If you’re going to remake a classic Stephen King adaptation, you’d better do it right. Nobody’s ever topped Brian De Palma’s original “Carrie,” no matter how hard they tried. “It: Chapter One” knocked it out of the park, but “It: Chapter Two” brought it back into the park and poured manure on it, so they more-or-less cancel each other out. The TV mini-series remake of “The Shining” isn’t as bad as everyone remembers, but let’s not go nuts. It’s pretty grim when the 2019 version of “Pet Sematary” is your gold standard, since quality-wise even that’s just a lateral move.
Gary Dauberman’s remake of “Salem’s Lot,” however, raises the bar. It may be the only Stephen King remake that gets it right. Tobe Hooper’s classic mini-series adaptation from 1979 is still scary, and it’s a heck of a lot more insidious than Dauberman’s, but it had the virtue of being three hours long. Hooper invited us into the sleepy town of Salem’s Lot for a long, long time before the vampires finally took over in earnest, which made his version more tragic and melancholy. But Dauberman doesn’t make the mistake of trying to do the same thing. His new “Salem’s Lot” comes in just under two hours, and he smartly gets to the mayhem faster. Much, much faster.
For those only now just joining us, “Salem’s Lot” takes place in Jerusalem’s Lot, ME, a small and dying town. The year is 1976 and Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman, “Top Gun: Maverick”) is an apparently-mediocre author who grew up there, and has come back to dig up his past. Along the way he meets Susan (Makenzie Leigh, “The Assistant”), who works at the real estate office and desperately wants to leave her overbearing mother in the rear view window. They form a connection, love is in the air. Also so are vampires, but we’re getting to that.
Writer/director Gary Dauberman doesn’t have much real estate to work with, so he has to find clever ways to cram character introductions and exposition into the first act as fast as possible. He succeeds. We meet a cavalcade of characters and while some of the supporting players had to be sacrificed — sometimes literally — we get a sense of this town and the people in it. The cast is game, the writing is tight. We’re invested. So we’re going to feel bad when these people turn on each other and start sucking out their neighbors’ blood.
Ben isn’t the only new resident in Salem’s Lot. Richard Straker (Pilou Asbæk, “I.S.S.”) has just bought the local haunted house, and opened up a creepy little shop. He’s a cartoon character, straight out of a William Castle movie, broadly drawn and wonderfully creepy. He’s hiding a vampire in his basement, an old-fashioned pale, lanky and demonic Nosferatu-type named Barlow (Alexander Ward, “Westworld”), who gradually infects the whole town, turning everyone into a vampire hellbeast.
Dauberman cut his teeth writing horror hits like “The Nun” and “It: Chapter One” (and also “It: Chapter Two,” but nobody’s perfect). His directorial debut was the surprisingly deft and scary “Annabelle Comes Home,” which pit a teen slumber party against a host of fascinating, franchise-friendly monsters. He’s honed his craft behind the camera in “Salem’s Lot,” filling the film with sinister silhouettes, macabre palettes, and cheeky match-cuts that compare The Bible to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which somehow make you go, “Oh, that’s clever.” Cinematographer Michael Burgess (“Malignant”) and editor Luke Ciarrocchi (“Split”) brought their A-game. Fortunately so did everyone else.
“Salem’s Lot” is all class until the monsters attack, and the heroes have to finally acknowledge that yes, vampires are real, and yes, everyone is really screwed. That’s when Dauberman kicks the film into high gear, going all in on his mad monster party. A cross doesn’t just make vampires cower behind their capes, it glows like a lightsaber and Force-pushes vampires across the room like they were shot out of a cannon. It should be ridiculous, and to be fair it definitely is, but Dauberman gets away with it. He’s telling a scary old-fashioned vampire story, yes, but he’s also making a damn movie, and that movie is a popcorn-spilling, shriek-inducing, tricky little treat.
Dauberman clearly loves this material he’s adapting, but he’s bringing a fresh energy to the material. It’s got the original Universal “Dracula” in there, but also set-ups straight out of “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” And when the film focuses on its eleven-year-old co-protagonist Mark (Jordan Preston Carter, “The Haves and the Have Nots”) it detours into “The Lost Boys” territory. He’s a “Famous Monsters of Filmland” kid, who isn’t even surprised to find out vampires are real. He just shrugs and decides to go kill ‘em. Lots of young horror fans are going to love Mark Petrie. He’s the Frog Brothers and The Monster Squad, all rolled into one.
“Salem’s Lot” was trapped in post-production hell for years. It was filmed in 2021, it was supposed to get theatrically released in 2022, it got delayed to 2023, and now it’s bypassing theaters altogether and going straight to streaming. And that is a crime that has been committed against moviegoing audiences. “Salem’s Lot” is a scream, with shockingly good jump scares, rousing heroics, and laugh-out-loud jokes that slyly diffuse the tension so Gary Dauberman can ramp it back up again. It’s a crowd-pleaser that isn’t allowed to play in front of crowds, and god only knows why.
But at least Warner Bros. is actually allowing this movie to exist, unlike some of the other movies they’ve shot and decided to throw into a trash can just to get a tax write-off.
“Salem’s Lot” is convincing evidence that sometimes studios don’t know what they have, because Warner Bros. has a banger on their hands. It’s a monster movie in all the best ways, unapologetic about its love for its characters, unapologetic about its love for its monsters, and unapologetic about its love for the audience. It’s a bloody great remake, and a bloody great time.
“Salem’s Lot” streams on Max starting Oct. 3.