Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on June 18, 2004, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
If nothing else, TNT’s new two-part movie adaptation of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot will give fans plenty to compare and contrast with both the novel and Tobe Hooper’s previous televersion. The good news is that it’s worthy of the comparisons; this is an honorable and mostly straightforward translation of King’s writing to the screen, and one of those welcome tube projects that doesn’t know it isn’t a feature film. Director Mikael Salomon brings big-screen gloss and atmosphere to the project, and Peter Filardi’s teleplay nicely replicates the author’s mix of rural character drama and deep horror. About the only place this Lot goes awry is in the opening act, when writer Ben Mears (Rob Lowe) is given far too much voiceover exposition about how evil hides in small towns. It gets to the point where you want to grab him and say, “We’re watching ’Salem’s Lot—we know there’s bad stuff in this burg. Let’s move on!”
Things get on track as the first of the two-hour installments continues, as Salomon and Filardi establish the assorted characters who will fall under the spell of the malevolence invading Jerusalem’s Lot and those who will eventually team up to fight it. Characters and situations have, by necessity, been deleted or combined (Dr. James Cody, played by Robert Mammone, for example, takes on the adultery subplot of the book’s telephone lineworker), while other individuals have been altered; the novel’s pushing-elderly high-school teacher Matt Burke is now an African-American (Andre Braugher) who looks barely 10 years older than former pupil Ben and is intimated to have homosexual leanings to boot. Purists may cry foul, but looked at objectively, the filmmakers’ changes do little to upset the feeling of a community fraught with intrigue and threatened with destruction.
Setting the ghastly events in a wintry, snow-covered environment (very convincingly stood in for by Australian locations) is a nice touch, as is production design that has the dreaded Marsden House seemingly visible out every window in town. The interior of the latter dwelling, which becomes home for the vampire Barlow (Rutger Hauer) and his human caretaker Straker (Donald Sutherland), is an impressively eerie creation, though one has to wonder why a creature of the night and his keeper would allow all those atmospheric shafts of sunlight to streak into the gloomy interiors. And while the more explicit horror largely takes its time in coming, Salomon makes the nastier setpieces count, doing full justice to such memorable King creations as the attack on the Petrie household, the creepy kids on the school bus and a character who falls through a staircase to a nasty end (which is actually nastier here than in the novel).
The large cast all acquit themselves well, with Lowe effectively haunted and driven and sharing good chemistry with Samantha Mathis as local waitress Susan (though their relationship isn’t as developed as it might have been). Braugher and James Cromwell bring gravity to their performances as Matt and local priest Father Callahan, while lesser-known Daniel Byrd and Mammone hold up their ends as young Mark Petrie (a more rebellious sort than the book’s incarnation) and the desperate Dr. Cody. Needless to say, the duo playing the villains get the most juice, with Sutherland, behind a Santa Claus beard, wonderfully insinuating as Straker and Hauer as a markedly different Barlow than the one seen in Hooper’s edition. Instead of the previous Nosferatu redux, this Barlow is a model of calculating evil who seems just as pleased to turn people over spiritually to the dark side as he is to snap their necks or tear out their throats.
If this ’Salem’s Lot has a weakness, and one not really of its own making, it’s that we’ve seen so many vampires lately on both the big and small screens that there’s not much these filmmakers can do to make the ghouls seem fresh. The makeup and FX are up to snuff, and the staking gags have been given a new wrinkle: the destroyed vamps fly up to the ceiling, their souls vanishing through while the physical bodies collapse in ashes back to the floor. Still, there’s a certain familiarity that sets in, and Salomon and Filardi create more tension through conflicts between the specific people/creatures than from the threat of monstrousness and bloodsucking. But then, King’s writing has often been about taking classic genre tropes and making them work anew via a character-based approach, and the new ’Salem’s Lot takes a pretty high rank among the made-for-TV adaptations of his work.
