Salem's Lot (2024)

'Salem's Lot' arrives as the first theatrical feature adaptation of Stephen King's 1975 novel, following two television miniseries and a great deal of studio hesitation. Gary Dauberman's film concerns a writer, Ben Mears, who returns to his hometown and finds it being converted, household by household, into a vampire colony. The narrative machinery is antique: a crate shipped from overseas, a coffin in a basement, crosses and stakes and the drive-in cinema as a final battleground. Nothing in the film pauses to explain itself, which is a virtue in a picture this thin on character development.

The casting carries the only trace of contemporary adjustment. Alfre Woodard plays Dr. Cody, a man in the source novel, and Jordan Preston Carter plays Mark Petrie. The film never remarks on either choice. Race exists in this Jerusalem's Lot as a fact of casting and nothing more; no conversation, no subtext, no thesis attaches to it. The gender swap of Dr. Cody is equally silent, an adjustment made and then abandoned. There is no social argument here, no environmental lament, no economic grievance, no sermon on the body or the mind. The vampires want blood and the townspeople want to survive, and the film is content to leave it there.

The result is a competently staged, somewhat gutted adaptation that received mixed notices and a streaming release after years of delay. It is a picture with no interest in instructing anyone. That restraint deserves acknowledgment in an era when horror frequently arrives with a pamphlet attached. This one simply wants to frighten, and it manages that only intermittently, which is a separate and less interesting failure.