Salem’s Lot review
The long-delayed feature film version of Salem’s Lot is good enough to fill two hours of your spooky season. As controversial as it is to say…it may have been sent to the right release platform.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Salem’s Lot
Directed by Gary Dauberman
Screenplay by Gary Dauberman
Starring Lewis Pullman, Spencer Treat Clark, Pilou Asbæk, Bill Camp, Makenzie Leigh, Alfre Woodard and William Sadler
Salem’s Lot Review
For two years discussion about Gary Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot adaptation has been contained to questions like “Whatever happened to Salem’s Lot?” and “Is that movie ever coming out?”. Fair questions in a time when David Zaslav has been banishing creative works to the upside down to reap tax benefits. Would the anti-art CEO strike again with the latest in a long line of Stephen King adaptations? Well, worry no longer. Salem’s Lot is not only alive and well…it’s available now. Not in theaters, of course…putting a horror movie in theaters on a genre-lite October release weekend would have made too much sense. Instead, it found a new home on Max. A decision that, after watching the movie, actually feels kind of fine.
That’s not to say Salem’s Lot is a bad movie. Honestly, it’s a pretty good movie. It just doesn’t feel all that new. For reasons that extend beyond being the third adaptation of a nearly 50-year-old novel. What it feels like is a mix of the recent It films with a dash of Mike Flanagan and a pinch of Stranger Things. It makes sense when you think about it. All three of those things have roots in King’s work. Either as direct adaptations or through heavy influence. This is just a long way of saying that Salem’s Lot nails the feel of a Stephen King adaptation.
Should it have gone to theaters first? Probably. This is a high-end production that must have cost the studio a pretty penny to produce. While I’m not an expert on the finances involved in film releases…I do believe that some money is still more than no money. An October release for Salem’s Lot would have brought in some money. A Max release is a nice bonus for subscribers looking for something to watch this spooky season. It also leads to (virtually) no money. I’m sure someone in the world will subscribe or, at least, postpone cancelling their subscription to watch it. But how many people can that possibly be?
What’s done is done. To see the latest King film for yourself you’ll need to have access to the Max streaming service. While we can argue the strategy from the studio…we should also look at what that means for viewers. It’s fine. A controversial take, I know. Direct to streaming is the devil and creators will never survive this new (new) Hollywood tactic. Despite this being the fourth straight paragraph discussing it…movie reviews don’t really take that into consideration. What matters is the quality of the movie. When I hear that a movie is going to sit on the shelf for two years before bypassing theaters…I get worried about its quality. Which brings us back to the main point. Salem’s Lot is, despite how it’s release was handled, pretty good.
It’s one of three new films offered by streaming services on October 3rd. House of Spoils (Prime Video) and Hold Your Breath (Hulu) being the other two. Salem’s Lot is the best of the three. Whatever your thoughts about what its Max release says about the state of the industry…having a new, pretty good, horror movie to watch on your couch as the leaves turn is not the worst thing in the world. It has theater release quality production and a fine cast. It also feels like something you’ve seen before. Maybe because you have. Maybe because it comes from the same seed that many modern studio horror films do.
If your familiar with the story of Salem’s Lot from its 1975 novel, 1979 George Romero mini-series or 2004 TNT mini-series…you won’t find much new ground broken here. More of a remix than a reimagining. The characters you know are all here in one form or another. No version of the story has remained totally faithful to King’s story. As the shortest of the three adaptations, 2024’s Salem’s Lot’s lacks the depth of King’s novel. Romero’s version remains the best adaptation. But it’s an easy, often fun watch with some strong qualities of its own.
If there’s anything to learn from this take on the story…it’s probably that it needs the extra time afforded by a mini-series. Instead of getting to know the people that populate Jerusalem’s Lot as well as we’d like…characters feel reduced to archetypes moved along a chess board as the story demands. A writer, a doctor, a teacher and a priest walk into a haunted house. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
The 1975 setting looks great. It feels more modern than it looks. Its design feels like those more modern examples laid out at the beginning of this review. Familiarity isn’t a negative…it’s a shorthand. Salem’s Lot seems to burrow a feeling from works you’re probably familiar with to lend its truncated tale a measure of instant understanding. When you’re sticking to archetypes…that’s a clever way to do it.
If you are not familiar with the story…you’ll find an enjoyable watch waiting on the other side of your Max subscription. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel. What it does, however, is provide a fast-paced version of a usually slower story. Alliances form and dissolve before you can blink an eye. Bad for character development. Good for watching a bunch of people getting dispatched by vampires in short order.
Salem’s Lot is too short to give us a full feel for the town, its residents, or how they deal with a vampire outbreak. If that’s what you’re after you’ll need a Netflix subscription. There you’ll find Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass. If you’d like to see that story on steroids…Salem’s Lot has you covered. Either way, your “vampires infect a community” stories will be found on streaming this spooky season.
Scare Value
Who knows how Salem’s Lot would have fared in theaters. Horror tends to outperform expectations…and it is the spooky season. This is a perfectly watchable Stephen King adaptation that respects the material. Worse movies hit theaters all the time. Debuting it on Max isn’t the end of the world either. Having a quality production that settles on “pretty good” a button press away can be a good thing for viewers…even if it sucks for creators.
3/5
Salem’s Lot Link
Streaming on Max
