Streamin’ King: ‘Salem’s Lot’ Is An Undeniable Misfire, But Not Without Its Charms

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching ‘Salem’s Lot, the November 1979 TV adaptation of the 1975 novel.

STREAMIN’ KING: SALEM’S LOT

THE GIST: Titular Maine town’s latest emigres—ancient Euro-vampire and aged dapper sidekick—swiftly create bloodsucking contagion across sleepy hamlet; local woman Susan, formerly local author Ben, teen movie monster–enthusiast Mark, and more band together. First King adaptation for TV, only the second overall, coming between Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (’80). Possibly—per a Blu-ray director’s commentary—”the most expensive miniseries made” at that point in history.

PEDIGREE: Directed by Tobe Hooper half a decade after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, followed by The Funhouse and Poltergeist. Stars Starsky & Hutch co-lead David Soul, Bonnie Bedelia (Die Hard), five-time Emmy nominee Fred Willard (RIP to an icon with a staggering 313 IMDb credits), three-time Emmy winner Ed Flanders (The Exorcist III), Oscar nominee Lew Ayres, and three-time Oscar nominee James Mason (who—like much of the cast—doesn’t have many recognizable-in-2021 roles to cite, but did play seven different parts whose names began with “Captain”). Written by Emmy winner Paul Monash, who created Peyton Place (a primary ‘Salem’s influence for King and Hooper both) and produced Carrie, its 2003 remake, and The Rage: Carrie 2. Emmy-nominated score was the swan song for three-time Oscar-nominated composer/one-time winner Harry Sukman. Also landed Emmy nods for Best Makeup and Best Graphic Design and Title Sequences.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Short answer: probably, yes. The book-reading superfan who should steer clear is 1) focused on ‘Salem’s Lot being an unimprovable novel, 2) not an adaptation completist, 3) unable to tolerate vampires, and 4) extremely not up for a three-hour experience where the most frequent mode is Quite Boring. Fans who don’t tick all four boxes should watch it sometime. Put it in the bottom third of your SK to-see queue. You love Carrie, you love The Shining, and you ought to see the “we completely can’t decide if this is a miniseries or film so we’ll just do multiple cuts and make both” experiment that arrived between those two horror pillars.

Hooper’s Lot is wise enough to keep a bunch of King’s scenes and lines, and bold enough to completely change master vampire Barlow into a nonverbal Nosferatuesque abomination. The Marsten House is clearly a labor of love, and its fussed-over exteriors and interiors both deliver. Ben, Mark, and Susan are benignly dull characters in the book, and their actors don’t rise above or fall below that line here. Straker is superb, Father Callahan’s alright, the constable’s a hoot, the rest of the Jerusalem’s Lot residents feel familiar enough—until they disappear entirely as the story shrinks to its final handful of bell bottom-wearing amateur vamp hunters. Overall a faithful-in-spirit, abridged transcription with an underwhelming drama-to-scares ratio, majorly hobbled by vaporizing many of King’s Act III ingredients that dazzlingly sew up his detailed hopping-from-house-to-house setup.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Not sure why anyone who hasn’t read this book would want to watch. Hooper die-hards? The then-mid-30s director’s clarity of vision is definitely admirable; it couldn’t have been easy to hold this all together enough to even have a watchable final product, when it could’ve easily been an irredeemable disaster. The Blu-ray’s very visually stimulating—careful set design, colors pop, wardrobe’s sharp. But you are watching something made to air between detergent commercials on evening television over 40 years ago, meaning a low, hard ceiling when it comes to many qualities we seek in a worthy miniseries, vampire story, horror flick, or panoramic small town drama. Scenes that call for even a modicum of action—characters trying to shake each other to their senses, a mid-death slide down a staircase—are awkward, slowed-down, stilted. But if you love your undead in Nosferatu flavor, here you go (for an absurdly small amount of screentime). There’s one sublime crane shot of Susan in the Marsten House that’s really something to see…but then again, there’s also a character taking THIRTY-FIVE+ whacks to put a stake through a heart.

9 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. Traditionally the most stunning or fresh intel gets this top slot—wild tidbits that aren’t listed six times on the IMDb trivia page. This time it’s a sidebar PSA: WATCH MIDNIGHT MASS! My awed feelings about writer/director/editor Mike Flanagan’s recent and future contributions to the Stephen King onscreen canon are sincere and bandied about here. Midnight Mass, which hit Netflix this fall, is an original, personal story from the filmmaker behind Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game (Streamin’ King column #1, 30 whole posts ago). And it’s just about the best 2021 version of ‘Salem’s Lot you could hope for. It takes so many cues from SK in its display of a complete little town falling prey to an eldritch evil who’s come from far away to feed. Two of its leads basically enact a reverse Ben/Susan situation in one of the most shocking horror moments ever. And its beyond-stunning lead, Hamish Linklater, is a bit like if SK went much deeper and weirder with Father Callahan. You already watched Squid Game, now indulge in Netflix’s other seven-episode fall ’21 opus.
2. The miniseries received two shorter cuts, a European theatrical one and a “TV movie” that Time Out Film Guide said was “slightly gorier and tighter than the original. Paring away the excessive plot exposition of [Monash’s] teleplay, it places the emphasis on Hooper’s fluid camerawork, creepy atmospherics, and skillful handling of the gripping climax.” There was also talk of turning it into an ongoing network series. King said in his Playboy Interview four years after the fact that he “breathed a hearty sigh of relief…because today’s television is just too institutionally fainthearted and unimaginative to handle real horror.”

