[COLUMN] The New Salem's Lot is Mostly Vibes - and That's Okay | by Darren Mooney

Note: This article contains full spoilers for Gary Dauberman’s new adaptation of Salem’s Lot, which is currently streaming on Max. It also discusses King’s original novel, at least in terms of theme. So feel free to bookmark and come back.

Salem’s Lot is not one of Stephen King’s longer novels. It is a little longer than Firestarter and a little shorter than The Shining. It certainly doesn’t compare to King’s epics like The Stand or IT. However, the novel feels longer than some of King’s comparable works, in large part because it is a portrait of an entire community falling under a dark shadow.

When legendary director Tobe Hooper adapted Salem’s Lot for CBS in 1979, he did so as a miniseries split over two nights. The two parts ran just over three hours. This is about the same length as Tommy Lee Wallace’s adaptation of IT for ABC in 1990, which makes a certain degree of sense. These are both stories about the rot in a small town, and so justify a larger canvas. It’s also the same length as Mikael Salomon’s largely forgotten 2004 adaptation for TNT, starring Rob Lowe.

Interestingly, Gary Dauberman’s recent streaming version of Salem’s Lot clocks in at under two hours, about 70 minutes shorter than either of the previous two adaptations. What’s even more interesting is that, despite its notoriously troubled release, Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot doesn’t feel like it was mercilessly hacked down in the editing suite. It never feels like a three-hour movie frantically cut down to two hours. It feels like a two-hour movie that was always meant to be two hours.

Dauberman is primarily known as a screenwriter. He has an extended relationship with director James Wan, scripting several entries in Warner Bros. Conjuring-verse including the original Annabelle and The Nun. He showran the short-lived Swamp Thing series. He is also familiar with the work of Stephen King, writing both chapters of director Andy Muschietti’s epic IT adaptation. So there is, perhaps, an instinctive assumption that Salem’s Lot would be a “writerly” movie.

Instead, the most striking aspect of Dauberman’s screenplay for his own adaptation is how ruthlessly efficient it is. It blazes quickly through the source material, rarely stopping to focus on character, motivation or theme. There is undoubtedly a lot of skill in this. Screenwriting is often the work of a mechanic rather than a poet, and it is clear that Dauberman is engineering his script for Salem’s Lot to a particular task. Dauberman-as-writer is constructing a showcase for Dauberman-as-director.

When an established screenwriter transitions into directing late in their career, there is often an assumption that they remain primarily a screenwriter. Martin McDonagh has argued that he began directing to “protect the scripts.” Alex Garland describes himself as “a writer who opted to direct, rather than someone who always had a burning desire to direct.” This is, of course, a generalization. There are plenty of visual stylists and respected auteurs who write their own films. However, it’s rare for one to have a long career as a screenwriter before moving into directing.

While he is a veteran screenwriter, Dauberman is a relatively inexperienced director. His only previous feature film directorial credit is on Annabelle Comes Home. Often, new directors who write their own material will hedge their bets by overwriting the screenplay to protect against any potential weakness in their visual storytelling. Blink Twice was a confident directorial debut from Zoë Kravitz, but it suffers slightly from extended sequences of characters explaining the plot, as if Kravitz-the-screenwriter wasn’t yet entirely convinced of Kravitz-the-director’s storytelling prowess.

In contrast, Salem’s Lot is a directorial showcase. It is a gorgeous movie. As on Annabelle Comes Home, Dauberman is working with cinematographer Michael Burgess, another frequent collaborator with James Wan. Indeed, Burgess shot James Wan’s Malignant, one of the most purely enjoyable horror movies of the past half-decade. Salem’s Lot carries over a lot of the style that Burgess brought to Malignant, shooting the film in rich blues and reds that evokes Italian giallo horror cinema.

Salem’s Lot is a love letter to a certain kind of pulp cinema. The climax is a shadowy showdown at a drive-in movie theatre in a dying town that simultaneously evokes Peter Bogdanovich's Targets and The Last Picture Show. Posters for Trog and The Sugar Hill Club hang on the bedroom walls of Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter). Crucifixes glow white-hot when wielded against vampires. Mark bashes in the brains of Richard Straker (Pilou Asbæk) with a stoker, in silhouette.

The plot moves incredibly quickly, because it has to. Doctor Cody (Alfre Woodard), shifts from skepticism about vampires to clumsily fashioning a crucifix from tongue depressors in the space of a few seconds. It proves surprisingly easy to convince Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) of what is going on. “I’m in the business of the supernatural,” he admits. “In my youth, I had my own unusual experiences. So you have to do a lot less to convince someone like me.” That’s pretty convenient.

Straker, the familiar who allows the vampire Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward) to take root in Salem’s Lot, is established as a major character and then quickly dispatched. When Mark reveals he killed Straker, the survivors are horrified  – if only for a second. “You’re like… what, eleven?” Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) asks. “You killed Stryker?” Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh) clarifies. “I had to,” Mark explains. “It was the only way I could get out.” That is it. There’s no more time to dwell on skull-cracking. There’s work to be done.

