Salem’s Lot (2024)
Director: Gary Dauberman
Screenwriters: Gary Dauberman
Starring: Lewis Pullman, Makenzie Leigh, Alfre Woodard, John Benjamin Hickey, Bill Camp, Alexander Ward

Horror has very few rules, but one is both obvious and unwritten: if you’re going to remake one of the best and most beloved adaptations of one of the best and most beloved books by one of the best and most beloved horror writers in the world, Stephen King, you’d better do it right. Unfortunately, this hasn’t always been the case. 2019’s Pet Sematary was atrocious, the 2022 version of Firestarter just as bad, and the less we reference the majority of the Children of the Corn films, including the recent 2023 film, the better. One of the only Stephen King remakes to get it just about right in recent memory was 2017’s It: Chapter One, and even the second, although not bad, never captured the success of the first. How, then, would the writer of those two films, Gary Dauberman, manage with writing and directing the iconic author’s vampire classic?

To give 2024’s Salem’s Lot a modicum of credit, it doesn’t change too much of the story. A new antiques shop opens up in the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine, owned by Richard Straker (played by Pilour Asbæk) and Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward). Straker runs the place, but Barlow, who lives in the old gothic Marsten House up on the hill, is never seen. Into the fray comes writer Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), who must team up with the townsfolk when mysterious deaths start leaving bodies drained of blood, before getting up with glowing eyes and a thirst for human flesh.

 

 

It doesn’t change much, but it doesn’t include much either, leaving only a sketch of the story’s iconography. The history of the Marsden house is gone. Ben’s relationship with his family is gone. Proper investigation into Father Callahan’s drinking problem and his loss of faith is up in smoke. It is the very essential bits a film needs in order to technically create a “Salem’s Lot” adaptation, and not a drop more.

This feeling of gutting the story runs throughout, and infects almost every department, causing every possible problem. The 1979 miniseries (which this film will inevitably be most often compared to) had to run to nearly three and a half hours to do everything it wanted to. This version comes in at just under two hours, and yet feels more like a 90-minute scramble. It would not be surprising if eventually we learn that an original cut ran twenty minutes longer before studio interference cut it down. Every scene seems to have a few lines of dialogue shaved off, and the film seems so disjointed that whole scenes must surely have been ripped from its guts.

Despite writer-director Gary Dauberman’s best efforts to present something which is, at the very least, passably workable in the directing department (in only his second directorial effort, being mainly a writer for The Conjuring series and the aforementioned King adaptations), the pacing disrupts all his best laid plans. His constant use of mirrors in the staging never leads to anything, not even to do with a vampire’s inability to appear in reflections. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style takeover of the town happens almost unnoticed, focusing on a few isolated cases before pulling back to reveal it all happened off-screen. By the end, acts feel simultaneously too long and too short, an impressive if unwanted achievement.

The acting isn’t stellar, but it certainly isn’t gutter-worthy. The score is a cobweb in the mind, blown away with barely a thought. The night-time scenes are blandly captured and uninteresting, making even the iconic floating-child scene lose its bite. Nothing is atrocious, and a lot of it is passable. It also, however, isn’t that good.

Salem’s Lot (2024) is a vampiric shell of its former self, shambling along with the appearance of life, sometimes able to convince you that it might have a semblance of the real deal inside, but by the end it has been drained of anything frightening or interesting.

Score: 9/24