Salem's Lot review: Stephen King adaptation lacks bite

Into this mini-revival of big-screen vampirism comes the first celluloid version of Stephen King’s second published novel, Salem’s Lot, directed and adapted by Gary Dauberman, who has credit in the bank for scripting the hit films based on King’s It.

The 1975 page-turner was adapted as a three-hour TV miniseries in 1979 and directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chain Saw Massacre fame. Genuinely creepy and scary with arguably David Soul’s finest performance as the novel’s haunted hero Ben Mears, it was later edited for cinema release, influencing the likes of Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass on Netflix.

A 2004 TV series starring Rob Lowe and Rutger Hauer was set in contemporary times.

King labelled his story as "Peyton Place meets Dracula", setting his tale in a sleepy rural town in Maine where the arrival of antiques traders Richard Straker and unseen partner Kurt Barlow coincides with the return of writer Ben Mears (played here by Top Gun: Maverick’s Lewis Pullman) to the home town where he was orphaned as a child.

Dauberman retains the 1970s milieu – fashions, hairdos, drive-in as social hotspot – but then spends little time on developing the characters or building tension before revealing the identity of the evil about to suck the life from the community.

The demise and disappearance of the Glick brothers sets the ghoulish train of events in motion, but that iconic scene where a floating and fanged Danny Glick is scraping on windows to get at his victim (seminal in the 1979 version and emulated later in a 2000 League of Gentlemen Xmas Special) lacks bite here.

Indeed, in next to no time, the 1,200-strong community is whittled down to a motley quintet of vampire hunters (Ben, girlfriend Susan, an alcoholic priest, a doctor and schoolboy Mark Petrie), who are all that remain to save the day.

Admittedly, the final confrontation at the local drive-in offers some edge-of-the-seat thrills, yet the best adaptations of the "King of Horror" tend to be when fully-formed characters have imbued a terror tale with emotional depth.

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Here, so much is missing (Ben’s chilling childhood experience at the Marston House, later home to Barlow and Straker) or undeveloped (his relationships with Susan and Mark), leaving a fine cast of veteran performers (Alfre Woodard, William Sadler, Bill Camp) lost for (a few more) words.

To be fair to the director, who also scripted all the Annabelle films from the Conjuring Universe, the movie was due for release in 2022, but delays, reshoots and executive reorganisation at Warner Bros have seen the film cut by at least an hour, according to Dauberman, including an opening scene depicting Ben’s Marsten House nightmare. Meanwhile in the US, it has gone straight to streaming.

Maybe a director’s cut would be an improvement, instead of this anaemic offering, a false dawn for one of King’s finest excursions into fear and sweat-inducing fright.

Salem's Lot is showing in UK cinemas from Friday 11th October 2024.

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