It’s once bitten, thrice shy for this third attempt to adapt King’s vampire masterpiece.
Much has been made in the rarified atmosphere of consumer electronics of Artificial Intelligence’s ability to wade through large amounts of text on your behalf. Rejoice, rejoice, for TL;DR is now a thing of the past! Chaotically busy iMessage chat? AI will summarise it. Long, multi-response email thread? AI will condense it down to the salient information. Intriguing but overly detailed internet article? AI will crystalise the key points for you. Complex, lengthy slow-burn American gothic horror novel dealing with the insidious threat of an outside influence and the petty corruptible nature of insular small-town life? Well, actually we don’t need AI for this one because Gary Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot has bowdlerised the source material to the point where further abridgement is nigh on impossible. The problem is; in doing so, he’s sacrificed everything that makes Salem’s Lot great in favour of a breakneck CliffsNotes basic vampire bitch version of the story that’s all cape and no fangs.
When writer Ben Mears (Lewis “son of Bill” Pullman) returns to his hometown of Salem’s Lot burdened with the weight of a vague and nebulous backstory, it’s not long before he’s disturbed by his failure to be able to rent out the local murder house and has to settle instead for a lodging house. Meanwhile, he’s not the only new arrivals in town. The new owners of the Marsten House are far more than the effete antiquarians they purport to be, especially the reclusive Mr Barlow who prefers to interact with the town’s residents via his partner Mr Straker (Pilou Asbæk). But it’s when an outbreak of apparently contagious pernicious anaemia starts to sweep the town that the wooden stakes are seriously raised.
This most recent adaptation of King’s rightly celebrated novel is basically gnawing on the bones of the story, its once plump, supple flesh drained dry of the narrative lifeblood that imbued it with such vitality and potency. In its frantic attempt to condense King’s sprawling narrative into a ludicrously ambitious two-hour runtime, atmosphere is sacrificed for action, suspense for speed and subtle foreshadowing for a vampire baseball bat to the balls of bloodsucking blatancy.
Lewis Pullman steps into the role of Ben Mears and delivers a decent performance but the problem is the film sidelines him almost immediately, never allowing the character to develop fully. It’s a problem shared by the rest of the ensemble—Mackenzie Leigh’s Susan, Alfre Woodard’s Dr Cody, and Bill Camp’s wonderful Matthew Burke are all there, but none of them are given the time or space to ever feel like real people or, in the case of the woefully underused William Sadler as Police Chief Gillespie even leave much of an impression. The only blessing in its breakneck run through the story’s big beats is that Pilou Asbæk’s risible Richard Straker is barely present and quickly dispensed with in favour of a new familiar for Mr Barlow, one that can at least be relied on to have an accent that actually occurs in nature.
There’s a fleeting moment where Bill Camp’s Matthew Burke begins to piece together the vampire threat over drinks with a newly turned local, and it captures the eerie, unsettling tone the rest of the movie lacks. But just as quickly as it appears, that mood evaporates, leaving behind a residue of a film that moves too fast to deliver a chilling or memorable experience. As precipitately paced as it is, Salem’s Lot might still have worked has the truncation been done with care to hide the hatchet job with smooth pacing. Unfortunately, the finished? film is a choppy horror picture show and scenes abut each other with a lack of coherence and certainly no time to really settle before the next one is upon us. Salem’s Lot is fundamentally a story that thrives on the slow, stiletto-blade style tension, built from the gradual, creeping realization that the town is being consumed by an ancient evil, but this adaptation has no time to waste on such indulgences so the vampire is revealed to the audience almost as soon as his coffin is lowered into the basement of the Marston House and his first victim follows soon after in a kidnapping so blatant it’s a wonder even a police force as ineffective as the Salem’s Lot PD weren’t able to solve it in half an hour.
Perhaps the most egregious fast forwarding is through the part where incredulity turns to reluctant acceptance as otherwise rationale townsfolk come to the conclusion that the only explanation for what’s going on is rampant vampirism. Then again, they’re probably tipped off to the incontrovertible existence of the supernatural by the fact that crucifixes glow brightly in the presence of ne’er-do-well nosferatu like Frodo Baggins’ Sting after a set of fresh batteries.
Visually, there are a few strong moments and the finale, set far from the Marston House, is at least a novel departure from the, well, novel as well as the two previous adaptations. Kurt Barlow’s Nosferatu-inspired creature design is impressive but effectively borrowed from Tobe Hooper’s superior 1979 version and while the town feels suitably creepy, the frequent use of rapid sunsets and looming shadows almost tips over into The Day After Tomorrow-style flash freeze ice capade silliness. But for all its visual flair, Salem’s Lot never really feels dangerous. The blithe acceptance of the existence of vampires robs them of much of their menace and it’s always in too much of a hurry to let the horror linger.
In the end, Salem’s Lot isn’t quite a disaster, but it’s a profound disappointment given the track record of everyone involved. It’s the cinematic equivalent of those AI summaries that all the cool kids seem to be going crazy for and, much like those AI summaries leaves you unsatisfied, probably ill-informed and needing to recheck some of the details yourself anyway. There’s nothing in it that stands out as distinctive and when you’re making the third adaptation of a popular piece of fiction, being distinctive and memorable is your raison d’être and, ironically, the other thing this version does too quickly is fade into obscurity, eclipsed by both versions that came before it.
