Salem’s Lot (2024)

Salem’s Lot: Why Must We Always Do This | 2.5/5

Written by Noah Dietz: 3/1/2025

Salem’s Lot opens on a world where the atmosphere comes first. The director is trying to immerse you in the cold world of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, and he clearly wants you to enjoy the story in the world Stephen King occupies. The town is uncomfortable to experience, clearly a place contained to the local inhabitants where others aren’t nearly as welcome as you might hope. Fog rolls on the hillside where an intimidating manor is perched, its corpse looming over the narrative both literally and figuratively. From step one you know you’re in for an experience, even if that experience is a little slow moving.

I am, of course, referring to the 1979 Tobe Hooper adaptation of Salem’s Lot. Not to mislead, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the film. I found it a little long, but what I couldn’t fault it on was the fact that I had not only an idea of what the town was like, but a sense of what it would be like to visit Salem’s Lot. It’s a dying town that just doesn’t seem to have a way to bring any life back, and they wouldn’t likely welcome it if it came. Even if I didn’t love it, there were plenty of scenes that I recognize helped cement it as a bonafide classic. Dripping in atmosphere, not bending a knee to a reasonable runtime, Hooper’s three-hour take on the story is on an unimaginable number of lists of “must see” Stephen King adaptations. Regrettably, the same cannot be said for Gary Dauberman’s 2024 attempt.

I’m not trying to get too rough on Gary’s work. He seems to be a man who has slotted well into the horror industry, primarily as a writer in the Conjuring universe. His work on both of the new IT movies, in addition to most of the Annabelle movies, is solid enough and I don’t hold any ill will against the man at all, but it’s a shame to see somebody handle an adaptation of King’s work reasonably well (IT: Chapter 1), only to see what came out here.

A consistent issue that exists with a lot of remakes, especially for horror films, is that the new rendition will rely too heavily on the existence of the original. Obviously for the adaptation of a novel there might be some expectation of having read it, but a good adaptation will work even if you haven’t. For a film remake, however, this can be a line that gets blurred more often than I think people would like to admit. From the get go, Salem’s Lot ’24 is relying on much of Hooper’s groundwork. We open on a scene that doesn’t hit until thirty-plus minutes into Hooper’s film, and the rest of the story proceeds in a sort of fast-forwarded pace. There’s no dread, no looming presence from the vampire, and minimal relationship development shown. There are, however, plenty of scenes that are trying to invoke the presence of the original in one way or another.

To be completely fair to this film, many of the scenes here look great. I love a lot of the lighting choices and am a huge fan of the absence of the “grey streaming sludge” problem that so many web exclusives can run into. The characters are fun enough (at first), I adore the vampire eye effects, and there’s some killer shadow work going on that calls back wonderfully to the original Nosferatu. Regrettably, however, a majority of the film feels confused about what the road map is supposed to be. There’s a certain cheap sheen over the whole thing that makes it difficult to know if everyone was working with the same direction for how serious the film was going to be. Scenes like Marjorie Glick rising from the dead, which should be dripping with fear and tension, are undercut with confused acting, poor soundtrack choices, and fast cuts that ruin any anticipation the scene could be building.

The original film, intentional in its usage of the Count Orlok design, is a plague film. The plague of vampirism taking the whole town happens over the course of weeks and months, and having a real feeling of the passage of time manages to convey the creeping dread. This film has a few cutaways to mail or newspapers piling up, but the rest of how the story is told does nothing to make me think the film takes place over the course of more than a week. The passage of time feels more like a half realized, afterthought decoration rather than an important story point. I simply can’t feel any weight to the activities here. The town empties like a bucket full of holes, with hundreds of people vanishing almost as quickly as the sunlight. Endless townspeople gone with no notice once they’re no longer relevant to the scenes. And speaking of sunlight, our days go from high noon levels of sunlight directly to “better look out, it’s almost sundown” at the snap of a finger.

At the end I’m left wondering what the point of the remake is. If all we’re doing is trying for a style over substance retelling, the style needs to be more than the paper-thin veneer we have here. This has the bones of something great, but I can’t help but think about what I've seen so many others say. “Surely, somebody who isn’t named ‘Mike Flanagan’ can adapt Stephen King’s work well.”