Director/Screenplay – Gary Dauberman, Based on the Novel Salem’s Lot (1975) by Stephen King, Producers – Michael Clear, Roy Lee, James Wan & Mark Wolper, Photography – Michael Burgess, Music – Nathan Barr & Lisbeth Scott, Visual Effects Supervisor – Brandon Nelson, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes & Ingenuity Studios, Special Effects Supervisor – Doug Ziegler, Makeup Effects – Fractured FX, Inc. (Designer – Justin Raleigh), Production Design – Marc Fisichella. Production Company – Atomic Monster/Vertigo Entertainment/Wolper Organization.
Cast
Lewis Pullman (Ben Mears), Makenzie Leigh (Susan Norton), Bill Camp (Matt Burke), Jordan Preston Carter (Mark Petrie), Alfre Woodard (Dr. Cody), John Benjamin Hickey (Father Callaghan), Pilou Asbaek (R.T. Straker), William Sadler (Sheriff Parkins Gillespie), Nicholas Crovetti (Danny Glick), Spencer Treat Clark (Mike Ryerson), Danielle Perry (Marjorie Glick), Debra Christofferson (Ann Norton), Alexander Ward (Kurt Barlow), Timothy John Smith (Royal Snow), Cade Woodward (Ralphie Glick), Michael Steven Costello (Larry Crockett), Declan Lemarandie (Richie Boddin)
Plot
Writer Ben Mears returns to Jerusalem’s Lot (or Salem’s Lot), the Maine town where he grew up. Arriving at the same time and renting the big, old foreboding Marsten House is antique dealer R.T. Straker. Straker abducts young Ralphie Glick to take as an offering to his master, the vampire Barlow. A big manhunt goes out for the missing Ralphie. Ralphie then returns changed and drinks the blood of others. Those bitten in turn become infected. Soon Ben and a coterie of others come to the realisation that Salem’s Lot is being overtaken by a plague of vampires.
Salem’s Lot (1975) was the second ever novel published by Stephen King. King was inspired while teaching Dracula (1897) to a class and debated what it would be like if Dracula were revived in the present-day. This was a period when cinema screens had only tentatively started dealing with the idea of modernising the vampire in films like Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and The Night Stalker (1972). King’s book was duly a best-seller and was adapted into a classic tv mini-series Salem’s Lot (1979) from director Tobe Hooper with David Soul as Ben Mears and James Mason as Straker. This was the second ever adaptation of a King work to the screen. This had an unrelated sequel A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987) from Larry Cohen. There was a subsequent mini-series remake with ’Salem’s Lot (2004) starring Rob Lowe as Ben Mears and Rutger Hauer as Barlow. There was also a BBC radio drama adaptation in 1995.
There have been a great many Stephen King adaptations to big and small screen. Ever since the box-office hit of the remake of It (2017), which was produced by Roy Lee and Vertigo Entertainment and written by Gary Dauberman, who are also behind the remake of Salem’s Lot, King properties have been big at the box-office (once again). Since then we have had remakes of The Mist (tv series, 2017), Pet Sematary (2019), Children of the Corn (2020), The Stand (tv mini-series, 2020-1), Firestarter (2022) and The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep (2019), as well as original works such as Mr. Mercedes (tv series, 2017-9), 1922 (2017), Castle Rock (tv series, 2018-9), In the Tall Grass (2019), The Outsider (tv series, 2020), Chapelwaite (tv series, 2021), Lisey’s Story (tv mini-series, 2021), Mr Harrigan’s Phone (2022) and The Boogeyman (2023). King has even been persuaded to sign on as an Executive Producer here.
The Salem’s Lot remake comes from Vertigo Entertainment and James Wan’s Atomic Monster production company. Directing/writing duties have been handed over to Gary Dauberman, who wrote the scripts for It and It: Chapter Two (2019), as well for Wan’s Annabelle (2014) and Annabelle: Creation (2017), before making his directorial debut with the third in the series Annabelle Comes Home (2019). Elsewhere, Dauberman has written the scripts for Bloodmonkey (2007), In the Spider’s Web (2007), Crawlspace (2016), Wolves at the Door (2016), The Cabin House (2019) and Until Dawn (2025). He also acts as a producer on the Wan produced The Nun (2018), The Curse of La Llorona (2019), The Nun II (2023) and the tv series Swamp Thing (2019).
