Review: Salem's Lot (2024) (Patreon)

There was potential here. For a moment, Salem's Lot was poised to deal with race and gender in interesting ways. Making Dr. Cody a Black woman led to some cool places. Same with Mark; the story almost becomes about bigotry in a way King's book wasn't. And the setpiece with the drive-in theater is kind of cool.

If somebody hadn't forced the editor to take 500 milligrams of Adderall, this might have worked. Some of the truncating makes sense — packing a lot of exposition about 'Salem's Lot's residents into the drive-in theater works. But overall this movies seems allergic to silence or subtext. It leaves very little to the imagination, flying along like it's terrified of losing the audience's attention. There's essentially no dramatic core — Ben Mears spends big chunks of the story doing nothing. Susan Norton has even less to do than she does in the book. All of the book's wonderful bits with Father Callahan are just gone. None of the relationships get time to breathe. Mark's parents don't even appear before their deaths. Sometimes the action is so rapid it's unclear what's going on — I still have no idea who kills Susan.

But the core of the issue is that the movie really has nothing to say beyond "gosh, aren't small towns insular and scary?" It excises all the rich subtext of the book, only engaging with the Seventies on a level of "here's some dad rock to play over this scene." The movie doesn't seem to realize the book was about anything. Lousy stuff. Vampires deserve better.