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| images courtesy of Arrow Video |
The Stephen King miniseries has been a household staple since 1990, when IT was first adapted by Halloween III director Tommy Lee Wallace. I remember watching The Langoliers and Storm of the Century with rapt attention roughly around the era I began reading Mr. King’s novels for the first time. (For the record, my favorite is The Running Man.) It’s a tradition that continues to this day, with Lisey’s Story from 2021 being the most recent example. There were highs (The Stand, 1994) and lows (The Stand, 2020), but let’s be honest: We all lapped it up like dogs finding their water bowl after a hot day in the sun. I don’t think there’s any one reason why King’s brand of storytelling is so compelling, nor why so much of his work seems tailor-made for movies and television, but it’s easy to figure out where it all began. Let’s take a trip back to 1979, to a town called Salem’s Lot.
Five years after Tobe Hooper redefined the horror genre with his first classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, he was offered the chance to make the very first adaptation of a Stephen King novel for television, and working alongside Paul Monash, the man who also produced the first King movie, no less. That movie is called Carrie. You might have heard of it. Hooper had accrued only one more directing credit to his name since 1974: Another psychotic redneck movie titled Eaten Alive. He was then replaced by John Cardos on 1979’s The Dark, so he was still fairly green, and really needed a hit. Adapting a modern take on the vampire mythos by the world’s bestselling novelist presented an opportunity to show he could play in tune with the great horror filmmakers. As a result, this film could not feel less like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Even if you had footage of Patrick Bateman doing stomach crunches while watching it, most people would never guess this is a Tobe Hooper film.
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| images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Salem’s Lot departs completely from Hooper’s frenetic documentarian style, instead focusing on beautiful framing and disciplined camera movement that would feel at home in the classic Universal monster movies of the 1930s, lit with atmospheric dread by Return of the Living Dead cinematographer Jules Brenner. It’s also populated from top to bottom with A-list talent like James Mason, David Soul, Bonnie Bedelia, Fred Willard, Ed Flanders, and Geoffrey Lewis. It also happens to be one of the most chillingly effective television films I’ve ever seen, ranking right up there with The Night Stalker. There are moments where Hooper seems to weave apprehension out of thin air right before stunning the audience with imagery and scares that are downright iconic. Every fan of The Simpsons remembers Bart Simpson’s Dracula, especially the part where the vampire Bart pays tribute to Salem's Lot by scratching at Lisa’s bedroom window in the middle of the night. Even having experienced the later parodies first, Hooper casts a spell that put Bart Simpson completely out of my mind; I was too enthralled by the quality of the filmmaking. Not only was this effect achieved without wires, but the entire sequence had to be acted in reverse in order to give us the otherworldly night fog that Hooper wanted. Chef’s kiss.
The story is simple: Author Ben Mears (David Soul) returns to his hometown with the intention to write a novel about an evil house that’s haunted his memories since he was a kid. It just so happens that an antiques dealer by the name of Straker (James Mason) has also arrived in town with a silent partner known as Barlow, a secretive man who no one in Salem’s Lot has met or even seen in passing, and they just happen to have bought that same haunted house. Meanwhile, Ben hooks up with Holly McClane from Die Hard, and befriends her father Bill (Ed Flanders from Exorcist III). Bill happens to be a local doctor who notices unusual cases of pernicious anemia that seem to set in overnight, even on men with high blood pressure. Most of these threads play in concert well enough, even if one particular subplot involving Fred Willard banging the local drunk’s wife (Julie Cobb) seems to exist only for itself before dropping off the movie’s radar after the first hour. Perhaps the novel incorporates it in a more impactful way, but it doesn’t do much for this adaptation.
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| images courtesy of Arrow Video |
What does work is the impeccable job Arrow Video has done restoring it. Both the complete mini-series version that aired on US television in 1979 and the shortened theatrical cut made for European theaters have been flawlessly rendered in UHD. It’s a guarantee that Salem’s Lot has never looked this good before. Equally exciting are the extras, primarily concentrated on the second disc. Both films boast new commentaries, interviews with King collaborators like Mick Garris and biographer Douglas Winter, plus a featurette that revisits the film’s locations nearly 50 years later. This is one Arrow Video release every horror fan needs for their collection. Whether you prefer the shorter theatrical cut or the slow burn of the mini-series version is up to each viewer. Personally, I think the complete version works better, even if the book end scenes in an exotic fictional country are pointless. They are absent from the theatrical cut.
Also largely absent from this vampire movie is… well, the vampire. Despite being a presence that looms over every frame of the film, Reggie Nalder’s screen time as Barlow is less than two minutes of its three hour runtime, but he makes every second of it count. A substantial deviation from the source material, which saw an articulate and verbose Barlow, Hooper and his producers went for an animalistic and feral depiction of the vampire. To say they were “inspired” by Max Schreck in Nosferatu would be an understatement bordering on the dishonest. This is a four-alarm love affair with the imagery F.W. Murnau unleashed on the world in 1922, and it says a lot that even a clear imitation can be so effective over a hundred years later.
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| images courtesy of Arrow Video |
If you like a good slow burn vampire flick that’s packed with great character actors, don’t ignore this one just because it was made for television. This is creepier than anything Hollywood has released in years. So here’s a prescription, from one horror fan to another: Pre-order a copy of Salem’s Lot (it comes out March 31), make some popcorn, dim the lights, select the version with the intermission for a pee break, and settle in for a genuinely spooky good time, courtesy of Tobe Hooper and Stirling Silliphant. Oh, did I mention that the executive producer was the acclaimed writer of Village of the Damned, In the Heat of the Night, and The Poseidon Adventure? Yeah, this movie has greatness in its veins, and it shows.
- Blake O. Kleiner