There is a certain disappointment in this. It is easy to be precious about Salem’s Lot. As Neil Gaiman summarized, King’s original novel is a “Dickensian portrait of a small American town destroyed by the arrival of a vampire.” Greg Herren has described Salem’s Lot as one “of the best books about life in small towns that [he has] ever read.” It is a horror novel about rural America, using “the vampire as metaphor for the loneliness, corruption, and petty malice of small-town American life.”

That is a big idea. It’s also a timely idea, particularly now. It might also be one of the reasons why King’s work has experienced a renaissance in recent years – it speaks to the moment. Part of what made Dauberman’s adaptation of IT so compelling, particularly the first of the two films, was the sense that there was something truly rotten and decaying beneath the surface of this stereotypical small town in a way that resonated with contemporary America.

There is a sense that there is an adaptation of Salem’s Lot that does something similar, that fashions a big horrific allegory for modern America. This is a story about a community that has been abandoned and left to rot, falling under the influence of a monstrous and parasitic creature. Stephen King wrote Salem’s Lot against the social decay of the 1970s, but the grand themes of the novel are arguably more applicable to this moment than they were even then.

Dauberman’s script gestures broadly in this direction, mostly through a couple of scenes with Sheriff Parkins Gillespie (William Sadler), a human embodiment of moral lethargy. When Ben arrives in town, Gillespie’s first piece of advice is that Ben shouldn’t cause trouble, because that’ll simply increase Gillespie’s workload. It sounds like a joke, delivered by an affable old law enforcement official, but it’s also indicative of Gillespie’s broader outlook.

“It’s quite a world we got here,” Gillespie laments to Callahan. “Only gettin’ worse, you ask me.”  Callahan agrees, “Yeah. What are we supposed to do about it, Constable? Isn’t that the question we need to ask ourselves.” Gillespie responds, “I ask myself plenty. All answers point to retirement.” Later, as Barlow takes control of the town, Cody catches Gillespie preparing to flee. “This town is still alive and you’re running away,” she protests.

Gillispie makes an observation that would serve as the capstone to a weightier adaptation. “It’s not alive, Doctor,” Gillespie tells Cody. “That’s why he came here. Barlow. It’s dead, just like him. That’s why he could take over like that. And the whole country’s going the same way, just you watch.” It’s a cynical argument, as horrific as anything Barlow does over the course of the movie. It’s proof of Callahan’s earlier assertion that the “only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” However, it also exists in a vacuum.

That said, it’s perhaps unfair to criticize Dauberman’s adaptation of Salem’s Lot for what it isn’t. Taken on its own terms, there is a lot to appreciate about Dauberman’s schlocky pulpy retro horror. Dauberman is clearly having a lot of fun, particularly playing with the camera. There are a few playful crank zooms and elaborate dolly shots. The film’s accelerated pacing is reflected in the cinematic language, with Dauberman often allowing time to pass in camera pans.

It’s playful and thoughtful, but it’s also methodical. While Salem’s Lot feels like an adaptation of the novel that has been cut down to the bone, it’s clear that this approach to the material was woven into the fabric of the film from the original pitch. Salem’s Lot feels very much like the movie that Dauberman wanted to make. It’s remarkably consistent and coherent for a film that covers as much ground as it does as quickly as it does.

Some of this may have been accidental. Salem’s Lot entered production in August 2021, during the global pandemic. The film has the feel of a movie produced during those strange times. It has a tight core cast, the blocking over places characters at a distance from one another, and there is the bare minimum number of extras present. In most circumstances, these constraints add an uncanny quality to films set in cities or towns. In Salem’s Lot, that eerie emptiness adds to the general mood.

Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot perhaps works best as a mood piece. The movie’s soundtrack heavily features classics like Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown or Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man. It’s pretty cool to watch Mike Ryerson (Spencer Treat Clark) drink from an old-fashioned glass Pepsi bottle. An early scene of Ben at the town library, reviewing news clippings of his parents’ tragic death in a car accident, doesn’t really set up a major plot or character arc, but it’s always fun to see a character operating an analogue news reel machine.

There are some genuinely inspired touches, a sense that Dauberman and his crew are having as much fun as possible with the premise. At the climax of the film, there’s a delightful moment when Ben impales a vampire on a stake and then heaps another vampire on top of that pinned corpse. The entire conceit of that sequence is Ben racing against sunset, trying to stay out of the advancing shadow of the drive-in movie screen. It’s a good, clean, fun horror movie set-piece.

Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot is a profound and weighty thematic work about the undeath of a small American town and the rot that has taken root at the heart of that community. In contrast, Gary Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot is mostly about how cool it is to fight vampires with a throwback aesthetic. And, to be honest, it’s pretty good at that.