Director: Gary Dauberman
Stars: Lewis Pullman, Bill Camp, Makenzie Leigh
For better or worse Gary Dauberman has had a large impact in sculpting the present style of populist American horror, being a key scribe behind many movies in The Conjuring Universe as well as a co-author of the IT screenplays. He’s even proven himself behind the camera, helming the surprisingly-fun Annabelle Comes Home a few years back. Still, his stamp on the multiplex scare factory has as many fans as detractors, and his name is more-or-less synonymous with CG-heavy funhouse rides with seesawing sound designs seemingly designed to placate the most impatient of cinema-goers.
Here he returns to the well with Stephen King, and another do-over of a title already covered in multiple TV efforts. Lacking the stretch and sprawl of a 2-part TV movie, Dauberman struggles to condense King’s longer-form storytelling to a workable 113 minute feature, particularly when he favours such a casually-paced entry into the material. In spite of a leisurely first half hour, character work is often thin, defaulting to the kind of cliché broad strokes that typify many of the entries in the Conjuring Universe. Indeed, this feels more of a piece with that series than King’s old-timey community spirit.
Thus we don’t ever really feel like we know King avatar Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), the author returning to his home town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine just when a sinister vampire overlord (Alexander Ward) decides to start feasting upon the inhabitants of the sleepy ‘burb. Nor do we get much personality from estate agent’s assistant Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh) beyond what’s required to make her the de facto love interest (it doesn’t help any that Leigh chooses to press every line reading to the point that it feels like Susan is always speaking in italics). Even Jordan Preston Carter’s energetic work as new kid on the block Mark Petrie is clipped down to run-of-the-mill whippersnapper street smarts. Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot is all about covering the basics as simply as possible.
Granted he shoots this thing with a handful of nice visual ideas in mind. Particularly effective is the picking off of the first of the town’s innocent kids, captured in fairy tale chiaroscuro during a walk in the woods. Former Game of Thrones antagonist Pilou Asbæk does a bit of standard-fare moustache-twirling as vampire emissary R. T. Straker in this regard. But, like everyone else, he’s only ever functional, and is whittled out of the story too quickly leaving Ward as a simple, ineffectual Big Bad who amounts to little more than a over-familiar costume and make-up job. Much like Dauberman’s popular terror The Nun, Salem’s Lot in 2024 suffers from a serious lack of character.
Thank goodness, then, for the precious efforts of co-star stalwarts Bill Camp and Alfre Woodard, who at least pretend that they’re not going through the motions. Camp lends the film the gruff, no-nonsense quality of a John Carpenter flick, while Woodard spends half the time swearing in disbelief, which at least adds a sense of self-aware irony to proceedings.
The spectre of Carpenter recurs in Dauberman’s overuse of fog as a quick shortcut to disguise potential jump scares and to generate the same kind of rote atmosphere favoured in the first Nun movie, but also in the (admittedly nifty) way in which crucifixes glow in the dark whenever a vampire is present, persistently bringing to mind the finale of The Fog. The visual reference casts John Benjamin Hickey’s faithless Father Callahan as a kind of foil for that film’s Father Malone.
Ultimately, however, Dauberman exhibits very little of the patience or craft of Carpenter, and after a gentle welcome to the town events start accelerating at a rate of knots. As a result it starts to feels as though Salem’s Lot has really had the shears taken to it, the passing of time stops making sense and one starts wondering what it is the surviving characters are even doing with their precious daytime hours. It all starts to feel full of holes.
There’s a brief exchange about the country at large losing itself to the sway of these damnable, persuasive creatures. Something that feels like a halfhearted tilt to the cult of Trumpism. But it’s the limpest of gestures, as though Dauberman doesn’t really want to tick anyone off in his pursuit of yet another crossover hit. The truth is, in a particularly busy Halloween season, his movie has next to nothing new to offer those with even a passing familiarity with the vampire genre. This Salem’s Lot is cheesier than it is suspenseful, sillier than it is striking, and doused from beginning to end in an over-waxy sheen as though its been digitally colour corrected beyond reasonable recognition.
With vampires that lack bite and a paucity of intensity, if you’re after a thrilling tale of a small community overrun by creatures of the night, you’re still better off revisiting the more hostile territories of 30 Days of Night.
The Lost Highway Hotel 