SALEM'S LOT Review: Promising King Adaptation Hampered by Compressed Running Time

For Stephen King’s Constant Readers, adaptations of his novels or short stories into film, TV movies, cable/streaming miniseries, or comics are almost as plentiful as King’s prolific output over the last 50 years.

His first published novel, Carrie, became an “overnight” sensation when Brian DePalma’s 1976 big-screen adaptation became a hit with audiences and critics alike. King’s second published novel, Salem’s Lot, solidified his burgeoning status as the horror genre’s latest, possibly greatest, practitioner. It also led to Tobe Hooper’s (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) masterful adaptation in 1979, though this time on network TV, spaced out across two separate nights.

While additional adaptations of King’s prodigious output have followed at record speed, they’ve generally remained one-and-dones (as in one adaptation per source novel or story). To every rule, of course, there’s almost always an exception.

Constant Reader- and King-favorite Salem’s Lot received a second, all-but-forgotten miniseries adaptation in 2004 and now, after two years of ownership-related delays, a third, fitfully enthralling adaptation helmed by frequent James Wan (Malignant, The Conjuring series, Saw) collaborator Gary Dauberman (It: Chapters I-II, Annabelle: Comes Home, Annabelle). Originally intended for theatrical release, but almost relegated to the digital ash heap, King’s public intervention convinced the studio to give Dauberman’s film a release via Max.

Truncated into a suffocatingly tight, sub-two-hour running time that too often speed-runs through character intros/outros, minor and major subplots, and a fast-moving vampiric plague, the new adaptation once again centers on one of King’s favorite professions (i.e., writing), Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), a fiction writer of some notoriety searching for new inspiration in old haunts, the Salem’s Lot of the title, a small, decaying town in Maine where Ben briefly lived as an impressionable preteen two decades earlier.

For Ben, the Lot remains forever fixed to the Marsden House. This not-quite haunted house doubled as the site of a murder-suicide, the center of rumors of supernatural terrors, and other human-related depravities.

When one of the town’s boys, Ralph Glick (Cade Woodward), disappears, suspicion immediately falls on Ben due to his outsider status. When Ralph’s brother, Danny Glick (Nicholas Crovetti), dies from massive blood loss, the town falls into a self-induced stupor caused by a terminal case of denial.

Only Ben, aided by fling-turned-girlfriend, Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh), Mathew Burke (Bill Camp), a local teacher, Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard), a local physician, and Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey), an alcoholic priest undergoing a crisis of faith at an inopportune time, gradually congeal into a vampire-fighting team of sorts, convinced that a vampiric plague led by Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward) and his human familiar, Richard Straker (Pilou Asbæk), will lead to to the town’s demise.

Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter), a resilient, horror-loving preteen whose knowledge of vampiric lore proves incredibly helpful, joins the de facto vampire-hunting crew. He doesn’t join Ben and the others, however, until well into the first hour, highlighting the perils inherent in adapting a sprawling, sometimes unwieldy, character-rich novel like Salem’s Lot for a sub-two-hour running time. When Mark does join the crew, it’s purely by accident, first encountering Matt as the latter engages in live research and later, the rest of the team after he flees the scene of a crime and decides, somewhat rashly, definitely foolishly, to take on Barlow himself.

Anyone familiar with King’s novel or the two previous adaptations won’t be surprised by what happens next, though Dauberman rearranges some scenes, rejiggers others, and completely excises other scenes altogether to meet the studio’s arbitrary running time, one that makes less and less sense given Salem’s Lot’s story-related drawbacks or its eventual transfer to a streaming site. To Dauberman’s credit as an adapter, however, he finds an elegant solution to providing audiences with a third act worthy of King’s narrative ideas without duplicating them outright.

The overly compressed storylines does not give the mostly able, mostly capable performers the time needed to fully develop their characters. Instead, Salem’s Lot takes a broad-strokes approach to characters, leaving the audience, Constant Readers or not, to fill in CyberTruck-sized gaps left behind by Dauberman’s reliance on hyper-compression. The lack of character time onscreen not only diminishes their deaths but makes them disposable, if not outright forgettable, once the vampire plague spreads and the rapidly diminishing survivors start losing key members.

Still, Dauberman, aided by cinematographer Michael Burgess, manages to deliver the odd arresting set piece or two, especially early on when the Glick brothers venture into a darkening forest on their last walk home together or when Mark, finding himself forced to fend off an unwelcome nighttime visitor, discovers that crosses positively glow with the light of righteous fortitude whenever Marlow’s minions are nearby, or later when Matt finds himself in a similar situation, but with a house-guest turned furniture-breaking vampire who refuses to leave Matt’s home quietly.

Marred on occasion by under-rendered CGI, especially during nighttime scenes involving fog or mist or photophobic vampires disintegrating in sunlight, Salem’s Lot (2024 Edition) won’t make longtime King fans forget Hooper’s adaptation or give Dauberman’s adaptation first position as the “best” adaptation of King’s second novel, but that doesn’t undercut what Salem’s Lot does do well (e.g., mood, tone, set pieces) or the promise, however unlikely, that Dauberman will be allowed to release his original three-hour cut in the future.

Salem's Lot is now streaming on Max.