Salem’s Lot

When author Ben Mears comes back to his childhood home in the search for inspiration for his next book, he discovers that the people in his home town are being turned into blood-sucking vampires.

'Salem's Lot is a 1975 horror novel by Stephen King. His second novel, he was inspired not only by a childhood nightmare, and the politics behind Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also by Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the question: “What would happen if Dracula came to America in the 20th Century?”

Nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1976, and the Locus Award for the All-Time Best Fantasy Novel in 1987, at the time, King said this book was his favorite work of his: "mostly because of what it says about small towns, and how they are kind of a dying organism right now.“ It was first adapted into a two-part miniseries in 1979 on CBS, with Tobe Hooper directing, which had a crappy sequel show up in 1987, and then there was a reboot in 2004 starring Rob Lowe. The novel itself had a huge impact on the American vampire genre in the last two decades of the 20th century too, and is widely considered the inspiration behind films like Fright Night and The Lost Boys, amongst others, as well as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And like Derry and Castle Rock, Jerusalem’s Lot (‘Salem’s Lot to the locals, or simply The Lot) is one of those fictional small towns in Maine that King dreamt up, which appears multiple times in his work, including the central hub of his lore, The Dark Tower series.

It’s got some juice is what I’m saying.

So, it makes sense that Hollywood would try to take another bite at this particular apple, but unfortunately, this time out, they fell far short of an admittedly pretty low bar. Far, far short.

The film opens on the traditional Stephen King author-insert character, and this time, it's known as Ben Mears. Ben is writer who is returning to his hometown to maybe write a new book, and to also do a really bad job of avoiding addressing his childhood trauma.

Almost immediately upon his arrival, two things start to happen. One, people begin to disappear, and then they start to show up dead, and then alive and fanged, or flying and fanged and knocking on second story windows, asking to be let in. Two, Ben meets a local lonely hot girl named Susan. She is smart and hot and she reads his books, so naturally, Susan is immediately in love with Ben and can barely contain herself, because she wants to fuck his brains out so badly, a curse that all aging male writers must bear, let me assure you. This doesn’t quite work out for them, unfortunately, as a whole bunch of sudden vampire-related issues end up pulling their focus away from each other’s genitalia.

Things escalate very quickly from here. as more people vanish and are then turned into vampires. Barely surviving a couple of vampire attacks, Ben and his group of new best friends he just met earlier that day, put their heads together and start to brainstorm. They quickly realize that the arrival of another mysterious newcomer to town–not Ben–who bought the creepy-ass Norman Bates-looking house on the hill above ‘Salem’s Lot, a guy who is also weirdly never around when the sun’s out, might possibly be the root of the vampire epidemic currently plaguing the town.

This man’s name is Kurt Barlow.

Following this quick reveal, it’s even more quickly revealed that Kurt Barlow is a King Shit type of vampire, a Nosferatu-looking kind of bloodsucker who might be older than Christ, and he has moved to ‘Salem’s Lot specifically to build a vampire colony out of its residents.

This is completely understandable, honestly, because sometimes you just want to hang out with people who understand you, and what you’re going through.

Soon enough, Ben and his gang of best friends, turned ill-prepared, wanna-be vampire hunters, find themselves helpless before the quickly encroaching evil as the whole town is overrun by bloodsuckers. There’s lot of blood and screaming after that, some hissing and baring fangs too, not to mention some scampering up and down walls, and a bit of the classic “trying to stay in the quickly fading last ray of the sun as the vampires lurk in the shadows nearby, biding their time.” All the usual classic vampire stuff, just presented in an immense hurry.

In the end, only Ben and the preternaturally intelligent pre-teen, Marc Petrie, manage to escape from ‘Salem’s Lot. As they drive away, they carry vengeance in their hearts, now and forever, the sworn enemies to all suck-heads.

I was rooting for this film to be good.

I love the book. I love a lot of the stuff it influenced. I love the whole idea of Vampire Hunters. The trailer looked good too. Plus, I’m a Stephen King fan. The Stand, It, and The Dark Tower Series are some of my favorite books. But there’s a tradition to acknowledge here, and unfortunately, as any Stephen King fan can tell you, that tradition is that adaptations of Stephen King’s work are usually god damn terrible. Just bad. And most of the time, certainly not all—I’m looking at you 2020 version of The Stand tv show—the reason why these adaptations are so incredibly bad is because they should’ve been a TV show, and not a movie.

The 2024 version of ’Salem’s Lot is no exception.

