“Salem’s Lot” trailer is here!

I knew what I was going to see.

Well, it doesn't look as absolutely shitty as IT and The Dark Tower. I, of course, will watch anything with Alfre Woodward

I'm glad they kept it set in the 70s.

Also, GREAT GREAT use of music. That is as good as Don't Fear the Reaper in The Stand, just fantastic it really pulled me in to the video. I agree r3

Whenever I see child acting, I often wish the director had done an enormous number of takes until they got a very good performance or line reading, and not just run with a mediocre one. This is no exception.

I'll watch! Bummer, it didnt get a theatrical release. Not a good sign.

R6 Salem’s Lot has always been a tv movie. People don’t seem to realize that. It was made for MAX streaming. Never intended to be a theatrical film

Lewis Pullman looks like 80s actor Craig Wasson.

Lewis Pullman looks like 90s actor Bill Pullman.

Lewis Pullman is great casting as Ben Mears. Love Alfre Woodard, too, and [SPOILER}

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hope she somehow escapes the character's fate in the novel.

[quote]I'm glad they kept it set in the 70s.

I don't know; even though some elements of the story would have to be re-worked in the age of cellphones, it might have been an interesting idea in our age of internet rumors for the start of the movie to originate with a story about a town where people move in for the cheap real estate only to keep disappearing. That's one of the elements that I liked about the story: the survivors going as far away as they can only, only feel like they can never really escape so they just lay low & don't talk. People living these lives on the fringe or in quiet desperation, a common element in King's stories, tends to get lost in movie/TV adaptations.

But the movie still looks reasonably entertaining. Let's just hope Pullman can fill out a pair of jeans the way Soul did

I watched some YouTube reviews.

They panned it.

Too bad.

They said there are some promising moments at the beginning but then the director loses his way and it turns into another zombie thing.

The vibe didn’t work for me. It just looked like another run of the mill vampire movie.

It's not a great novel but a fascinating one and the first IIRC to set a vampire story in a run-of-the-mill modern environment.

King wrote it as Maine was at the height of its population loss, so the idea of historic towns emptying out was familiar to the immediate audience.

[quote]King wrote it as Maine was at the height of its population loss, so the idea of historic towns emptying out was familiar to the immediate audience.

Well, maybe in Maine, but not elsewhere. I didn't hear much about Maine's population loss in the rest of the USA in the mid-70s, at any rate.

That actually looks incredibly scary. Maybe even too scary for me, because I jog past a cemetery in the middle of nowhere every night.

r5 And who's gonna finance those enormous numbers of takes? Time is money, especially on a film/TV set with so many people involved. Besides, it's not about the number of takes, but about getting a director who has experience with or even specialises in directing kids. The kids not having thirsty parents who over-rehearse their lines with them at home like they're dogs helps as well.

I read the reviews too & none of them were good. I know is recent productions have been a mixed bag, but I wish Mike Flanagan had remade Salem's Lot for a limited series on Max. Limited series are a better forum for novels & Flanagan gets what King was going for in those books.

He already did Midnight Mass which was very similar to Salem's Lot.

It's not a limited series it's one movie.

Watching it now, it looks like a tv movie from the 90s. Bill Pullman's nepo baby son is the lead. He's ok.

Who knew that rural Maine was so multicultural in 1975?

Hell, rural Maine isn't all that multicultural in 2024.

I really liked Bill Pullman’s son and little Mark but this movie was just awful.

Don’t bother with this one. Watch the 70’s mini series. Somehow they managed to lose all the scary tension in this one and the special effects are WORSE than the original. Big disappointment. I really wanted to love it.

So bummed. It's my favorite King book and was really looking forward to it.

While looking like the Barlow from the 70s, this Barlow was nowhere near as frightening as that one.

I actually liked it. No, it doesn't compare to the original, but on its own, it was a decent, compelling watch. Perhaps I went in with such low expectations. The only bad thing was Alfre Woodard, who is usually dependable, but her accent was atrocious and all over the place.

[quote]Don’t bother with this one. Watch the 70’s mini series.

Which is also on HBO Max, along with "Return to Salem's Lot."

I found the Rob Lowe version really good. At times it gets bogged down with the unspoken secrets of a small town jazz, but it doesn’t dwell. Worth watching in my opinion.

When is this coming out?

Next year, R27. We've all just been given really early screeners to get to see it.

How about that creepy black profile scene of the Glick boys walking through the forest at sunset? That was pretty cool. It seemed like something Del Toro would put in one of his movies.

