Salem’s Lot is a good ol’ fashioned vampire flick.

Sorry, I meant “mini-series”.

Ant
Ant
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

With the new IT on its way (which I’m very excited for), I figured it would be a good time to catch up on some Stephen King adaptations. I have a few gaps, including an unexpected number of Children of the Corn sequels that I may never get through. And of course, the one I’m looking forward to most: Maximum Overdrive.

Growing up, I wasn’t the biggest fan of King’s writing. While I appreciated it for its place in literature, he was just to verbose for my liking. Come on, get to the good stuff! Though I suspect that if I gave his writing a second chance now, I’d have a different view.

But that means I’ve seen way more Stephen King adaptations than I have read Stephen King books. One that I haven’t seen or read, though, is Salem’s Lot. Until right now.

Salem’s Lot is a 1989 TV mini-series directed by the great Tobe Hooper. In the movie, Ben Mears, an author (of course) returns to the small town of Salem’s Lot after being away for a long time. He wants to write a story about a local haunted house.

But there’s another arrival in town — a well-dressed old man named Straker. He has opened an antique store, but is creeping everyone out with his talk about his mysterious business partner, Mr Barlow. A crate is delivered to the haunted house, and weird stuff starts happening. People begin to see strange things, and the citizens of Salem’s Lot start disappearing. It seems Mr Barlow has arrived, and he’s no ordinary business partner. He’s an ancient vampire, bent on making Salem’s Lot his domain.

Grrrrr… arrrrg.

The funny thing is that Salem’s Lot doesn’t add or subtract much from the vampire mythos. Everything in it has been done before. The master vampire, Barlow, is very similar appearance to the vampire in Nosferatu (which apparently differs dramatically from the book). There are crucifixes, there are stakes. It’s all standard fare to anyone who has caught half a vampire movie in the last 100 years.

Even the whole climax was very Hammer Horror, with the two heroes creeping down into the vault with stakes to dispatch the lead vampire. There’s a lot of old Victorian iconography to go along with that — grain the footage a tad and it could be an old Peter Cushing creature feature.

But what’s strange is how much Salem’s Lot clearly influenced later vampire movies. There are a lot of scenes that reminded me of the original Fright Night — the house where the final confrontation takes place even looks a little like the house from Fright Night. Especially the staircase. And the kid, Danny, knowing about vampires due to his obsession with horror movies reminded me of Charlie Brewster.

As well as that, the vampiric children floating outside the window trying to “seduce” the people inside very strongly brings The Lost Boys to mind.

So you’ve got this movie that doesn’t do anything new, but at the same time is a massive influence on films that followed. It’s like a fulcrum, sitting right in the middle of the old-school horror of the 1920s-1970s, and the funky new horror of the 1980s. Maybe those old Hammer Horror films were too Grandad to take inspiration from directly, so Salem’s Lot became the stepping stone. It would be like a new band taking inspiration from The Hives, oblivious to the fact that The Hives were basically doing The Rolling Stones.

I did really like how there was a dark undercurrent in the town of Salem’s Lot (another Stephen King staple). It felt like the town was already full of this weird evil that no one talked about, and the arrival of Harlow just brought it bubbling to the surface. Both Mears and Straker aren’t in town for 10 minutes before suspicions and accusations of infidelity start to fly. In King’s world every small community is sitting on a powder keg of evil, and it just takes one match to set it off.

A match lit by a 3,000 year old vampire.

Every Day Is Movies

I watch a movie every day in 2017, then write about each one. It seems like a good idea here in 2016.

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Ant

Written by

Ant

Every Day Is Movies

I watch a movie every day in 2017, then write about each one. It seems like a good idea here in 2016.

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