even had a grade school bicentennial pageant (with what looked like either real flintlocks used as props or very convincing replicas), and trust me as someone who was there that there's few things more authentically 70s than that. The movie is also stuffed with character actors of the era, and James Mason is creepily effective as a Straker who makes your skin crawl by saying very little.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:41 PM on October 10 [2 favorites]