There have been entire documentaries made about screen adaptations of Stephen King’s writing. We’re up to something like 80 or 90 individual movies and shows at this point, and frankly a significant portion of them aren’t exactly known for being good. That might be because King, despite his prolificacy, has always had a very natural idiosyncrasy; his narrative “voice,” the interlocking plot strands of his more sprawling novels, the specificity of his little Maine towns. You might even describe novels like It or Salem’s Lot as “Dickensian.”
The Salem’s Lot adaptation comes from Gary Dauberman, a writer on both recent IT movies and also the Annabelles, and while it hews pretty closely to the novel’s basic story beats, the requirements of a narrative movie require it to jettison much of King’s voice and tone. What’s left after the excision of such essential qualities feels largely perfunctory. One could look to compensate for those absent elements with some real formal panache, some sleek style, but that’s nowhere to be found here either.
Author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) has returned to the titular town of his youth to try to find inspiration for his next novel. What he doesn’t know is that the scary old Marsten house on top of that spooky hill has recently become the new residence of Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward), an ancient vampire who lives in a coffin in the basement, and who quickly goes about turning the residents of this quaint little town into ghoulish bloodthirsty slaves of the night. It’s a real shame — seems like Salem’s Lot was a nice place. Lewis makes friends with librarian Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh), teacher Matt Burke (Bill Camp), local Doctor Cody (Alfre Woodard), Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey), and the very nice but perpetually bullied kid Mark (Jordan Preston Carter), and together they slowly work out that their home has become a nest of thirsty undead, a threat only their small, makeshift cadre seems to be able to combat.
Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot does boast some legitimately creepy moments, though perhaps nothing as iconic as the floating vampire kid outside Mark’s window, absolutely chilling in King’s novel and immortalized in Tobe Hooper’s 1979 miniseries. But while shades of spookiness make their mark throughout the film, this new iteration is unfortunately largely bereft of any style to support its moments of workable horror. It’s all modern dark digital lighting, shallow focus close-ups — it all sort of looks like a Hallmark movie. Honestly, that would almost seem fitting, but what’s really, fatally missing from Salem’s Lot ’24 is the melancholy portrait of an idealized “American” space torn apart by insidious evil — yes, vampires, but also suspicion, paranoia, prejudice, declining opportunity. Rather timeless stuff, and yet not particularly present here. And aside from a pretty nifty choice to set the final confrontation at a drive-in, there isn’t much invention or electricity or updating to be found. Instead, viewers are left with the most frustrating and predictable of outcomes — just another mediocre Stephen King movie that shortchanges the idiosyncratic source material and paints its generic horror by numbers.
DIRECTOR: Gary Dauberman; CAST: Lewis Pullman, Makenzie Leigh, Alfre Woodard, Bill Camp; DISTRIBUTOR: Max; STREAMING: October 3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 53 min.
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