The town’s defenders – (l to r) Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh), Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), Dr Cody (Alfre Woodard), Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter) and Father Callaghan (John Benjamin Hickey)
The film ended up experiencing delays. It was originally shot in 2021 and intended for a 2022 theatrical release, which was then extended to mid-2023. Reshoots did occur and Gary Dauberman expressed regret that his original three-hour cut of the film ended up being trimmed down to 113 minutes ie. having had more than an hour’s story cut from it. Stephen King even went to Twitter/X to express frustration about the film languishing in limbo. After a single theatrical screening at the L.A. Beyond Fest, the film was then dumped to HBO Max in October 2024.
The original 1979 mini-series is still one of the best Stephen King horror adaptations out there – and moreover, one that treats the book with a surprising degree of faithfulness for the most part. The 2004 mini-series significantly differed from the book on a number of points, while A Return to Salem’s Lot is connected in name only. The welcome thing about the 2024 Salem’s Lot is that it makes a concerted effort to return to the basics, even to the extent of having it set in 1975, the year the book was released (even though in theory there is no reason why it could not have taken place contemporary).
Most of the characters are there are fairly much as the way King wrote them – in some cases, this version makes them more accurate with the alcoholic priest Father Callahan being far more the way he was originally written (although the film kills him off whereas King later had him turn up as a character in The Dark Tower series), whereas the 1979 version stripped his appearance down to a couple of scenes. The larger canvas of characters across the town is trimmed down somewhat. Plus Dauberman also mixes up the racial complement more so than the whitebread cast line-up of the book and mini-series, while making Dr Cody into a woman (in the 1979 version, Cody became Susan’s father). Certainly, some of the eventual fates of characters end up being quite different to the way King and the mini-series had them with Dauberman inventing a big climactic battle that does not take place in either version.
Pilou Asbaek as Straker
Casting-wise, none of the new actors here made any impression on me, least of all Lewis Pullman, the son of Bill Pullman, and Makenzie Leigh as respectively Ben Mears and Susan Norton. Danish actor Pilou Asbaek, whose name has been rising internationally, makes for a colourless addition as Straker. Asbaek is sorely lacking in anything of the class and elegance that James Mason brought to the 1979 mini-series and Straker ends up being ignominiously written out of the action without being given much to do. The great Alfre Woodard brings some life to the role of Dr Cody and her customary tart delivery is just perfect as she is in the midst of vampire attacks.
In many ways, the 2024 Salem’s Lot is reliant on the 1979 version to the extent it could even be called a remake of the mini-series more than it is an adaptation of the book. Dauberman retains many aspects from the mini-series such as the look and design of the Marsten House. The most obvious point is the depiction of the vampire Barlow being modelled along the lines of Max Schreck’s Count Orlock in Nosferatu (1922), albeit with the addition of a wide mouthful of fangs. Crucially, this Barlow only gets a single dialogue, with both this version and the 1979 mini-series strip out the pages of dialogue that King gave to Barlow.
The debt to the 1979 Salem’s Lot even goes so far as to Dauberman replicating a number of the key scenes. We get a repeat of the spooky image of the vampire Danny Glick floating outside Mark Petrie’s bedroom window; a reworking of the scene where the body rises in the morgue and is driven back by spatulas held together as a crucifix; of Mike Ryerson trapped in the grave he is digging as Danny Glick comes back to life; as well as the appearance of Barlow in the Petrie home. On the other hand, Gary Dauberman has the tendency to blow scenes that worked perfectly in the 1979 original up with more than they need – Danny Glick flying into Mark’s room and then being abruptly propelled back out again after Mark wields a crucifix, the fight around the morgue floor with people struggling to get the spatula crucifix and then Alfre Woodard having to inject herself with a rabies shot. In these and other scenes, there is the rather ridiculous effect of the crucifix glowing as though it is battery powered.
Barlow (Alexander Ward) attacks Matt Burke (Bill Camp)
Sadly, Gary Dauberman has taken an original that worked perfectly fine as it did – the 1979 mini-series – and remakes it while adding minimal changes. The 1979 version lacked the effects that get added here and was far more eerie. And scenes where Dauberman starts freely inventing on his own lack half the effect – the silly image of the sheriff being tossed through the stained glass window of the church, a sequence with Mark hiding in a treehouse as vampire children drawl around the outside, and in particular the climactic scenes at the drive-in theatre, which vie between occasional tension and silly effect.
The sad truth is that Dauberman is revisiting a classic work that was essential in the creation of the modern vampire. In the 49 years between the King book coming out and now, the idea of vampires in modern America, be it suburbia, a metropolis or a small town, has been used by so many other works that there is no longer anything unique about the basic set-up. The book and mini-series still stand up as fine works, but the basics rehashed here lack anything remarkable about them.