This film has a look and a feel that really reminded me of After School Specials from the 70s and 80s, as well as the more young adult focused horror of that era. Not The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Halloween or anything like that, think more Escape from Witch Mountain or The Watcher in the Woods. The look, the lighting, the whole style, the dialogue even, it reminded me of these types of films so much, this era of filmmaking so much, that at first I had to wonder if it was being done on purpose, like a deliberate homage? I can’t say for sure either way, but I don’t think this is the case, I think the film is just bad due to bad choices, instead of “bad” on purpose. But even if I’m wrong…

That wouldn’t suddenly make this a good movie.

There’s a super hacky way of doing exposition that is often referred to as the “As you know, Bob” writing style. It can often be found whenever a writer will have, for example, two characters landing on a faraway planet in their rocket, and the writer will have the characters say some shit like: “I’m going to fire up the rocket’s retro-thrusters, which, as you know, Bob, slows the rocket’s descent, allowing us to land safely on the planet’s surface.” It’s tedious and awkward, and incredibly false, as no one talks like that, sharing commonly known knowledge with another person who is a part of the same society and has the same base of societal knowledge. Imagine if someone was to say to you: “Let’s just take my car, which as you know, Bob, has an internal combustion engine, which uses the combustion of a mixture of fuel and air to propel the vehicle.” It’s ridiculous.

But that’s what this whole movie is like.

It’s a good-looking movie, with some cool shots, but other than that, there’s nothing here but a constant dirge of overly-expository dialogue just straight-up explaining the events, or their intended emotional impact, of scenes we just watched, while poorly disguised as conversations. Even background extras do it.

So, yeah… huge problem. It absolutely kills the movie.

But in its defense, this is probably due to the fact that the film has absolutely no time to doddle at all. This film is sprinting from the very moment it starts, running pell-mell downhill, always on the verge of falling ass-over-tea-kettle in its rush to tell its story. And it‘s like this, because like I said, most Stephen King stories aren’t feature-length film type of stories, there's just more necessary story elements than can be fit into a 90 to 120 minutes time frame. 'Salem's Lot is no exception either. This is why the other two attempts to adapt this story were mini-series. That there are two previous versions, and they're both mini-series instead of films, makes the fact that the filmmakers still tried to force this into a feature-length film even more ridiculous. "This time for sure!" I'm sure they shouted. Did they think it just never occurred to the last two productions to try to make the story into a movie? Do they really have no idea how many attempts at a feature-length script there were before those previous productions decided to make a mini-series, even though movies are generally more profitable? Or did they just have their heads up their ass? Whatever the answer, the simple truth is this...

They cut too much, and they cut too deep.

Even at almost two hours, this version feels almost hysterically rushed. Multiple scenes seem to start at the halfway point, as if, in their desperation to get it down to under two hours, the filmmakers had no other option then to lop off the start of random scenes.

Plus, as a result of all this chopping, the question of how much time has passed during the story is unclear. The events of the first hour of the film make it feel like it’s taking place over the course of maybe a week. By the second half, as the town is turned into vampires, maybe two weeks or so has passed, at least, if you go by the piled-up mail, the newspapers on the lawn, or the milk bottles on the porches. The problem with this is, these details very clearly show us that more days have passed then the amount of days that have passed based on the events the main characters are experiencing, like, it's been five days for them, unless they've spent 3 or 4 days just staying home and watching TV and were not shown this. Now, admittedly, this kind of little stuff doesn’t necessarily mean the film is bad–30 Days of Night has the same problem, but I enjoyed that film–but still, it's bad filmmaking.

Also, speaking of milk bottles, this part bothered me…

If a milk man was still seeing to his rounds, and bringing milk to the people of Jerusalem’s Lot over the course of four or five days, and each day, he sees that the still full bottle of milk from the previous day is still on the porch, along with the ones from the days before… why wouldn’t he pick up the old ones when he left the new ones? Why would he keep leaving milk on the porches to spoil? Also, another thing that needled me, these little details to show the passage of time, the piled-up mail and newspapers, the bottles of milk, they imply that some of the last people in the entire town of Jerusalem's Lot to get turned into vampires were the mailman, the paperboy, and the milkman. I’m not saying this isn’t possible, but I also feel like maybe somebody should’ve pointed out to the filmmakers that both Paperboys and Milkmen do their work in the early morning darkness… when the vampires would be out.

Anyway…

So, there was a little tempest in a teacup among the filmheads online when this film wasn’t released in theatres. First, it was pulled because of COVID closures in 2022, and then it kind of hung in limbo for awhile, and it seemed like it was likely doomed to be used as a tax write-off by supreme asshole piece of shit billionaire CEO of WB, David Zaslav, much like he did with Batgirl and Coyote vs ACME, but in the end, it went to streaming instead. And now we know the truth, and as hard as it is to admit this, the simple truth is that sometimes even Studio Executives are able to tell when a film is bad. And I don’t mean mediocre either, this film is bad, and not so bad that it’s good either.

It’s just bad.