I was rooting for “Salem’s Lot.” Not only am I a huge Stephen King fan who considers the 1975 original among the master of horror’s best works, but I resent how much Max/WB keeps burying their projects like “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs. Acme.” This one threatened to meet a similar fate, once scheduled for theatrical release in Fall 2022 before being pulled from the slate in another wave of Covid-related delays. However, it simply lingered in purgatory after that, with many worrying it could be another victim of the tax write-off game being played by its parent company. When Stephen King himself tweeted in February of this year that he had seen it and liked it, WB finally announced that it would land on Max, just in time for spooky season. How great would it be if all this drama was hiding a new horror gem, a movie that should never have been treated like an afterthought? I wish I could say that was true.
The problem here is simple: There’s a reason this story has been told twice in mini-series form. You can’t do it in a feature. Even at almost two hours, the 2024 “Salem’s Lot” feels almost hysterically rushed with scenes picking up halfway through them and things like segues to mark the passage of time just missing entirely. It’s no exaggeration to say there are scene transitions in “Salem’s Lot” in which it honestly feels like maybe you accidentally fast-forwarded a few minutes and missed the connective tissue. Nope, it’s just been cut in a film that was in the can so long that too many people played with the final product. You can almost see the scissor marks on some scenes that a producer decided could be tighter. This thing has been cut so many times that it bled to death.
The funny thing is that Gary Dauberman is keenly aware of how much King’s material is suited to more than the length of a feature, having written the two parts of Andy Muschietti’s “It.” He writes and directs this tale of a writer named Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) who returns to his hometown of Jerusalem’s Lot to dig around in his own trauma. King’s book is a great variation on the “you can’t go home again” template of fiction—in this case, home is populated by vampires.
Well, not at first. Mears discovers that two mysterious figures have bought a legendary creepy house on the hill in ‘Salem’s Lot: Richard Straker (Pilou Asbaek) and Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward). Before long, it’s revealed that Barlow is a Nosferatu-esque creature of the night, and Straker is his Renfield, a human familiar who gets him food and supplies. When Straker kidnaps a small child and feeds it to Barlow, it shakes up the entire town, but Dauberman never lets anything linger. Before you know it, Mears, his girlfriend Susan (Makenzie Leigh), Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard), a teacher named Matthew (Bill Camp) and a preacher named Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) are going vampire hunting.
Clearly, it’s a strong cast, and a few of them find a way to make an impact. Bill Camp is an always welcome presence, and Hickey nails a certain kind of weariness with faith well. Pullman works at first, but he gets discarded by a film with too many characters and ideas to spend any time at all developing Ben, and poor Susan makes out even worse. Again, Dauberman races from key moment to key moment, forgetting that it’s the atmosphere of projects like this that matters most of all. Worst of all, there are moments when that version of this production peeks through the choppy editing of this one, such as a great scene wherein Camp’s teacher finds a vampirized young man he knows named Mike (Spencer Treat Clark) at the bar, and starts to figure out that something is very, very wrong. It’s a creepy moment in a film that just doesn’t get under your skin enough. It doesn’t have time.
