31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 15: Salem's Lot (1979)

Day 15: Salem’s Lot (1979), dir. by Tobe Hooper

Streaming Availability: Rental

The two-part CBS miniseries of Salem’s Lot was only the second ever adaptation of any Stephen King novel. When this aired in November 1979, King had only written five books, versus the exactly 700,000 he has out now. Sure, even then he was as successful as any author could hope for, but Stephen King was not yet an institution. You did not need to title the movie "Stephen King's Salem's Lot". There’s a good chance that most of the audience watching, all looking disgustingly Seventies, presumably resting their disco shoes into their shag carpets, had no idea who King even was. They were just here to see some spooky vampires on TV. Well, after this, the Kubrick version of The Shining was waiting in the wings for 1980. By the mid-Eighties, King’s best-selling novels and genre flicks were non-stop, a torrent of Steve, and he would be the ruling Shock Meister for decades to come.

Another fact: this is the first vampire movie I can remember seeing as a kid. I think it was 1996, I was down in my grandma’s house, on her lap, five-years-old, watching a big blue-skinned yellow-eyed spooky Nosferatu man getting staked in his coffin. You gotta start kids off early with horror, I say.

Stephen King’s novel, ‘Salem’s Lot has a far vaster scope than any story we have seen so far. We have today a TV movie adaptation that’s three hours long and it actually needs all that girth. (Boy, do I miss the Thirties movies I started with which were only seventy or even sixty minutes long...) This is not the story of a vampire arriving from a more dark and magical part of the world to torment say, one London social circle of about five people. This vampire is attacking an entire rural Maine town, interrupting its internal dramas and history. King’s narrative has one central hero in Ben Mears, but he's one thread in a living tapestry of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine. That’s a lot to fit into a conventional filmic three act structure. King does this a lot, for example Derry in IT and Haven in The Tommyknockers. None of those novels have managed to be condensed into a two-hour movie. You need the structure of a TV miniseries, and even then, this adaptation is missing a ton from the novel.

Also, yeah, the book is better. I like this miniseries, but 'Salem Lot is one of King's best works, highly recommended read. That dude can write some novels, have you heard?

The version of the Tobe Hooper Salem’s Lot you’ll find today will probably run continuously as a single film. However, you can still spot the various commercial breaks, since Salem’s Lot loves to punctuate its stoppages with a big jump scare or a cheesy zoom-in. You can also clearly see where the movie was cut into two episodes, since there’s a dramatic conclusion ninety minutes in, before the film returns to another slow building prologue. This means Salem’s Lot is fatty pacing-wise, but it was never intended to be viewed all the way through like this anyway.

Personally, I’d to see a version with the Seventies commercials left in out of pure kitsch value. Let’s see some ads for Billy Beer or John Travolta’s godawful solo album between the all the spooky.

You might assume that a TV movie would be cheaper and less cinematic than a proper theatrical release. However, the only part of Salem’s Lot that looks rough or dated is the fashion – I can only describe David Soul’s haircut as “groovy golden retriever”. This is not an extravagant gore or sex movie, there’s very little blood, but the scares are there. The Californian town Tobe Hooper filmed in to double for 'Salem's Lot, ME looks convincingly like a small handsome hamlet in the Northeast. We never get the full scope of the town as in the novel, but we do get a solid core of a dozen or more character actors to fill in the side roles. You can easily imagine plenty more side stories happening off-screen.

What’s most impressive and best-remembered about Salem’s Lot is the effects. I'm watching over forty years later there and these are still brilliant scares and memorable scenes. They get a lot of mileage out of reflective contacts in the vampire’s eyes. It looks great, especially with characters sitting in darkness staring at the camera with glowing evil in their faces. Then there's the little vampire children scratching at the window of their friends, begging to be let in. Fog behind them, floating unnaturally. Nobody has had pleasant dreams remembering those scenes.

The final boss vampire, Barlow (Reggie Nalder) is as horrifying a take on the 1922 Nosferatu design as has ever been filmed. He's no longer a graceful creature of nightmares but rather a rat-like beast. The novel’s Barlow is a play on Count Dracula, but Hooper went in a far nastier direction with this malformed thing.

Since Barlow never speaks, if it is capable of speech at all, the villainous charisma of Salem’s Lot is instead given to his human familiar, Straker, played by the great James Mason. Mason basically replays his venomously polite villain from the Hitchcock film, North by Northwest only now in a vampire story. He's an incredible villain here. 

Unfortunately, the main hero, Ben (David Soul) is not quite up to the challenge of matching that charisma. Soul is hunky, that’s about all brings to this movie. It is funny when Ben Mears assumes the horror in Salem’s Lot is related to his childhood trauma in the big haunted house at the end of town – when actually, Barlow and Straker have no idea who he is. This horror film is actually not at all about trauma. Mears’ new girlfriend, Susan, is not one of Stephen King’s greatest female characters on the page, and the version here, played by Bonnie Bedelia, is not one of the greatest female characters on screen either.

Luckily the cast is backed up by strong character actors. Fred Willard, Julie Cobb, Elisha Cook Jr., Geoffrey Lewis, George Dzundza, and Baron Harkonnen himself, Kenneth McMillan are all better than solid here. There are halfway decent New England accents from much of the cast too. As victims, comic relief, or just blue collar Maine flavor, they're the real star of Salem's Lot.

The 1979 Salem’s Lot is one of the most beloved vampire movies we have covered so far. It made both AMC and Shudder’s Greatest Horror Movies lists. The miniseries was so beloved, that a TNT remake in 2004 starring Rob Lowe was laughed out of the room. Personally, I think that version is perfectly fine – even better in a few places, especially James Cromwell’s Father Callahan, a character that might as well not even be in the '79 version. Also, in 1989, Larry Cohen made a hilarious sequel-in-name-only, which I covered two years ago in 2020's Spooky Month. The Netflix miniseries, Midnight Mass, borrows a ton of ideas from this story too. Finally, there's a new movie coming out next year directed by Gary Dauberman.

As for Stephen King, well, 700,000 books later, he’s probably the most successful horror brand in human history. He would return to vampires multiple times in his long career, and we will run into him again.

Next time! We’re finally leaving the Seventies behind! Who’s hungry for some David Bowie? We all have a The Hunger.