Salem’s Lot: Suspense is king in this occasionally effective adaptation of a vampire classic

‘Salem’s Lot (1975), Stephen King’s second novel, imposes the plot of Dracula onto the small-town-with-festering-secrets tradition of Peyton Place. The book has been as influential on contemporary horror as Dracula was – among the many works inspired by it are Peter Straub’s novel Ghost Story and Mike Flanagan’s streaming miniseries Midnight Mass (2021). 

Writer/director Gary Dauberman comes to the material after co-writing the recent films of King’s even-thicker small-town horror doorstop It and doing a smart job of direction on the perhaps-unpromising Annabelle Comes Home (2019). TV miniseries adaptations in 1979 and 2004 both run close to three hours and still prune vital material. With a smaller canvas, Dauberman makes radical trims to a wealth of sub-plots. Recognising that the tactic of delaying a key reveal until well into the story is no longer viable, Dauberman allows a glimpse early on of the Dracula substitute Barlow – sporting a Nosferatu look close to that of Tobe Hooper’s 1979 miniseries – and plays with vampire conventions to create suspense rather than surprise.

Sometimes, it feels like a shadow-play – a particularly effective sequence has the silhouette of the vampire’s human minion (Pilou Asbaek) stalking children in stylised woods. Key character elements (like why Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) has come back to his home town) are dropped entirely in favour of a quick-building atmosphere of dread. 

Noting an imbalance in Bram Stoker’s battle between stalwart champions of light and the surprisingly-easily-beaten Dracula, King makes Barlow a more persuasive, insidious villain. The story whittles down its ‘circle’ of monster-fighters by having the fiend prey on their weaknesses, so that folk we might rely on as Van Helsing acolytes – the priest, the doctor, an English teacher, the town constable, even the heroine – are broken, corrupted or just end up running away. Dauberman stresses this despairing thread rather than the death of the town – though he makes something of eerily deserted daytime streets and the glowing-eyed spectres who emerge in the mists at nightfall.

As a stab at making vampires physically and spiritually threatening again after a run of fictions more sympathetic to their outsider status, Salem’s Lot is intermittently effective. Crucifixes glow with divine light when brandished against hissing creatures, former friends and family members pounce on victims with gleeful malice. The Marsten House, central to the novel, is here almost a red herring. Its new, more apt location for the dying heart of small town America is the local drive-in cinema where a hundred car boots serve as coffins for Barlow’s flock of fledgeling vampires.

► Salem’s Lot is in UK cinemas now.