The original Salem’s Lot was a 1975 Stephen King book, turned into a 1979 made-for-TV Tobe Hooper miniseries… one that I watched when I was twelve. Twelve years old and I knew I was going to be a horror fan when I grew up.
The original holds up pretty well, all things considered. For those not in-the-know, made-for-TV movies were the 70’s and 80’s versions of Netflix shows. It was something you could watch on TV had had higher production values than your regular TV shows, and were frequently broken up into multiple parts. Prime examples that come to mind are Roots, Back Stairs at the White House, The Day After, and Trilogy of Terror. These were not always great, and the acting was frequently stage-oriented, but they were often quite good, made by genuine filmmakers and various acclaimed movie actors. We looked forward to these.
Now 45 years later HBO has made a New Line Cinema (known as “The House That Freddie Built”) feature film out of it. Will it be any good? Man I hope so! Hollywood has a habit of taking otherwise-solid 70’s horror movies and completely ruining them with sequels and remakes and re-boots and re-gurgitations… Amityville, Phantasm, Exorcist, Poltergeist… you name it, they’ll wreck it!
A young writer returns to his hometown of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine to write about, well they don’t 100% get into that. Researching for some whatever. This young-writer with oily 70’s hair comes back, flips through local library microfiche (Google it) for a few days, then immediately hooks up with his real estate agent who takes him out on a date to dish about how shitty the town is and how shitty its residents are. Typical “cynical hip townsperson who longs for the city” type of character.
Oh, you know who ELSE has come to Jerusalem’s Lot, aka Salem’s Lot, aka “The Lot?” A scary Eurotrash vampire and his antique dealer ghoul! And he wants to eat neighborhood children because he’s a total creep like that. Now what I always liked about the vampire Barlowe, back in the 70’s when Tobe Hooper introduced his screen character, is that he wasn’t a dashing long-haired glamorous disco vampire like so many were back then. The Fright Night sort, the Frank Langela sort, pre-cursors to the Lestat type of other-worldly glamor goth in a silk scarf bloodsuckers of the era. Nah, he was more your Count Orlok… bleached and gaunt and hairless and stinking of the grave. An actual monster in hiding. A monster with a taste for little boys.
Ew, right? Not your typical glitter vampire for teenaged girls to fall in pathologically obsessive love with. More like that sketchy school janitor that all the kids were suspicious of.
A little boy goes missing, then his little boy brother comes down with a case of the ghastlies after being attacked in the yard and then dying and then reverse-dying. Then he starts coming after the townies, who also get a bit of the ghastlies. Naturally, the heroes all figure out, right away, “Oh! Well then it must be vampires! Whelp, guess we gotta go kill Barlowe.”
You’ve not even MET Barlowe, just gonna go right ahead and profile the dude who came from nowhere and bought the notorious murder house on the hill, no one’s ever even seen him, just his strange European housemate who wears Edwardian clothes while selling a cornucopia of antiques he happens to have a collection of, after having the movers come and deliver a coffin full of dirt directly to his basement after nightfa – okay yes, I think I see it now.
Night comes and hungry glowy-eyed villagers come out to persuade others to join Master Barlowe’s new world order… which is kind of stupid. Look at this, it’s a small town out in rural Maine. You drink blood from living humans in order to survive, and you have this mission to start turning the resident humans into more vampires like you. More hungry mouths to feed. At this rate we’re looking at three months tops, before you run out of critical supplies (ie., alive not-vampirey humans), and then what? You’re not thinking this through. You don’t want more vampires, you want more humans! Build a nice big human farm, with pens for humans to live in. Think dorms, or a medium-large hotel. Beds with soft linen, plenty of smokey R&B music piped into the plushly-carpeted pens, universal healthcare with a robust obstetrics department, no work to do or bills to pay or groceries to buy just hang out all day in your farm, watch cable TV, drink some red wine, and just make lots and lots of humans.
Not gonna happen, though (which is too bad ’cause that all sounded kinda great). We have experts on the job! A middle-aged English teacher, a middle-aged country doctor, a skinny middle schooler, an alcoholic priest, and an author and a realtor who don’t even want to stay in this town in the first place!
It’s not a perfect movie but neither was the 1979 miniseries. It’s okay, takes liberties with the story, not overly scary, but still fun enough. 6 out of 10.