This review was made possible by an advance screener of Salem’s Lot. Salem’s Lot premieres on Max on October 3, 2024.
Gary Dauberman’s adaptation of Salem’s Lot has been a bit of a mystery movie for the past two years. Initially planned for release back in September 2022, a sudden delay due to COVID-19 and post-production issues quickly made the film disappear from the release window. When Warner Bros. started their tax write-offs and the film’s release date was still unknown, it was safe to assume that this was next on the David Zaslav chopping block. However, WB decided instead to move the film over to their streaming service, Max, and now, two years later, we finally get to see what we were missing out on.
Welcome Home
Salem’s Lot follows Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), a notable writer who returns to his hometown of Jerusalem’s Lot to find inspiration for his next book. While taking in the former sights of his youth, Mears begins to make the troubling discovery that his home is under threat by a vicious vampire. As people start to disappear and the town becomes enveloped in darkness, Mears brings together a group of townspeople to fight this vicious creature and take back their town.
For the most part, Gary Dauberman’s adaptation of Salem’s Lot owes a lot of its visual palette to the original Tobe Hooper adaptation from the 70s. The cosy yet bitterly cold night photography and the hazy colours of our vampiric characters, as they approach the windows of people’s homes, are replicated here in a way that feels familiar but still incredibly chilling. The number of influences present, from Mike Flanagan’s Netflix work to WB’s adaptation of Stephen King’s It, potentially spells trouble for Dauberman’s cinematic voice, but thankfully, these are mostly applied very well. The first half of Salem’s Lot is a slower burn, with impending doom being the present focus of the film’s horror. One sequence involving two children being abducted by a terrifying force is beautifully portrayed with shadows and a dreamy background that’s legitimately more striking than what many studio horror films attempt to accomplish today.
Making Your Grand Finale
On a technical level, Salem’s Lot more than delivers with solid performances and enough creative visual and directorial choices to keep it an engaging film all the way through. The first half of Dauberman’s film is a slower burn that ultimately builds up to a more explosive second finish, and unfortunately, that’s where a lot of the issues creep in. Once we move into the bloated and action-focused third act full of fight scenes and set pieces, much of what we see on screen becomes weightless and pushed along to a very emotionless finish. The pieces that Gary Dauberman places down in the first half are legitimately striking and haunting in a way familiar to previous adaptations of the material but modernised in ways that fit pretty nicely with Warner Bros’ modern horror style. It’s just a shame that the finale is as big and unnecessarily noisy as it is. It’s only natural for the mystery here to be answered, but once those revelations are put into place, they strive to serve the flashy finale of the movie and not the compelling characters it should be affecting.
Gary Dauberman thrives best here as a subtle filmmaker who allows the inherently haunting atmosphere of Stephen King’s original story to take center stage over the bombastic action. The pivot to that explosive finish is not enough to stop the film from being an engaging watch, but it does arrive at a point where it becomes clear it doesn’t have much more to offer. Dauberman clearly feels more interested in the slow-burning setup of Salem’s Lot, but it’s to the point where everything else around it ends up feeling undercooked. The characters are all fun enough to be around, with some good performances to boot, but they don’t get much time to breathe and grow into people you actually care about. Instead, they ultimately serve a story that knows how it wants to start and where it wants to go but not how to end in the short amount of time it has.
‘Salem’s Lot’ – Final Thoughts
Salem’s Lot is not quite the failure some might’ve expected, given its mysterious absence in the release calendar. Gary Dauberman brings quite a bit of flair behind the camera, allowing the film to command a much greater sense of atmosphere than the average studio horror picture. However, the lazy and noisy third act leaves the film feeling robbed of its potential. What’s here, though, is far better than a lot of recent studio horror we’ve had, and it’s a big shame that WB has dumped it out as harshly as they have. It’s far from anything particularly revolutionary, but those wanting an inoffensive dose of Stephen King during the Halloween season can do a lot worse than this.
Salem’s Lot premieres on Max on October 3, 2024. Check out the trailer below.
