In the Flesh: 'Salem's Lot (2024)

There’s a lot to like about Gary Dauberman’s ‘Salem’s Lot, an adaptation of Stephen King’s classic vampire novel of the same name. Bill Camp is tremendously likable as the caring, perceptive school teacher Matt Burke, the color grading is refreshingly vibrant and thoughtful, Alfre Woodard is great as Dr. Cody, and child actor Jordan Preston really brings the character of Mark Petrie alive. There’s an early scene of child sacrifice that is almost unwatchably painful. The first act is a solid, stylish small-town horror flick with tantalizing glimpses of the Orlock-esque Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward) to keep your arm hair standing on end, but right about the time the first crucifix begins to blaze with golden light like a powerup in a video game, things go off the rails. What begins in the mold of a classic King story, deeply concerned with character and setting, becomes a kind of half-assed Evil Dead knockoff, characters pinballing between increasingly shoddy setpieces, important confrontations truncated and thematically gutted, others stretched into indifferently choreographed tussle-fests straight out of a network procedural.

In short, Dauberman’s incarnation of ‘Salem’s Lot is a dud, a great big stinker, with the added indignity of great performances and a really strong first act. The scene in which we meet both Mark and Matt feels like its own little screenwriting clinic, it’s so quick and economical, so intelligent in how it glosses a moment in time to give us a complete picture of two people. Then you have a long string of scenes in which people bustle in and out of houses, squawking the plot at one another, or stake random vampires, or retreat warily as more vampires advance on them with the arrogant self-assurance of Saturday morning cartoon villains. It’s all hokey, plodding, paint-by-numbers bullshit, and as a leading couple, Lewis Pullman’s Ben and Makenzie Leigh’s Susan can’t pull it off, so you’ve got nothing to cling to when the film starts its Nantucket sleigh ride through a sea of lazy mediocrity.

So much of what makes King’s novel work is the interiority of its characters, and without that essential support, the story’s underlying weaknesses are on full display here. The bluntly incurious approach to Catholicism’s magical powers is even worse here than in the book, especially in the absence of Barlow’s heartbreaking showdown with Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) in which the vampire breaks the priest’s faith and forces Callahan to drink his vampiric blood, leaving him to wander the earth tainted and disgraced. There’s just such a dull sense of naivete to it, and coupled to the rushed and fumbling plotting of its last hour, it’s a losing proposition. Barlow is reduced to a video game boss, Mark becomes an unfeeling killing machine at the age of eleven, and Ben and Susan’s lukewarm romance sputters out in a completely limp action scene following her vampiric resurrection. It’s a real pity, but they should have left this one in the coffin.