I was supporting “Salem’s Lot.” Not only am I a huge Stephen King fan who considers the 1975 original among the horror master’s best works, but it bothers me how much Max/WB continue to bury his projects like “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs. “Acme.” This one threatened to suffer a similar fate, once scheduled for a theatrical release in fall 2022 before being delisted in another wave of Covid-related delays. However, after that it simply remained in purgatory, and many fear it could be another victim of the tax write-off game its parent company is playing. When Stephen King himself tweeted Back in February of this year, seeing it and liking it, WB finally announced it was landing on Max, just in time for horror season. How wonderful would it be if all this drama hid a new horror gem, a film that should never have been treated as an afterthought? I wish I could say that was true.
The problem here is simple: there’s a reason this story has been told twice in miniseries form. You can’t do it in a function. Even at nearly two hours, 2024’s “Salem’s Lot” feels almost hysterically rushed with scenes resuming halfway through and things like transitions to mark the passage of time simply missing entirely. It’s no exaggeration to say that there are scene transitions in “Salem’s Lot” where it honestly feels like you’ve accidentally fast-forwarded a few minutes and missed the connective tissue. No, it was just cut from a movie that was in the can for so long that too many people played with the final product. You can almost see the scissor marks in some scenes that a producer decided could be tighter. This thing has been cut so many times that it bled to death.
The curious thing is that Gary Dauberman is well aware of the extent to which King’s material fits more than the length of a feature film, since he wrote both parts of Andy Muschietti’s “It.” Write and direct this story of a writer named Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) who returns to his hometown of Jerusalem’s Lot to delve into his own trauma. King’s book is a great variation on the “you can’t go home again” model of fiction; In this case, the home is populated by vampires.
Well, not at first. Mears discovers that two mysterious figures have purchased a legendary, spooky house on the hill of ‘Salem’s Lot: Richard Straker (Pilou Asbaek) and Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward). Before long, Barlow is revealed to be a Nosferatu-style creature of the night, and Straker is his Renfield, a human familiar who provides him with food and supplies. When Straker kidnaps a little boy and feeds him to Barlow, the entire town is shocked, but Dauberman never leaves him. anything persist. Before you know it, Mears, his girlfriend Susan (Makenzie Leigh), Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard), a teacher named Matthew (Bill Camp), and a preacher named Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) are going vampire hunting.
Clearly, it’s a strong cast and some of them find a way to make an impact. Bill Camp is a always welcome presence, and Hickey achieves a certain kind of tiredness with faith. Pullman works at first, but a film with too many characters and ideas discards him to spend time developing Ben, and poor Susan fares even worse. Once again, Dauberman races from one key moment to the next, forgetting that what matters most is the atmosphere of projects like this. Worst of all, there are moments when that version of this production peeks through the choppy editing of this one, like a great scene in which Camp’s teacher encounters a vampiricized young man he knows named Mike (Spencer Treat Clark) at the bar, and begins to realize that something is very, very wrong. It’s a creepy moment in a movie that just doesn’t get under your skin enough. He doesn’t have time.