Why you watch: Salem’s Lot (1979)
Vampires rarely terrify anyone anymore, but the original TV miniseries of Stephen King’s novel still disturbs, thanks to its canny reconfiguring of the classic monster.
The fiction of Stephen King has become its own undead entity, rising from the grave to be adapted again and again, usually with a fatter budget and less imagination. The best will reflect King’s two great talents, rarely found in the same writer: devising threats that tap into our primal fears and crafting ordinary people to face them. Few are as good at making unremarkable New Englanders credible and compelling.
This grounds his terrors in a recognizable world and keeps the tension up because workaday folks are natural underdogs. It’s all the more remarkable now since our pop culture seems to have given up on regular people. Only Navy SEALS, Ivy-Leaguers and superpowered beings are worth watching anymore.
The rest of us can wait to be collateral damage since we’ve spent the last 40 years selling the idea that only the extraordinary deserve to eat or afford chemo. And of course, there are few superpowers as effective as simply being rich already.
This tendency has recast any number of genres into YA exercises, about “chosen ones” who discover hidden powers that make them the one special person who, sure, is haunted by all the “responsibility,” but also is the only person who matters: “So suck it, Karen. I was born to save the world. And you’re just here to date the guy I’ll live happily ever after with, after you die tragically in my arms.”
YA also tends to recast all kinds of imaginary figures into merely powerful beings, just another wizard or unicorn, divorced from the fears that inspired their invention in the first place. In the case of vampires, they were already neutered into camp from overexposure, as endless movies riffed on the rules codified by Todd Browning’s landmark DRACULA (1932).
Every once and a while, someone finds ways to sharpen those fangs, but they are few and far between. More often, filmmakers will find completely new riffs on vampire myths, with the sour cherry of THE ADDICTION (1995), the unsettling romance of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) and existential chic of ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2014) proving there’s still plenty to be reworked.
Straight-up scares are even harder to find, which makes the original SALEM’S LOT all the more impressive. After the success of DePalma’s CARRIE (1976), Hollywood was happy to adapt King’s second novel, but the development process was bumpy, even as the likes of Larry Cohen tried to winnow down the sprawling story, and George Romero was attached to direct. Eventually, the producer Richard Kobritz felt it was better suited as a miniseries, at which point Romero left, unsure how to tell the story within the restrictions of broadcast TV.
Luckily, Tobe Hooper was game. Kobritz hired Hooper after screening his timeless masterpiece of shock and dread, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Given that film’s gory reputation, Hooper may seem an odd fit, but actual viewings show it used restraint as often as disgust to scare the hell out of us. Hooper is a patient scare king, knowing how to build dread with silence and expectation. But that also means there’s little time left for hitting every beat of King’s densely plotted book.
SALEM’S LOT concerns Ben Mears, a novelist who grew up in the Maine town of the title, leaving when he turned ten. He’s back now, to write his next book about a house in that town that continues to haunt him. This house was recently purchased by the mysterious antique dealer, Mr. Straker who is busy preparing for the arrival of his business partner, Mr. Barlow. We’ll eventually realize Barlow is quite the vampire, looking to feed on the isolated small town as long as he can.
King’s novel was already a fresh take on vampires, blending elements of haunted houses and zombies to treat vampirism as a kind of plague. The screenplay by Paul Monash amplifies this, making sure that the town and the town’s doctor assume it’s a rare form of anemia until it’s too late. So much of the horror comes from zombie tropes, where the bitten threaten the people who love them the most. Here, our vampire from old Europe doesn’t wander from house to house in search of necks. Instead, that best friend or next-door neighbor shows up in the middle of the night, hungry.
Monash had previously adapted the George V. Higgins crime novel THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, reshaping it into an elegant character study that gave Robert Mitchum his last truly great starring role. In both movies, Monash reveals an understanding of how much a script can do, and what it can’t. EDDIE COYLE and this are both built to compliment the performances and the direction, rather than trying to do all the work in plotting and dialogue.
And Hooper’s direction is the star here. There are a few thousand ways this material gets reduced to camp, as the 70s exploitation craze mined vampires for maximum sex and gore, which only made more classic versions seem sillier. It’s easy to assume that horror directors only reference their genre of choice, when the fact is, great horror filmmakers will often redeploy imagery and references from all kinds of genres.
