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Film Review | Stephen King

Salem’s Lot (2024) — how not to adapt a Stephen King novel

The inhabitants of a small town in Maine gradually realise that a vampire has arrived in their community.

Barnaby Page
Frame Rated
Published in
8 min readOct 14, 2024

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DDelayed several years, Gary Dauberman’s version of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot is now going straight to streaming in the US, and only a few countries (including the UK, where I saw it) are getting a cinema release. But King fans in parts of the world where the new Salem’s Lot (even posters are inconsistent on whether its title should, like the book’s, start with an apostrophe) is confined to the small screen can be reassured they aren’t missing much. Indeed, they’d be better advised to seek out the relatively chilling 1979 miniseries from Tobe Hooper rather than waste time with this pedestrian, unscary adaptation that manages to be simultaneously rushed and tedious.

That is, of course, a problem with many screen versions of King’s work. His novels are mostly long and packed with characters and incident, a lot of it serving to build up a believable world into which horror can be inserted, rather than to develop…

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Barnaby Page
Barnaby Page

Written by Barnaby Page

Barnaby is a journalist based in Suffolk, UK. By day he covers science and public policy; by night, film and classical music. He has also been a cinema manager.

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