Being Film #21 for Hooptober 2024
Announced in 2019, shot in 2021, originally set for theatrical release in 2022 only to dribble out onto the Max service this past Friday, the long-awaited ‘Salem’s Lot took a meandering road to reach our eyes. And in the end it was neither a massive misfire not a surefire hit. It was slick, mean, thin in characterization but visually sharp and sumptuous and with enough good sequences that I came away having had a lot of fun with the film. Does it hold a candle to the original 1979 series shot by our marathon’s namesake? No, but I didn’t need it to be, either.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: Ben Mears has returned home to Jersalem’s Lot to research…I guess his parents? Don’t worry about backstory; the film certainly doesn’t. It’s just your typical 70s Maine town, lots of gossip and racism and dandy foreign men opening antique stores…oh, and the creepy old Marsten place up on the hill. Soon Ben and young Mark Petrie, another new soul in the Lot meet up with the town’s OTHER new neighbor, and it’s not a spoiler to tell you it’s a vampire. Soon one of our heroes will be relegated to a series of reaction shots and a deus ex machina ending while the other does all the work of killing vampires…I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which. In the meantime, make sure you bind your homemade crosses and bless them, just in case a pair of eyes glow outside your window tonight!
I might have been a little unfair in the quick summary above, but my biggest complaint with ‘Salem’s Lot (and I should add again I quite enjoyed the film) is that our main characters get almost nothing to do. Lewis Pullman has a fine presence and good chemistry as Ben Mears, but the script has his almost completely inert the entire film. Same with Makenzie Leigh as Susan, his love interest. To be fair, that gives more room to the real start and hero of the film, Jordan Preston Carter as young Mark Petrie. He’s instantly alive from his first moment standing up to a bully to essentially killing about 85% of the vampires over the course of the film. Writer/Director Gary Dauberman shows a lot of care for his secondary characters: both Alfre Woodard as the town doctor and Bill Camp as Burke, the school teacher feel much more alive and fleshed out in the film, and Burke in particular has some great sequences, including the first use of one of the film’s novelties, the fact that crosses will glow when in the presence of a vampire.
Visually Dauberman puts a lot of care into the film. It looks fantastic, very pulpy with its use of color in the nighttime sequences, with things taking on an eerie greenish/blue hue. His daytime scenes fully evoke the New England golden hue of a time gone by, and when he stages his action, its typically fast and sudden, unbalancing you each time (though once you learn the rhythm it fades). He also wisely keeps things as practical as he can, and the vampires all look great, especially Barlow, who retains his very Nosferatu look from the original miniseries but with the added bonus of thick veins on his head that fill and bloat as he feeds.
‘Salem’s Lot is also a film that doesn’t rest on its laurels (though that might be why the miniseries worked as well as it did); it races to its climax which for once really feels like a climax and is something I wasn’t expecting after all the other iterations of the story. Yes, it sacrifices a lot (Father Callahan in particular) to make its runtime and thin story work, but as far as a slick adaptation goes I’m still happy with what Dauberman did here.
Would it have worked in the theater? Who knows but tell you what – I would have LOVED to see this in a drive-in.
Cinema Dual 
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