Small towns are rapidly losing their distinct charm, but that feeling of driving past a small American place and thinking it never left the 1950s, Salem’s Lot presupposes: what if it’s frozen by vampiric bloodlust?
Stephen King’s second novel has been adapted three times now (in addition to the mostly forgotten sequel A Return to Salem’s Lot), but none have come close to the overall quality of Tobe Hooper’s 1979 two-part miniseries, which has finally received the 4K restoration it deserves. Beyond Fest recently held the new version’s theatrical premiere.
Salem’s Lot Is A Timeless Horror For Today’s Times
The material here is quintessential Halloween. With secret vampires, creepy, crumbling and abandoned mansions, rabid black dogs, desecrated cemeteries, inherent threats of a full moon, hooting owls, and fog so thick you could swear it emanates from a machine, the original adaptation is prime for the season. It also happens to be the perfect marriage of King and Hooper.
Though Hooper also adapted King’s The Mangler, it’s Salem’s Lot which brings together King’s interest in the seedy underbelly of American suburbia with Hooper’s unique talent for the derelict. Five years separated from the film that would define the entire genre, The Texas Chainsaw Mᴀssacre, Hooper again wonders what lies beyond the reach of mainstream civilization.
For the uninitiated, King’s early career opus begins familiarly. Ben Mears (David Soul) is a thriller novelist who has returned to his small Maine hometown of ‘Salem’s Lot (short for Jerusalem’s Lot), which has a population of just over 2,000. The writer has arrived to write a new book about the abandoned Marsten house, a mᴀssive cobblestone mansion on the outskirts of town that has been uninhabited for 20 years.
It turns out the home has recently been re-purchased from the town’s lone real estate agent, Larry Crockett (Fred Willard), by the mysterious Mr. Straker (James Mason), a black-suited British aristocrat with a porkpie hat whose entire being seems out of place in this tiny place. Alongside the suspiciously absent Mr. Barlow, Straker plans on opening an antiques shop.
With nowhere else to stay, Mears opts for the local bed and breakfast run by Eva Miller (Marie Windsor), whose small H๏τel directly faces Mears’ muse. From his window, Mears keeps a close eye on Straker and periodically types up pages he is perpetually unimpressed by.
[Salem’s Lot is] patiently woven, extraordinary in its service to so many disparate people whose collective contribution to the story is undeniable.
When the first corpses begin to rise with a taste for blood, it isn’t long before the Glicks friend Mark (Lance Kerwin), a horror fanatic, catches on quickly about what is really going on. Mears, too, understands that Straker is no ordinary antiques salesman at all — but the longtime ᴀssistant of The Master (Reggie Nalder), a pale blue-skinned vampire with mᴀssive, yellow, pointed teeth, who is spreading his immortality.
Part of Hooper’s intent here, with an ᴀssist from teleplay writer Paul Monash, is a question of responsibility. “Do you believe a thing can be inherently evil?” Mears asks his childhood mentor and schoolteacher Jason (Lew Ayres), with the unspoken follow-up question being if it is humans instead who are sinister by design. Over dinner, Mears suggests to Jason that the Marsten house attracts “bad men,” which leads Jason to naturally ask, then, why the house attracts Mears. Is he evil? Is Mark? Or is it that storytellers and artists are often able to see what others can’t, or won’t?
Apart from length, the miniseries format allows Monash and Hooper to revel in these questions and in the incestual relationships that characterize these complex figures. The two-parter is patiently woven, extraordinary in its service to so many disparate people whose collective contribution to the story is undeniable. It remains a remarkable achievement, blending as it does the sensibilities of a novel, television, and film in one compendium of horror.
Hooper & King Ask, “What Is Happening To Our Small Towns?”
In light of the film’s 4K release in the context of America in 2025, Salem’s Lot feels prescient as an existential question over what plagues our small towns and working-class neighborhoods. Jason’s class is rehearsing a comically flat play that seems to glorify ‘Salem Lot’s violent and tragic past, in a way that hints at how nostalgia can be a poisonous drug.
Several characters’ devotion to religious absolutism may be blocking them from seeing what’s going on underneath the surface. Yes, he is a servant of pitch-dark evil, but suspicions over Mr. Straker largely arise purely out of his status as an outsider. And, being that The Master seems to target young boys — much mention is made of scores of missing children who have never been recovered — King could be asking what can be salvaged for our future generations who’ve been left behind by elders that have failed them.
Mears, Mark, Susan, Jason and Dr. Norton are left to try and save ‘Salem’s Lot from the grips of vampirism in a final act of pure devastation. But, even if they succeed, can evil be truly rooted out? Throughout the film, there is mention of how what is happening to ‘Salem’s Lot could be happening in any small town, anywhere in the country. Perhaps that means that evil lies within us. That the scariest potential of all is what we, as humans, are capable of.
