'Salem's Lot

Me. 11. Sneaking downstairs to watch a horror on ITV. The film was 'Salem's Lot. A classmate had told me it was deadly. Then all of a sudden a vampiric Danny Glick was floating outside Mark Petrie's bedroom window pleading with him to open it and let him in to feed and this young Tipperary boy thought fear was going to make his head explode. Last night, 31 years later I watched it again and it's still as creepy as ever.

There's a 'Salem's Lot remake coming. I'm not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand it's based on what could quite possibly be the scariest book ever written but on the other hand there's far too much story here for a film unless it's at least 3 hours long. A film will inevitably gut the story and it's rich tapestry of characters. It might be split in two like the It adaptions from a couple of years back but it's unlikely. It's not an easy story to carve in two because the vast majority of what draws a horror crowd to a horror film happens in the second half.

It's the tale of a man coming home. Ben Mears has returned to Maine after decades away to write a book about the town he grew up in. He has plans to buy a house that has haunted his dreams since childhood and is dismayed to find out a pair of businessmen called Kurt Barlow and Richard Straker have just snapped it up before him. He decides to stay on after he meets a woman by the name of Susan Norton but the mysterious disappearance of a child kicks off a series of horrifying events that turn the town on it's head.

The book is magnificently written. It does what too few books do these days, it takes it's time. It slowly introduces us to the town of Salem's Lot through the eyes of the returning Ben Mears. We get a sense of the place and of the people populating it. The rhythms of the town are slowly shaken out and we seen how the people there interact with each other. The people who run the place like sleazy business owner Larry Crockett & hotel owner Eva Miller & Sheriff Parkins Gillispie. Then there's the downtrodden and forgotten like the alcoholic Weasel Craig and Dud Rogers, the hunchbacked custodian of the town dump. Slowly we learn enough about them to have our favourites and the ones we hate. All the while the town's atmosphere grows more oppressive and before we realise it Anywhere USA has turned into a Transylvanian horror show. A horror show made scarier by the fact that writer Stephen King has made us care about the characters caught up in the whole mess. It's a superb, thoroughly affecting and totally unsettling read.

In 1979 Tobe Hooper (of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame) directed a mini series based on the book. It's a series that looks dated in places but it's still scarily effective. Due to network TV censorship constraints the grittier aspects of the story had to be scaled back along with it's violence. In place of this shadow and suggestion are cleverly used meaning a scary story becomes a creepy one and it's that kind of slowburn creep that gets under your skin far more effectively than a gallon of gore. It's why the miniseries is still remembered 40 years after it was first shown. That and it's rat like take on the vampire Kurt Barlow. It's far from perfect now, don't get me wrong. Even at 3 hours long it lost a lot of story and quite a few characters had to be amalgamated to streamline the plot. A supporting cast of dozens just wouldn't work in a miniseries and some plot lines got jumbled and silly as a result. But as a horror it worked. Gravedigger Mike Ryerson opening the coffin of a child vampire. That first jail cell appearance of a hissing Barlow. The crawling dead slowly moving towards Ben and Mark when they make their final move. Barlow's attack on the Petrie's and of course that infamous bedroom window moment. Nightmare fuel created in King's imagination and brought to life brilliantly by Tobe Hooper.

Then in 2004 the powers that be decided a new version was needed. This new version had a superb cast full of actors like Rob Lowe, Andre Braugher, Rutger Hauer, Samantha Mathis & Donald Sutherland. More of the supporting cast from the book appears too and this time the take on the vampire Barlow skews far closer the book than the previous adaption.........but it's not one bit scary at all. None of it works. Plotlines are needlessly changed (the horrible opening for example, Matt Burke's sexuality), there's no bit of atmosphere and the "scarier" scenes are augmented with cheap and shoddy looking CGI. The practical fx of the 1979 version look far superior. It's a pity. It could have built on the older version but it fails at nearly every hurdle apart from Rutger Hauer's Barlow. He's far removed from the 1979 creature with his take being a far more sophisticated and urbane monster. This time he could talk too and some of King's beautiful dialogue sounds great coming from him. He's far better than the miniseries deserved.

After a failed adaption like this you'd assume that it would be time to move onto something new. King has a tonne of stuff that hasn't been adapted yet but nope, we're heading back to the Lot again it seems. The success of the new version of 'It' has reminded the big studios of the $$$$$ potential of a well made Stephen King adaption. There's a glimmer of hope though. This time around James Wan is involved. Not as a director unfortunately but as a producer. A man with plenty of horror experience behind him. The fella behind The Conjuring movies, a series that's been critically bashed but a series that's genuinely enjoyable and actually unnerving. In his mitts Salem's Lot could conceivably work out fine, hitting both on the book's horror and it's dark, dark comedy. Director Gary Dauberman (who co-wrote the new versions of It) is promising a return to truly scary vampire cinema, not the romanticised versions so prevalent in the last few decades. No sparkling or gliding, but ripping, tearing, snarling, primal evil. William Sadler will be taking the role of Kurt Barlow. He's an interesting choice. In the picture above you'll recognise him from The Shawshank Redemption and the Bill And Ted trilogy. We'll see what happens. I'm not one bit confident but if it turns out good then happy days. 

And if it's shit we'll always have the book.