TV takes a second bite at Salem’s Lot.
As the similarly titled, King-adjacent sequel implied, there’s a great deal of risk in a return to Salem’s Lot. Tobe Hooper’s 1979 miniseries may not have stuck to the novel’s blueprints with diligence, but it seared itself onto pop culture memory with an iconic ferocity that transcended its televisual origins ensuring that from that point on, you couldn’t readapt Salem’s Lot, you can only remake it.
The 2004 version, directed by Mikael Salomon and starring Rob Lowe, thus had to reckon not only with the novel’s rich tapestry of creeping dread but with the ghost of Hooper’s version tapping at the television screen like Ralphie Glick on a first-floor window. In response, Salomon adopts a more novel-faithful approach while subtly recalibrating tone, casting choices and structure for a post-Six Feet Under audience. The result is neither a disaster, like the action-oriented abridgement of 2024, nor a triumph; more an interesting reshuffle of creative aesthetic that falls squarely in between serving King’s novel better and selling his story short.
The most obvious recalibration is the casting of Rob Lowe as Ben Mears. A little too clean-cut, square-jawed and clear-eyed, Lowe brings a muted intensity to the role that strays into blandness on more than a few occasions; his subdued emotional register never quite selling the trauma that underpins his reasons for returning to Jerusalem’s Lot in the first place. Donald Sutherland, on the other hand, is here to have a little fun and turns things up a notch or two, delivering a gleefully corrupt Richard Straker, all silk handkerchiefs and sulphurous smiles; sleazier and more predatory than James Mason’s urbane gentleman.
It’s Rutger Hauer’s Barlow, though, that lets the side down; an anaemic lurking presence rather than a full-blooded malignancy. He’s closer to the novel’s original conception of Barlow for sure, but while it makes intellectual sense, dramatically Hauer’s few scenes feel undercooked and devoid of the menace required to catalyse the town’s descent into a vampiric vassal state. Hauer’s Barlow seems detached and disinterested, like someone slipped a blood thinner into his nightly B-negative. It’s a shame too, because the rest of the cast deliver some damn fine work to flesh out the soon-to-be-exsanguinated borough, particularly James Cromwell’s weary and weak-spirited Father Callahan, and Andre Braugher’s Matt Burke, who adds both warmth and wisdom to proceedings even if his role in the unfolding tragedy is somewhat compressed but without that malevolent centre of gravity, the dramatic orbits quickly decay.
Where the 2004 miniseries does succeed is in capturing the grain of the novel as well as the timber frame; this Salem’s Lot understands the festering resentments beneath small-town Americana. Its Jerusalem’s Lot isn’t a quaint, postcard-perfect community but a hollowed-out, calcifying husk barely holding together its secrets. The adaptation leans into the moral mildew of the town; paedophiles, abusers, drunks, and hypocrites writhe beneath the civic surface like maggots in a coffin and it’s here that the spirit of King’s novel feels most intact. The supernatural incursion is almost incidental, the final imbalance that plunges the town’s pre-existing predilection for depravity over the edge; vampirism less an invasion than a metastasis.
For all its thematic fidelity, though, 2004’s Salem’s Lot suffers from structural sprawl. Spanning three hours, it attempts to gather every narrative thread from the book, but in doing so tangles up the tensions and blunts momentum. The decision to frame the story with Ben’s post-Lot institutionalisation drains some of the ambiguity, turning his slow-burn tale of encroaching dread into a retrospective trauma dump, an over-explanatory framing device – a common affliction of early-2000s television drama, where trust in audience inference was still catching up to ambitions of psychological complexity.
The Marsten House still looms like an architectural ulcer on the hill overlooking the town but, like the adaptation itself, the interior horror rarely matches the promise of its exterior. There are occasional bursts of stylistic flair but they seldom congeal into sustained dread. It’s atmospheric but rarely scary, and while it hews closer to King’s text than Hooper’s stylistic flourishes did, fidelity does not equal ferocity.