3. ‘Salem’s Lot is finally coming to the (global) big screen courtesy of prolific horror screenwriter Gary Dauberman and producer James Wan. The co-writer of Andy Muschietti’s It and sole scribe on the sequel will make his sophomore directorial effort following 2019’s Annabelle Comes Home. Actors include Alfre Woodard, Bill Camp, William Sadler (veteran of Frank Darabont’s trinity of King films), Game of Thrones’ Pilou Asbæk, and 13-year-old Jordan Preston Carter as Mark. The flick will bring things full circle, as Warner Bros. wanted a feature before the miniseries, with zombie auteur George A. Romero in contention.
4. Multi-time Kingverse visitors: Geoffrey Lewis (Mike) did The Lawnmower Man in 1992, Bonnie Bedelia (Susan) was in Needful Things (’93), Tobe Hooper directed and co-wrote The Mangler (’95), and producer Richard Kobritz did Christine.
5. 2003’s The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla introduces one of Lot‘s main characters to King’s uber-story and keeps him there for quite a while. In an extensive FAQ on SK’s site, a very small selection of books are directly addressed, and only one—about ‘Salem’s—addresses a potential sequel. “Actually, I’m hoping to write a sequel to almost all of my novels and you will find those,” he wrote, in the final three Tower books, teasing that “you’ll find out a lot of what happened in ‘Salem’s Lot for one thing and one character in particular.” Spoilers/dope art here.
6. Re: The Dark Tower, the elevation on the town sign in Hooper’s Lot—289—adds up to 19, the ultimate SK number, laced all through TDT. Chronologically and logistically impossible as an intentional reference, but 19-hunting is fun.
7. Hulu’s Castle Rock dropped references to nearby ‘Salem’s Lot in Season 1 and got some material into the title credits. But in the wild and woolly second/final season, it became an actual setting, and the Marsten House thrillingly appeared as an ongoing setting for a not-so-thrilling plot; Vulture accurately called the inclusion “one of the most direct riffs on King lore that the series has yet produced.” The season’s flashbacks into the deep past also named the local settlement New Jerusalem.

8. TNT made a two-part miniseries remake starring Rob Lowe, Andre Braugher, Donald Sutherland, James Cromwell, and Rutger Hauer. Screenplay by Peter Filardi (The Craft), now writer and executive producer on Epix’s new series Chapelwaite, itself based on the 1800s-set prequel “Jerusalem’s Lot,” which opened King’s debut short story collection Night Shift in 1979.
9. A Return to Salem’s Lot had a limited theatrical release in 1987 (after premiering at…Cannes Film Festival?!), falling in the Pet Sematary/Children of the Corn mold of poorly advised sequels to adaptations of one-off books/stories. Directed/co-written by Larry Cohen, who wrote one of the attempts at a feature script for the original Salem’s. All you need to know is that the main vamp is fatally staked by an American flag, and this bit from a YouTube review: “—the townsfolk turn out to be bloodsucking vampires, and they’re determined to have Joe Weber write their memoirs. Defiant to the last, Joe teams with a Nazi-hunter named Dr. Van Meer.”

CRITICAL CONSENSUS & REFLECTIONS: Contemporaneous reviews are sparse, but the available findings are unexpectedly charitable in parts—the Washington Post said it was “a more assured exercise in the art of the heebie-jeebies than a number of recent theatrical horror movies,” while Empire decreed it “faithfully follows King’s pattern of establishing the characters at a leisurely pace before ripping them all to shreds, but doesn’t quite nail the scale of the infection, focusing on a few characters in a seemingly empty town.” SK’s opinion in ’79 was: “Considering the medium, they did a real good job. TV is death to horror. When it went to TV a lot of people moaned and I was one of the moaners.” He critiqued “a few boners—such as making my vampire Barlow look exactly like the cadaverously inhuman [Nosferatu].” (Hooper said over a decade later that “even now, I don’t know whether it was right or wrong, but now it’s done, and if I was doing it again, and I had a hundred percent free rein to deal with the situation, I frankly don’t know what I would do.”)

After Hooper’s 2017 death, Uncle Stevie tweeted his sorrow and noted, “He did a terrific job directing the ‘SALEM’S LOT miniseries, back in the day. He will be missed.” Hooper himself said in 1991’s The Shape Under the Sheet: The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia that he would’ve preferred a theatrical feature. “I wish there’d been everything from the novel in the film, because the book is such a magical, fantastic thing. … But since I only had four hours, there just wasn’t time to find a way to correctly insert a lot of the extremely valuable back stories.” The 42-years-later opinion online has earned it an IMDb rating of 6.8 (via 22K voters) and Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 64% (“25,000+” voters).

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR ‘SALEM’S LOT (1975): Published 18 months after debuting with Carrie, followed by The Shining in ’77. First time using the fastidiously panoramic small town formula he’d expertly return to for Needful Things, Under the Dome, The Tommyknockers, Sleeping Beauties, Storm of the Century, and more. Pseudo-prequelized in 1979’s Night Shift story “Jerusalem’s Lot,” semi-sequelized in ’03’s The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla.

Some vividly specific making-of commentary, also from King’s Playboy Interview: “We were living in a trailer on top of a bleak, snow-swept hillside in Hermon, Maine, which, if not the asshole of the universe, is at least within farting distance of it. I’d come home exhausted from school and squat in the trailer’s furnace room, with [wife Tabitha King]’s little Olivetti portable perched on a child’s desk I had to balance on my knees, and try to hammer out some scintillating prose. … And believe me, after a day of teaching and then coming home and watching Tabby gamely juggle her way through a mountain of unpaid bills, it was a positive pleasure to squeeze into that cramped furnace room and do battle with a horde of bloodthirsty vampires. Compared with our creditors, they were a fuckin’ relief!”

Zach Dionne is a senior news editor at Complex who is cooking up a book in North Carolina.

Where to stream Salem's Lot