I didn't find Barlow scary in this movie but I would call him an improvement over the 70s Barlow. The way his massive scalp veins bulged when he was draining someone was clever and disgusting. He was more of a disease-ridden parasite more than a monster. It would have been better if they had given him a personality like the Barlow in the book. I was hoping for a longer scene with him and the (underused) priest.

I watched it tonight.

I'm still digesting...

Set in bizzaro Maine, where no one has a Maine accent.

Well, R31, whatever was coming out of Alfre Woodard's mouth was an admirable try, the poor thing.

It wasn't THAT bad.

It wasn't that great. It had some decent updated special effects but still maintained the original's simplicity. Lewis Pullman is tasty, but I wasn't feeling the love interest.

Horrible, horrible reviews. Viewers hate it.

Another bomb for Warner Bros.

Who knew Sue's mom was such a cunt?

Or Susie took Boom Boom's job at the local realty.

[quote]R31: Set in bizzaro Maine, where no one has a Maine accent.

William Sadler as the Sheriff seems about the only one making that effort. Well, he and the guy playing Larry Crockett, the real estate agent.

[quote]R24: The only bad thing was Alfre Woodard, who is usually dependable, but her accent was atrocious and all over the place.

There was nothing wrong with Alfre Woodard's accent, which was what was to be expected of a Black woman in 1975. Her character too was a transplant, an outsider, as screamed by Susan's mother Ann, near the end of the film. She would not have had the heavy New England accent. I rather appreciated reactions her "Aw, ℎ𝑒𝑙𝑙 no!" and "This is some shit."

At R30, I said I was still digesting. I watched it again today with my best friend, and it's not improving. The following observations and criticisms will contain 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐈𝐋𝐄𝐑𝐒, so anyone who hasn't yet seen it will need to avert their gaze from the rest of my post.

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► This film has been edited down to the merest bare bones. Right out of the starting gate, the box is being delivered to the Marsten House; it took the 1979 version some 40 minutes to reach that point.

► Ben Mears' original reason for returning to Salem's Lot was that, as a kid, he'd had a frightening experience sneaking into the Marsten House, and the memory of it had become an obsession. He wanted to return and explore the memory by writing about it. This version of Ben Mears has no real expressed reason at all for returning. No time-wasting exposition here.

► Susan Norton exhibits vocal fry, something I don't recall women in 1975 doing. She got on my nerves.

► One nearly has to have some experience of previous versions of this story to know who most of the mentioned characters are, or who they are supposed to be. Floyd (Ned in the '79) Tebbets is an example; blink and you'll miss him.

► Some don't seem to have a point. Mark Petrie is bullied by one Richie Bodin. If there was a return point to introducing this character (like him being one of the kids attacking Mark at the treehouse), it must have been left on the cutting room floor. Likewise the casting of Hubert Marsten, who only gets two mentions and doesn't appear in this cut of the film.

► R19 remarks that "who knew that rural Maine was so multicultural in 1975?", by which I supposed he was referring to the Black doctor and the Petrie family. While recasting characters as Black doesn't generally bother me, I found myself chewing over that question for a few minutes, of whether it was appropriate for small-town Maine in 1975. I decided to let that one go, and was annoyed with myself for being momentarily diverted by it.

► In the morgue, Marjorie Glick is still wearing house slippers (something happens which draws attention to this fact). I find this improbable. Transporting and handling her dead body and keeping these on her feet would have been a real pain in the ass, and wholly unnecessary. She'd have been barefoot, with a toe tag. Usually I don't register objections of this kind, but this one got under my skin.

► When the group goes to the Marsten House to see if what Mark Petrie had told them was true, Dr Cody (Alfre Woodard) is sent to check it out, while the rest get into trouble in the cellar. There is no confirmation of her findings or of Straker's disposition in this version of the film. It's just a dangling loose end.

► Barlow is used really, really sparingly, and that's probably a good thing because, at the end, when we get a good look at him, I was unimpressed. Reggie Nalder he is not.

One reviewer I read a few days ago noted that this film was supposedly finished in 2022, and allowed to rest on a shelf for two years, probably with several strafing bouts of editing by different hands. This assessment seems correct to me. I find the resulting film incredibly mediocre, and probably won't look at it again unless they release a more complete 'director's version.'

R37, tl;dr

The original miniseries scared the shit out of me.

Waste of time- don't bother.

