Salem’s Lot review - listless King remake

A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV take on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared a teen generation out of their skins.

This new film exists first as a failed franchise equation, adding Conjuring Universe producer James Wan to IT screenwriter Gary Dauberman as writer-director (he also wrote The Conjuring’s Annabelle series), but suffering heavy cuts prior to this much delayed release.

King’s Salem’s Lot was a textured depiction of a Yankee small-town going to hell. Dauberman retains its 1975 setting, rendering its then modern American reckoning with Bram Stoker’s Dracula nostalgic. That’s certainly how troubled hometown author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) feels as he drives into Jerusalem’s Lot’s folksy clapboard idyll, before meeting cute with librarian Susan (Mackenzie Leigh, pictured below). Whisky priest Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) and Dr Cody (Alfre Woodard) will be among those joining them as vampire-hunters. A la It, we also meet kids Danny and Ralph Glick and brave new boy in town Mark (Jordan Preston Carter).

The deceptive trouble with adapting King is the amorphous mix of character, atmosphere, place and incident which drives his super-charged narratives. Dauberman’s slashing edit hacks towards a clean spine, but leaves mutilated scenes limply fading or lopped off. It’s a Pyrrhic triumph of surgery that the patient still walks. Efficient jump-scares apart, horror climaxes are also flinched from, skipping the crucial bloody beat. Dauberman’s previous film as director, Annabelle Comes Home (2019), shared the Conjuring Universe’s cosey conservatism while being written with heart, qualities repeated here.

Pilou Asbæk’s performance as Barlow’s urbane familiar Straker (drolly menacing James Mason in ’79) must mostly grace the cutting-room floor. When his old car pulls up on a dark country road to offer the Glicks a lift, though, Dauberman fashions a marvellous shadow-play as the children flee through dusky woods and Straker appears a pace behind. There’s something of The Night of the Hunter and true folk magic here. There’s a frisson, too, in gravedigger Mike (Spencer Treat Clark) sitting in a bar, face consumed in inky shadow, soullessly lost to the light.

There are hints of a larger American story this Salem’s Lot is too gutted to tell. “You see any good men around here lately, father?” burned-out Sheriff Gillespie (William Sadler) asks Callahan. Later, when the Lot has been eviscerated, papers and pints of milk piling in front of vampirised homes standing silent in sinister twilight, Gillespie rails that the town fell because it was already “dead”, adding “the whole country’s going the same way”. This chimes with King’s late Vietnam-era novel. The book’s Callahan fears vampires and blanket air bombing alike spreading unchecked as evil’s old, understood shadows melt under “the hard soulless glare of parking-lot fluorescents, of neon tubing”.

The Lot’s drive-in cinema has meanwhile booked an unlikely double-bill - The Drowning Pool and Night Moves. The latter of these downbeat 1975 detective films hit a sort of nihilistic terminus for American dreams as Gene Hackman’s horrified hero sees a girl’s corpse rise beneath a rich man’s yacht. Is this the rotten America Barlow easily infects, burrowing into a soured apple small-town which 50 years later might pine for MAGA? Dauberman has no time to say.

King campaigned for Salem’s Lot’s release, and you can be sure he loved Dauberman’s inspired climax in the drive-in car park at sundown, where the town’s vampires rest not in castle coffins but Cadillac boots, wittily building on the book’s modernised Stoker. Not as cut-rate as 2022’s Firestarter, narratively bizarre as 2017’s The Dark Tower or overrated as IT, listless drift still outweighs pulp punch.

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