“A fresh Stephen King adaptation should be exciting,” said Christina Newland in The i Paper. “It’s a shame, then, that Salem’s Lot” – a small-town chiller set in 1970s Maine – has “zero new ideas or even a particularly frightening take” on the author’s 1975 novel.
Directed by Gary Dauberman, the film stars Lewis Pullman (“a charisma vacuum”) as a writer who returns to his home town to research his new book, and discovers that “a mysterious newcomer” (Alexander Ward), who is posing as an antiques dealer, is actually a “vampire with a burning desire to turn the entire population into fellow bloodsuckers”.
‘Deeply unscary’
The film has the “sense of having been cut and re-cut repeatedly, with scenes rushing into the next or characters cropping up late” with little introduction, and its weird pacing makes it “deeply unscary”. Dauberman “does change the book’s original conclusion to something more modern and satisfying”, but “in the final analysis, this Salem’s Lot is vastly inferior” to the popular 1979 miniseries.
This film was due for release back in 2022, and has gone straight to streaming in the US – which has made for rather a “shaky advance reputation”, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times. But I’d agree with King (executive producer here), who declared on X/Twitter that the film was, “Quite good. Old-school horror filmmaking: slow build, big pay-off.”
‘No risk of nightmares’
I’m afraid I found Salem’s Lot “half-baked and half-hearted”, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. Its vampires “send you to sleep without any risk of nightmares”, and it looks abysmal, with most scenes either “ineptly underlit or horribly graded”. Sure, “there have been a few worse King adaptations” – but not many.