Human evil lacking in return to ’Salem’s Lot

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/10/2024 (533 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As part of this October’s Spooky Season viewing, there’s a new movie version of ’Salem’s Lot now streaming on Crave. Starring Lewis Pullman and Makenzie Leigh and adapted by director Gary Dauberman from Stephen King’s 1975 novel, the story centres on a small Maine town menaced by an ancient evil. King himself has pronounced it “quite good.”

Now King, who has written a whole lot of novels as well as the nonfiction book On Writing, must know the “quite” in this phrase is doing a lot of work.

Sure enough, this adaptation is not utterly terrible. It’s not terrific either. There are some evocative, effective shots and some interesting performances, especially from reliable character actors like Bill Camp and John Benjamin Hickey. But overall, the movie is just OK.

For me, the best thing about this “quite good” 2024 outing is that it sent me back to the 1979 TV miniseries (which can be rented on Apple TV, Microsoft and Prime Video platforms, or maybe watched on an old VHS tape).

This version, from director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), is more than “quite good.” It can be a little uneven and occasionally outright hokey, but it’s great.

My October watches are mostly repeat viewings of old movies. I prefer long, eerie lead-ups to gory, graphic payoffs, and I would rather see the most rudimentary practical effects than the most elaborate CGI wizardry. That’s why I tend to look to the past for my horror fix.

In true retro fashion, the ’79 Salem’s Lot goes low and slow. David Soul (on whom I have an involuntary residual crush, thanks to teen viewings of Starsky & Hutch) plays Ben Mears, a struggling writer who returns to ’Salem’s Lot, the New England community where he spent part of his childhood.

Ben is hoping to start his new novel, about the long-abandoned mansion that looms over the town, but he’s also obsessed by the sense that ’Salem’s Lot is somehow a magnet for evil. When he discovers the mansion has been rented by the owners of a new antiques shop, Richard Straker (James Mason) and the mysterious, unseen Kurt Barlow, Ben begins to suspect a vampire is preying on the Lot’s inhabitants.

King knows his Maine settings, and he understands both the good and the bad of small-town life. The 2024 movie reduces the townspeople to types — the whiskey priest, the rational doctor, the lonely widow — and its action is so rushed we don’t get to know these people before they become vampire chow.

The 1979 series, with its three-hour runtime, lets us hang out with the characters when they are doing ordinary, everyday human-being things. We get to know them first as flawed but concerned parents, as erring husbands and wives, as sleazy businesspeople, as dedicated teachers, as kids just being kids. That’s why we care when these people start disappearing and dying.

The one creature who remains elusive in the ’79 series is Barlow the vampire. While the 2024 version lets us glimpse our monster in its opening minutes, Hooper keeps his Big Bad under wraps for most of the series, making him more frightening when he finally does appear. Hooper offers instead subtle setups, ratcheted tight by the characters’ reactions, tense with scrabbling soundscapes and unsettling atmosphere.

But perhaps the most important aspect of the ’79 series is where it locates the locus of evil. Barlow is a grotesque parasite with glowing eyes, pallid skin and sharp yellow teeth, but it’s Straker who is ultimately more terrifying. As the antique firm’s front man and the vampire familiar, he possesses some unusual powers but remains recognizably human.

The 2024 Straker, played by Pilou Asbaek, hardly registers, while James Mason’s performance in the ’79 Salem’s Lot is just magnificently chilling. Dripping with exquisite sarcasm, elegant contempt and utter callousness, Mason reminds us of the enduring central insight of King’s work — that the supernatural realm might be scary but, in the end, it’s human evil that really gets to us.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca