Funereal Plots
Horror Cinema reviews
Matthew M. Bartlett
Salem’s Lot
Writer/Director – Gary Dauberman
This straight-to-Max movie is the third adaptation of the masterful Stephen King novel that tells the story of a writer returning to his hometown to find it on the verge of being overrun with vampires. The first adaptation, for television, by Tobe Hooper, is a masterpiece of atmosphere, with great performances, memorable set pieces, and material shockingly adult-themed, for its time.
The second adaptation remains unseen by me.
I’ve seen the 2024 version referred to as the Cliff’s Notes version. That might be slightly unfair; any adaptation restricted to under two hours has to condense the story—but in this case it’s apt. The cuts are just egregious. It’s not simply plot and suspense that’s cut out or changed, the characters are all bloodless ciphers. Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), the writer, is supposed to exude warmth, to be a kind of father figure for Mark Petrie, the horror-obsessed boy with whom he tackles the infestation. Instead, the actor is bland and unremarkable, as is his vacuously agreeable love interest, Susan Norton.
The vampires have CGI-red eye, Kurt Barlow, the main vampire, lacks the ghoulish effects of the Hooper version, and though I thought the character was a CGI creation, he was actually played by actor Alexander Ward. His human helper, Straker, is another character so expertly (and creepily) essayed by James Mason in the Hooper version, that the character here feels like an afterthought.
Also an afterthought in the movie is the Marsten House, centrally featured as a locus of evil in the book, here just another set. This iteration of Salem’s Lot is just a collection of missed opportunities. There’s not enough of the sense of a small town deteriorating—it’s all compressed; everything happens too fast. The only spark of invention is the location of the vampiric townsfolk, changed from the book and from earlier adaptations, and that’s a little too little, a little too late.
A lyric I heard somewhere leaps to mind: “Do it right or don’t do it at all.”
This shouldn’t have been done at all.