Here, Hooper stages SALEM’S LOT as a retro piece, even if it’s set in modern-day Maine. When Mears (David Soul) is falling for the pretty local Susan (Bonnie Bedelia), they sit by the lake together, in an idealized bucolic tableau, calling to mind melodramas like PICNIC or A PLACE IN THE SUN. In 1979, he’s using the visual vocabulary of the 50s, which even then, was already packaged as the time of American innocence, no matter how little it reflected the reality of that decade.
Hooper also undercuts the clichés by placing it in a world where horror movies exist. Young Mark (Lance Kerwin) is a horror fan, with classic Wolf Man models and Frankenstein posters. His best friends are the town’s first victims, and when his dead friends start showing up at his window, he knows what’s happening, but is dismissed as a kid whose horror interests are warping his sense of reality. But absent among all of Mark’s toys are vampires. Hooper isn’t interested in some metaplay. He knows one look at Bela Legosi on a wall might jeopardize the tone. The creatures here deviate from any Universal incarnation that might be on Mark’s wall.
Adding to that retro feel is the use of such stars from the era as Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor, and most notably, James Mason as Mr. Straker. Mason walks off with the movie, using his stuffy Brit routine to deliver an impish malevolence. When Mears asks about his strange business partner, Mason responds, “You’ll enjoy Mr. Barlow, and Mr. Barlow will enjoy you.”
It’s a great line, but rather than sit on Mason’s smirk, where it could bloom into camp, Hooper cuts away, letting the line only be heard, like a whisper over one’s shoulder. These echoes to the 50s aren’t mere commentary, but a way to root ’79 audiences viscerally back to their childhoods. Now, it helps it feel timeless, even if there’s still one or two of those dated crash zooms into freeze frames that barely worked at the time.
Most of Hooper’s choices here holds up. He employs the simplest practical effects, such as using a boom crane instead of wires to levitate the vampires, or filming fog in reverse, an image that can still unnerve. He may not show a little boy vampire attack his mother, but when she lies on the floor and talks of dreaming that her boy was back in her arms, we know what this means. Towards the end, as the plague consumes more of the whole town, he’ll show a red tricycle tipped over on a front lawn, knowing we’ll assume the worst.
Hooper knows how to tease out the suspense in the most basic blocking. In one scene, the local school teacher (Lew Ayres) discovers his dead friend (Geoffrey Lewis) in a rocking chair in his spare bedroom. Ayers stays in the doorway clutching his crucifix, and Lewis makes no move either. Hooper sits on this confrontation, until the eventual attack arrives off-beat, for maximum shock. Earlier, he orchestrates one of the best jump scares of the movie by framing a room just off-center so that we’ll expect something is waiting just beyond the frame, and sits on it, daring us to predict when the threat will hit.
This doesn’t mean he relies on recycling old methods and stars to do the job. He understands that to scare us, there needs to be a contrast between that retro innocence and the present danger. For the climax, as Mears finally ventures into that old dark house on the hill, it’s not a classic Gothic climate. It’s outfitted as an abattoir, as grisly in detail as anything in MASSACRE. Feathers, crassly stuffed animal heads and floors slick with something we can only assume is carnage, deviates from our expectations of a lushly furnished mansion.
And when we finally behold Mr. Barlow, the big, bad vampire that began the plague, he’s long past playing the fussy aristocrat who doesn’t drink… wine. He’s a riff on the alien façade of Orlak, from the silent vampire classic NOSFERATU, a rodent-faced monster ill-suited to host a dinner party for his prey. Placed into that 50s milieu, this monstrosity seems all the more foreign and disturbing.
Rare among King adaptations, this manages a satisfying, if not groundbreaking, climax, and conclusion. The final confrontation with Mr. Straker and Mr. Barlow has all the stakes for a proper crescendo, and Hooper knows that’s enough, building in close-calls and last-minute reprieves like a pro, all the way to the final shot.
Neither King nor Hooper was looking to revolutionize the genre with SALEM’S LOT, only deliver its pleasures once more, pleasures that continue to tempt filmmakers and audiences today. And those pleasures are more than Old World glamour or secret desires implied in that bite. They include a hope that evil, be it a monster or a plague, can be stopped with a single stake, wielded by anyone brave enough to drive it all the way through that undead heart.
SALEM’S LOT can be rented on various streaming platforms.
Why You Watch is a weekly series looking at forgotten, rarely seen or underrated movies for what they can teach about the filmmaking craft and culture. Show some love with a clap or two to this piece, by sharing it, or follow me here or on Twitter, @arthousepunch. And of course, let me know what you think about SALEM’S LOT in the comments.
