It never occurred to me that Jerusalem's Lot was a sundown town until two of the central characters in the story were racebent. If you don't know what a sundown town is, it's a town where it was illegal to be out on the streets after sundown if one belonged to a despised minority. This was traditionally directed at African Americans, but other not-white peoples have fallen prey to this as well. It is perhaps too much to ask that the new version of Salem's Lot (2024, directed by Gary Dauberman) actually do something with this idea. They almost get it. So close. But, alas, no. The way race is completely ignored in a film set in Maine in 1975 is conspicuous. There aren't a lot of black people in Maine. But this is off in the woods. 'Salem's Lot is a different kind of sundown town, a fact elided by Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown" on the soundtrack. A little on the nose maybe, but not wrong.
The story should be familiar. Writer Ben Mears returns to the town where he lived as a child, intent on writing a book about the sinister Marsten House, reputed by generations of locals to be haunted. When he arrives, he is surprised to find that the house itself has been rented by Misters Barlow and Straker, who have also opened an antique store downtown. The more public of the two is Mr. Straker, who does business on their behalf. Mr. Barlow is a mystery. Ben meets and begins a romance with Susan Norton, though that romance is greatly disapproved of by Susan's mother, Ann. He also befriends local high school English teacher, Matt Burke, who invites him to speak to his class. Susan invites Ben to the drive-in movies, where she details the various relationships among the townfolk who come out for the movies. Also new in town is Mark Petrie, an eleven year old prodigy who we first meet standing up to a bully in the schoolyard. This attracts the admiration of the Glick brothers, Danny and Ralphie, who walk to Mark's house after school. Mark is a monster kid, weaned on horror movies and possessed of a collection of Aurora models. On the walk back to their own house, the Glick brothers meet with misfortune. Ralphie vanishes, and Danny contracts a pernicious anemia. He perishes of the disease. After the funeral, gravedigger Mike Ryerson falls asleep before he gets far into burying the coffin, and hears a pounding from inside of it. He opens the coffin. Matt Burke encounters Mike at a local bar some time after this. Mike is sick, so Matt takes him to his house, where Mike invites something else in. Mark Petrie also has a nocturnal visitor. He is awakened by Danny Glick scratching at his window, demanding to be let in. Matt has read Dracula. He knows what Mike Ryerson has become. Mark Petrie knows what Danny Glick has become. But the town is sliding down. It's going bad. And the circle of living people is shrinking...
Stephen King's novel on which this film is based is one of the most intractable books in the author's catalog. It's a story that resists abridgement. The books sprawls, which is appropriate given that the author intended it to be "Peyton Place with vampires." Most of the novel is cut away in this new version. The key scenes remain. You still get Danny Glick floating outside Mark Petrie's window. You still get Matt Burke's desperate battle against the vampire Mike Ryerson. You still get Ben's impossible choice at the end. But the filmmakers have completely abandoned the incidents at the end of the book in favor of a climax of their own invention. In the context of the film they've made, it works okay. The abandonment of what makes the book distinctive in favor of rushing from plot point to plot point drains the story of some of its flavor. The filmmakers even know how much they've left on the floor, given the occasional nod to narratives they've chosen not to pursue. The graffiti on the school bus is the one that stands out to me, but the spirit of the scene that shot implies from the book is retained well enough in another scene the filmmakers have invented, in which Mark holds up in his backyard treehouse while child vampires sit in the tree around him like vultures. The filmmakers have done an admirable job of capturing the flavor of the book in the scenes they've invented. I imagine that King must love the climax of the film set at a drive-in movie theater. Even so, the film is somehow depopulated. It doesn't have a sense of the town like the book, which undercuts its theme of dying small town America. King devoted three whole chapters to describing the town at various points during its fall. This film barely gives it any screentime at all.
For all that, the filmmaking is pretty sharp at times. The scenes with vampires have a striking color design that does a lot of heavy lifting. Director/Screenwriter Gary Dauberman has said that he wanted to restore vampires to the status of scary monster rather than tragic anti-hero, and damned if he doesn't manage it. There are scenes of the vampires standing around on roofs or trees that are particularly menacing. The climax this film provides is a pretty good action/horror set-piece that has geography and logic to it, which is not always the case in horror movies. It works well enough. The film has good actors. Bill Camp and Alfre Woodard are the standouts here as Matt Burke and Dr. Cody, though Makenzie Leigh is fine as Susan Norton. Jordan Preston Carter as Mark Petrie steals the movie from much older actors whenever he's on screen. Lewis Pullman isn't a great Ben Mears, though, and Pilou Asbæk as Straker is not good at all (in his defense, James Mason looms large in the role from the 1979 television version, which is an impossible standard to match). The film retains the image of the king vampire from the 1979 version, derived from Nosferatu, but this version has actual lines of dialogue, which is new to film adaptations (the character in the book is downright chatty in a monologing villain sort of way). No one in the cast really torpedoes the movie, but the performances here are often bland.
A viewer aware of the film's history might balk at the fact that this sat on a shelf for two years waiting for release. This usually augers bad things about and for the movie. In truth, this would have been fine in a movie theater and it probably would have made pretty good money. But it was unlucky. It was caught in the fallout from the Warner/Discovery merger, and then delayed because of the strikes of 2023. The powers that run Warner Brothers these days decided that it would best serve their bottom line as content for Max, which was starved for new material in late 2024. I can't argue with their reasoning, but it taints the film through no fault of its own. It's not a bad film. It's certainly on par with Tobe Hooper's version and it's better than the second mini-series from 2004. "Not bad" is damning it with faint praise. It's not better than "not bad," alas.
Welcome to this year's October Horror Movie Challenge. I'm participating in my friend, Aaron Christensen's annual fundraiser during this year's challenge. Aaron has chosen the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project again as this year's recipient for our community's largess, so if you've got a few bucks lying around, here's a donation link for the donor drive. You know what to do.
As usual with the challenge, I'll be prioritizing films that are new to me, so I'm off to a good start there. I'll also be prioritizing pre-Code, silent, and older international horror this year, because during the last few decades, the genre has gotten too big to really track. We'll see how it goes.
My current progress:
New to me films: 2
Total films: 2
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