Perhaps appropriately, an ominous foreboding precedes the release of this third take on a deservedly revered Stephen King novel. Shot three years ago, and originally scheduled for a 2022 release, the current ’Salem’s Lot receives a theatrical airing in Ireland but goes straight to streaming in the United States. None of that yells confidence. There are further signs of compromise in the film’s throat-clearing moments. Always beware an adaptation that tells part of its story through an animation beneath the opening credits. Here, a map shows the transport of something sinister from traditional vampire territory in eastern Europe to that corner of the northeastern US we have, since the book’s publication in 1975, come to know as KingLand.
All that suggests cutting of establishing scenes – and, sure enough, the succeeding action feels similarly chopped and concertinaed. More than one critic has endorsed King’s own suggestion that the book combined the worlds of Dracula and of high-end soap opera Peyton Place. His point was that we are as intrigued by the busy community in the titular town – properly Jerusalem’s Lot – as we are by the vampire moving into the house on the hill. Sadly, Gary Dauberman’s version allows itself little time to explore those relationships. Characters rapidly identify themselves and then run headlong into the developing panic. The accumulation of everyday America that was so important in early King is abandoned as the picture gives into comic-book vampire hunting of the broadest stripe.
Lewis Pullman, son of Bill Pullman, stars as Ben Mears, a modestly popular novelist returning home to research his next book. Makenzie Leigh plays what passes for love interest, a wiseacre named Susan who is introduced nodding off to the latest Mears title. Talking to the local estate agent, the author learns that, against the odds, an odd, flamboyantly dressed fellow named Richard Straker (Pilou Asbaek) has moved to the long-vacant Marsten House. Those familiar with the novel or earlier adaptations will understand why the building has caused such unease. Others will have to make do with nods and suggestions.
Early on, it is made clear that Straker is a less addled Renfield to an ashen vampire named, still prosaically, Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward). Before too long that beast is converting the citizens to a sanguinary and nocturnal life. Fans of the flawed but genuinely eerie 1979 miniseries will remember James Mason having the right sort of suave fun with Straker, but Asbaek, best known as the spindoctor in Borgen, is stuck with a few brief scenes that suggest nothing so much as Willy Wonka on sedatives.
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The three characters who will join Susan and Ben in their vampire-hunting are barely more than sketched. John Benjamin Hickey is a whiskey priest. Bill Camp is a grizzled schoolteacher. Alfre Woodard is an initially disbelieving doctor. Of that set, only Woodard looks to be having any fun. Without edging the piece into camp (which might have been a good thing), she pulls a WTF face that, accompanied by growled surprise, confirms that at least one actor was fully awake throughout.
Little new is added. Indeed, whereas the contemporaneous setting brought a freshness to the genre on publication, subsequent pastiche, homage and nostalgia have worked the post-Vietnam vibes to threads. We are in the 1970s rather than the 1980s, but it is hard to set a King project in that vicinity without it seeming Stranger Things adjacent.
None of which would matter much if the film maintained a satisfactory pace. Sadly, we are catapulted with unseemly haste from perfunctory scene-setting to a dull, formless mess of generic action-horror. We are now further from the King novel than the King novel was from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu. The book may not show its age, but this adaptation feels more ancient than the oceans.
’Salem’s Lot is in cinemas from Friday, October 11th
