‘Be careful what you invite inside…’
A troubled production very rarely makes for a good final product. Gary Dauberman’s ‘Salem’s Lot was originally scheduled for a cinematic release in September of 2022 after being initially announced all the way back in April 2019. The fact that it ended up being released in October 2024 and straight to streaming set alarm bells ringing, as did reports that Warner Bros. insisted on trimming the film down from over three hours to under two. And sure enough, ‘Salem’s Lot 2024 is yet another underwhelming Stephen King adaptation…
The small town of Jerusalem’s Lot (known locally as ‘Salem’s Lot or just The Lot) is overrun by vampires following the arrival of two mysterious gentlemen. It falls upon writer Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), returning to his childhood home to research a book; his teacher friend Matthew Burke (Bill Camp); and local preacher Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) to defeat the ancient evil.
Writer-director Gary Dauberman is best known for his work on The Conjuring Universe (he wrote every entry in both The Nun franchise and the Annabelle series – also directing Annabelle Comes Home). He has successfully dabbled in King before (he wrote both chapters of the recent IT adaptation) and so seemed a natural fit for this long-awaited ‘Salem’s Lot reboot. And perhaps he would have been had he been allowed to foster his original vision. There is nothing wrong with his direction here, in fact, the cinematography and editing are consistently excellent (if a little unnecessarily ostentatious in places – not every cut needs to be a match cut), and he clearly has a feel for the material.
The problem is that you simply cannot cut down a 439-page novel into a 113-minute movie. The audience will only care about a small town becoming overrun if they feel as if they know the town. We see nothing of Jerusalem’s Lot here outside of the central characters. There is nothing to mark the town out from any other small town in Maine. It’s a cliche but the key to King’s small-town horror is that the towns themselves become a character. There is none of that here. We also don’t learn much about the central characters either besides that annoying habit that scriptwriters have of giving each character one definable trait and nothing else. Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter) is brave, Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh) wants to leave her hometown, and Father Callahan is an alcoholic and on and on. There is none of the depth or the texture that made the source material so compelling. The final insult is that Barlow, supposedly the big bad, is a CGI creation that could have come straight out of any film from The Conjuring Universe.
There may have been a semblance of a good film here had Warners allowed the director they had chosen to do his job, but the film we are left with is visually innovative but ultimately forgettable – a toothless adaptation of one of King’s most beloved novels.
