Salem’s Lot review – Stephen King’s small-town vampire rework lacks bite

The inevitability of even more Stephen King adaptations, in the wake of It’s record-breaking success back in 2017, has rarely felt associated with all that much necessity. There have been about 13 on the big and small screens in the years since, mostly a mix of sub-par second-go reworks of classics (Firestarter, Pet Sematary, The Stand) and an unnecessary stream of little-known short stories (The Boogeyman, Mr Harrigan’s Phone, Chapelwaite), with only the odd bright spot in-between (Doctor Sleep, The Outsider).

The more we’ve seen of him, especially in his lesser works, the more we’ve been made keenly aware of his recurrent themes and tropes. They’re front and centre in a new take on his 1975 novel Salem’s Lot, the third adaptation after two miniseries attempts. It was supposed to be the first big-screen transfer but the film has had a rather cursed journey, announced in 2019, shot in 2021, moved off a 2022 release date, moved again from a 2023 slot and then finally downgraded to a streaming premiere in the US (it will hit cinemas in the UK the week after). It’s not quite the ungainly disaster that timeline would suggest but it’s also not really distinctive enough to warrant much fanfare, the strategy to offload it (especially during a difficult year for big-screen horror) making perfect sense.

It’s a musty grab bag of Kingisms – small town, plucky kids, male novelist, age-old evil – that would have felt fresher back in the 1970s but at this point in the adaptation cycle, it’s just all too familiar. There’s maybe a more vibrant remix to be done but it’s not what The Nun and Annabelle director Gary Dauberman has in mind, giving us a competently made yet hugely uninvolving retread that never once finds a way to explain why this particular novel needed a third adaptation.

It’s about an author coming home to a town he’d left a long while back and finding himself in the middle of a nightmare. Ben (Lewis Pullman, son of Bill) is looking for inspiration but quickly becomes distracted from work by both a burgeoning relationship with local Susan (Makenzie Leigh) and the death of a local boy (the film, like many of King’s stories, is refreshingly unafraid to buck standard horror convention by killing children).

He becomes part of a group of locals (also including character actors Alfre Woodard, John Benjamin Hickey and Bill Camp and impressive newcomer Jordan Preston Carter) who have started to realise that vampires are starting to take over and they band together to save what’s left and take down the source …

As the first contained adaptation, told in just under two hours rather than spread across multiple episodes, Salem’s Lot can feel a little rushed, failing to flesh out the central town and the people who live in it (made in 2021, it also has the unmistakable feeling of a Covid-19 production with very few highly populated scenes, a problem when you’re trying to focus a film on the importance of community).

The central romance is blandly developed with such speed that I kept worrying I’d missed a chunk (I’m sure many more scenes can be found on the cutting room floor) and while Dauberman manages a handful of effective moments (a morgue scramble with a homemade cross and a drive-in movie light trick are particularly good), he’s never able to capture the slow, escalating dread that a story such as this demands.

It’s always nice to see actors like Woodard, Hickey and Camp get slightly meatier roles in genre fare like this but the film is hampered by an obsession with shock deaths, which grow less shocking and more frustrating, the stop-start rhythm making it hard for us to invest in anyone or anything. There’s nothing here to root for or care about and so we’re left to focus on the horror over the drama, which is only mildly diverting at best.

King, who has a habit of over-praising certain films and shows on social media, posted about the film back in February, saying that it’s not “embarrassing or anything”, the faintest of praise. He’s right, it isn’t embarrassing but it also isn’t really anything either.