Salem’s Lot (2024) Review – “A solid adaptation of one of Stephen King’s greatest novels”

Finally (long, long, long, long, long) Gary Dauberman’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s property is here, after a delay so long that fears arose that it could be the latest Warner Bros. film to get in the way of WB boss David Zaslav’s giant magnet. After all, nothing kills vampires faster than deletion for tax purposes.

A fate worse than death averted, and the sheer magnitude of the delay (the film was shot in 2021 and was originally supposed to be released in 2022, according to the copyright text at the end of the film) left tongues wagging over the quality of the film chatted. Was Salem’s property a big old stinker? Had Dauberman, who made his directorial debut here after adapting King’s words for the screen with the two texts by Andy Muschietti It Films (and as a screenwriter for various incantation Movies), made a vampire movie that just sucked?

The simple answer is no. Although there is a more complicated answer at play here too. There’s a lot to admire about the first big-screen adaptation of King’s story of a small New England town slowly overrun by vampires, although it’s not enough to escape the shadow of Tobe Hooper’s 1979 television version.

Interestingly, the greatest achievements of a writer-turned-director film are visual. While there is nothing in Hooper’s take that compares to the trembling, subconsciously connected majesty of young, vampirized Ralphie Glick floating through the fog to type at the window (though that image is revisited, albeit slightly less so). effective) Dauberman and his cinematographer Michael Burgess have shown some imagination – clever shadow play shows that two characters are not as alone as they thought; A multitude of bright-eyed vampires appear scattered across the night sky to illustrate the extent of the problem in Jerusalem’s Lot. While the all-new finale – one of Dauberman’s most effective changes, delving into the fates of specific characters, some of which will please King fans, others of which will have them reaching for garlic and crucifixes – is satisfying action-packed.

There are other areas that let the site down. While the performances are mostly good (Pilou Asbæk as Straker, the suave sidekick of Vampire Barlow’s leader, is miscast), it moves so quickly that it’s difficult for any character – even the nominal lead, Lewis Pullman’s Ben Mears and Jordan Preston Carter’s Mark Petrie – to make a difference. King’s book was a sprawling, Peyton PlaceA soap opera style soap opera that just happened to be crawling with bloodsuckers, but it meant he could take the time to build and develop characters so you could feel the pressure when they perished or succumbed to the dark side . That doesn’t happen here. There are just too many balls to juggle. Characters are introduced and then disappear for what feels like an eternity. When a minor character you glimpse briefly in the opening act returns near the end in the middle of a main sequence, you could be forgiven for not recognizing or even remembering who they are.

One gets the feeling that there is a much longer and perhaps more satisfying cut of the film; one that restores excised subplots (Ben’s fascination with the city’s spooky centerpiece, the Marsten House, is hugely important in the novel and is reduced to an afterthought here) and puts flesh on the bones of the sparsely drawn characters. Maybe that giant magnet was used after all. If so, that would be a great shame, because while this is a solid adaptation of one of King’s greatest novels, there’s a feeling that there could be a much better film here if only it were allowed to breathe properly.