They cut out too much, everything happened too fast, we didn't get to know anyone. I don't think I liked a single thing about this movie. Bummer, because I was looking forward to this.

Actually, I liked Matt Burke's sateen Red Sox jacket because I had one just like it as a kid. Other than that, what a let down.

The book is scary as hell, the three filmed adaptations have never managed to really capture what made the book so good.

I was molested in Salem. A lot.

I'm about the rewatch the 2004 version for the first time in 20 years. As r37 said, the 2024 movie starts pretty late into the story so we miss the "world building" which was a big part of the book. We don't really learn anything about Jerusalem's Lot or the people who live there so it's not a big deal when the Lot Goes Bad.

R19, you have clearly forgotten about the well-off Black child who was a part of the Loser's Club in IT. That kid lived in a shittier town a good twenty years before the events of Salem's Lot. I don't think the filmmakers took any outrageous creative liberties when they decided to have a Black doctor and a Black family in a Stephen King adaptation set in the 70s. The town was still very white.

[quote]The book is scary as hell, the three filmed adaptations have never managed to really capture what made the book so good.

I think it's because in the book, the characters were mostly living these lives of quiet desperation & with the exception of Ben Mears, who in the book is depicted as a bit of seedy guy with a past, they're slow to notice when people actually start dropping dead or disappearing. Which kind of makes all of this all the more disappointing since the death of small towns (particularly due to meth) is even more acute today than when the book was written. But I also think vampires have been done to death, so there was probably little appetite in Hollywood for dusting off the original story.

I watched. Characters were underdeveloped and it would be a better mini-series. Also, why is it every time they'd do a vampire hunt it was 30 minutes to dusk? Wouldn't you wake up early for that shit?

I started watching the 1979 version with David Soul again. It's superior to the remake because more of the town's characters are given stories like the book had. Small towns always have their dirty little secrets under the surface nice which King is always good at weaving.

Lewis Pullman was pretty weak. Wasn’t really impressed. If that’s the extent of his acting ability, then for sure nothing more than a nepo.

I think he's kinda cute.

The Chapelwaite tv series is worth watching, if anyone wants more Stephen King vampire content.

I'm an easy lay when it comes to this sort of movie, but this was really bad. The director seemed to coax Lifetime Original level performances out of everyone involved.

What a POS that show was.

The opening with Ben Mears driving through through the town with Gordon Lightfoot's Sundown playing on the radio and the expression on Lewis Pullam's face I thought was brilliant. I've read the book so many times and have seen all the series, this was the one thing out of all of them that was spot on. Kudos. That sequence is till stuck in my head.

BTW I had dinner one night in August of 2021 with John Benjamin Hickey at Joe Allen's and we talked about this upcoming project for him. He was very enthusiastic. We didn't get into the book to script changes then but I wish we did. I'd have offered my feedback.

I thought Chapelwaite was terrible & made me wonder how Oscar winner Adrien Brody has fallen to such a low.

Not a movie, but I think one of SK's best short stories is "One For The Road" in the Night Shift book. If I recall, that story was one of the predecessors of SL & makes you feel as if you're in Maine on a cold night in the middle of a snow storm

Dreadful.

A few more observations (again, 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆: 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐈𝐋𝐄𝐑𝐒):

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► Derivative additions - the way Burke renounces his invitation to Mike Ryerson, and he's sucked out of a window as though it was an airlock in space is copied and pasted from HBO's 'True Blood,' which marked the first time it was depicted in this way.

► Barlow's appearance is highly reminiscent of that of the title character from 'The Nun' (2018) - same overall face, eyes, teeth, and lower jaw stained black with blood. It probably figures, though, since James Wan and Gary Dauberman were attached to both 'The Nun' and 'Salem's Lot.' They're evidently really thrilled with that look.

► The removal of Straker's character so early in the film precipitates some plot changes to the second half. In particular, this completely muffs up the scene in the Petrie dining room, originally staged as a contest of wills and faith between Barlow and Father Callahan over the fate of Mark Petrie. James Mason's Straker originally was umpire between the two.

It also removes the reasoning behind why Callahan's faith failed. In the original, Callahan agreed to the terms for Mark's temporary safety (as Straker '79 had said, "Throw away your cross! Face the Master!), but once the boy had been released, he reneged, claiming privilege, "I'm a priest." In this version, there doesn't seem to be a direct attributable reason why his cross light goes out, save perhaps that he's a shitty, hard-drinking priest, and not that he went back on his word. (If they'd done it right, it would have otherwise served as an excellent way to underscore the motto, "we keep our word here in the Lot.")

