"It's not alive, doctor. That's why he came here."
Once scheduled to release in theaters in 2022, but was pulled due to COVID delays, Gary Dauberman's, Salem's Lot, drops on Max this Halloween season. After being shelved and thought to never see the light of day, it's finally being released on streaming. Was it worth waiting for?
Dauberman, best known for writing films like It, The Nun, and the upcoming Until Dawn, explores the town of Salem's Lot and its citizens once a vampire moves into town. While Dauberman has been at the helm of many horror films as a writer, this is his second time behind the camera as director (his first being Annabelle Comes Home).
Following the writer Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), who returns to his childhood home to work on his next book, instead discovers there is more to the sleepy little town than meets the eye. As many may have thought (many being me), Dauberman doesn't bring the Stephen King story to modern times but it's instead set in 1975, when it was written. While that isn't inherently a bad thing, I do find it somewhat lazy. Keeping it set in the 70s takes out a lot of the legwork that would go into modernizing the narrative that I believe it would have been worth it. Digging deeper, the Marsten House and Barlow were characters that represented so much more about the evil and corruption that can take hold in a town. This serves as a missed opportunity for Dauberman to give us more than just a vampire who moved in next door.
Also in this iteration of the story, a few characters are left out (or combined) along with some parts of the story we know as Dauberman decides to open the film with the coffin being delivered directly to the Marsten House. While that makes sense in terms of runtime and pacing, it does leave out much of the character development that came with those elements, which is probably why it hasn't ever been made into a feature film. Dauberman also decides to flip a few characters by giving us Alfre Woodard to portray Dr. Cody and Jordan Preston Carter as Mark, our hero. I love how smart, strategic and just plain brave Mark is in this adaptation. I also love that he is a Black boy who, unlike Dauberman's other films where Black characters are featured, isn't written with a slew of tropes involved.
I'd also like to give credit to the fact that we don't wait until it's too late for the characters to realize what they are dealing with and start working on a plan to rid the town of the vampires and keep the townspeople safe. Ben, Dr. Cody, Susan (Makenzie Leigh), Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) and Burke (Bill Camp) work together, bringing their own expertise together to defeat the evil at play. There are some creative aspects thrown in but Dauberman doesn't ever give us enough to sustain us.
It's not the worst but definitely not the best Stephen King adaptation, even though the King himself tweeted that he liked it. Salem's Lot will serve as a cute Halloween season watch that serves up a few scares but not a lot of depth.
Written & Directed by Gary Dauberman
Now Streaming on Max
⭐⭐.5