► Which brings us to another inconsistency: how and whether a cross works. For several instances in the film (Mark Petrie's plastic Aurora model cross, Matt Burke's wooden cross), crosses light up unprompted like Bilbo Baggins' sword Sting, unassisted by ritual blessings or issues of faith. In others (like the makeshift crosses at Green's Mortuary), it takes many additional steps, including blessing the cross - but it's to be noted that none of these are dependent upon the faith of the person wielding the cross. It's just checking off boxes in terms of ritual.

► The loss of Straker as protective 'daywalker' requires someone else to replace him, and here it's Susan's mom Ann, who seems to have been modeled on a MAGAt soccer mom, brandishing a gun. Though the film doesn't make it explicit, there's several lines of dialogue which compare Barlow to a plague threatening to engulf the entire country... rather like Trumpism. They seem to invite the comparison.

It had the look of a tv movie from the 90s. The production values were surprisingly low.

Maybe someday we'll get a limited series that does justice to the novel.

[quote]It had the look of a tv movie from the 90s. The production values were surprisingly low.

As I said upthread, it looked and felt like a Lifetime Original from a generation ago. I can be entertained by very little but I'd rather watch a Lifetime Original than this.

I believe Stephen King has said that Salem's Lot is his favorite of all his novels. I wonder why he never wrote a sequel.

Just watched some of it

So bad

[quote]The loss of Straker as protective 'daywalker' requires someone else to replace him, and here it's Susan's mom Ann, who seems to have been modeled on a MAGAt soccer mom, brandishing a gun.

While I don't like that twist from a story perspective, it is kind of funny: who would be in league with a vampire killing the entire town? Why a MAGA Karen of course, brandishing a gun at her neighbors by day, hunting them at night for The Master all while wearing a #Live Laugh Love t-shirt

It's inventive, R61, I'll give it that.

To your fourth point, R56, I think the crosses that glowed immediately were the ones that were actually manufactured to be crosses (I.e., the Aurora model and wooden one were originally built as crosses).

I believe the "crosses" that needed blessing were the ones that were slapped together from other items like the one in the morgue that was taped together with tongue depressors.

My biggest question is how did Barlow get into the Petrie's house without being invited in?

[quote]R63: I think the crosses that glowed immediately were the ones that were actually manufactured to be crosses (I.e., the Aurora model and wooden one were originally built as crosses).

Perhaps you have something there, but faith still seems unnecessary.

[quote]My biggest question is how did Barlow get into the Petrie's house without being invited in?

That's a good question. It might be a problem with the '79 miniseries, too, except that in that instance Barlow was accompanied by Straker, which may well have obviated the need for permission.

Someone bumped a two-year old 'Zodiac' thread, which mentions Donovan's 'Hurdy Gurdy Man.' It's also featured in this film during the scene at Dell's Bar with Matt Burke and Mike Ryerson (what they did with Ryerson's eyes while his face was in shadow was effectively creepy). 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' seems to have acquired its patina of horror from its use in 'Zodiac.'

r37/r56/r64 that's all very perceptive. What college did you go to, and what was your major? What kind of professional career have you had?

Very good detective work on this.

[quote]My biggest question is how did Barlow get into the Petrie's house without being invited in?

That's what happens in the book too: The Petries along with Father Callahan are sitting in the kitchen talking about why Mark is such a little oddball & Straker & Barlow rather dramatically bust in. You expect Mark (little monster expert that he is) to remind them that the vampire rules require them to be invited in while they respond that they're not rules, just guidelines.

That's mighty complementary of you, R65.

My, what an interesting posting history you have.

So what educational and career background do you have?

R68, you will never know.

My assumption has always been that Barlow, in some ways, was above the rules of vampirism. He's so old and powerful and connected to the devil (through the houses' original owners) that he has outgrown some of the restrictions. Like, a final boss.

Finally watched it this weekend - what a stinker of a movie! No wonder the execs didn't know what to do with it. And Alfre Woodard - I kept thinking "why is she talking like that? Loose dentures?" and then I realized she was trying to do a Maine accent which no one else was doing. Her wig should've gotten it's own screen credit.

r21 I watched it this weekend. I didn't love it but it wasn't as bad as everyone keeps saying. If you want REALLY bad watch "Return to Salem's Lot." OMG that was awful.