Salem’s Lot (1979)

Before he became the core of a whole film-making industry, Stephen King enjoyed a couple of notable early screen successes with Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and this two-part television adaptation of his second novel, first published in 1975. The mini-series was directed by Tobe Hooper and marked a move towards more mainstream work following the low-budget horror films The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Eaten Alive (1977). Hooper came to the project after producers Warner Bros. had struggled to find a director who could adapt the 400 page novel into a feature film, eventually handing it over to producer Richard Kobritz to turn into a television adaptation.

It starts, unexpectedly, with writer Ben Mears (David Soul) and teenager Mark Petrie filling bottles with holy water in a church in Guatemala – “they’ve found us again” says Mears. In flashback we see Mears returning to his childhood home of Salem’s Lot in Maine two years earlier to write a book about the supposedly haunted Marsten House, scene of a childhood trauma that still haunts him. Mears had hoped to set up home there but finds that it’s already been bought by charming antiques dealer Richard Straker (James Mason) who is setting up shop with his absent business partner Kurt Barlow (Reggie Nalder). As Mears begins a relationship with Susan Norton (Bonnie Bedelia) and starts to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances, people start disappearing or turning up dead. Suspicion falls first on Mears and Straker as outsiders. The real culprit is Barlow, a centuries old vampire who is spreading his condition around the town like a plague, leading to Mears and Mark heading for the Marsten House for a final confrontation.

Paul Monash’s screenplay takes some liberties with the source material (King seems to blow hot and cold on the series, sometimes seeming happy with the way the changes, sometimes not so), most notably in its depiction of Barlow, transformed here into Reggie Nalder’s nightmarish Nosferatu-inspired monster from the book’s more cultured and apparently human vampire. Where Monash really improves the story is the removal of many of the minor characters who feature in the novel only as local colour to flesh out the small-town setting. Monash wisely merges some, dispenses with others altogether and tries to keep the focus more firmly on the key players.

The series suffers some of the sagginess inherent in the 70s and 80s mini-series but a trimmed down, feature-length version designed for theatrical release goes the other way. The small screen version leaves some characters stranded without proper resolutions but the feature version is worse, skipping over important story elements and ignoring some smaller characters altogether. But when Hooper stages his much-loved and unforgettable set-pieces, the film really comes to life and earns its reputation as one of the most unsettling of small screen horrors. Slimy real estate agent Larry Crocket (Fred Willard) fleeing the house after being caught in flagrante delicto by his lover’s husband (George Dzundza) only or a hand to reach out from the trees to clutch at him in freeze frame is a startling moment, as is the scene of Ben and Mark trying to stake Barlow in the cellar as his undead spawn stirs around them.

But the crème de la crème of Salem’s Lot set pieces, the one that traumatised a generation of viewers really too young to see it, is the eerie sight of the undead Ralphie Glick (Ronnie Scribner) hovering outside the first floor window of his brother Danny, eerily scratching at the glass and begging to be let in. Hooper had wrongly earned a reputation for being an excessive director though as is now more widely recognised, his work on his earlier films, particularly The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, is remarkably restrained. Salem’s Lot is a good platform for his talents at generating atmosphere to shine and he’s helped no end by Monash who gives Mason in particular some wonderfully sinister lines (“You’ll enjoy Mr Barlow – and he’ll enjoy you”).

David Soul was at the peak of his popularity in 1979. Cop show Starsky & Hutch had just finished its four year run and his music career was taking off following the worldwide success of hits like Don’t Give Up on Us, Going in with My Eyes Open and Silver Lady. Sadly he’s a bit bland here – likeable enough but hardly overflowing with charisma. Bonnie Bedelia goes some way to filling the personality void but the performances we all remember are James Mason’s charmingly evil turn as Straker (Mason’s wife Clarissa Kaye-Mason plays Marjorie Glick) and Nalder’s unforgettably horrible vampire. The supporting cast is a fine collection of old dependables, among them Kenneth McMillan, Geoffrey Lewis, Bonnie Bartlett and Elisha Cook Jr.

The delay in getting Salem’s Lot off the ground (attempts to film it as a feature had begun shortly after the book was published) ended up working in the mini-series’ favour. By the time it was broadcast on 17 and 24 November to impressive viewing figures, Hollywood (and Germany) had rediscovered vampires and soon versions of Dracula were all over the place – Frank Langella donned the cape and a bouffant hairdo in Dracula (1979), George Hamilton took the count to New York in Love at First Bite (1979) and Klaus Kinski inherited Max Schreck’s role in Werner Herzog’s glacial remake Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). In 1979 you couldn’t more for fangs, capes and coffins. But what all these vampire films had in common was a reinvention of Dracula as a lovelorn matinee idol (even Klaus Kinski’s Nosferatu spend more time moping over Isabelle Adjani than actually sucking blood) so Salem’s Lot‘s feral, repulsive Barlow stuck out like a particularly fetid sore thumb and was all the more effective for it.

He’s the perfect vampire for a story in which vampirism itself is re-imagined as a contagion – as indeed it had been in the novel – spreading throughout the population of Salem’s Lot like the zombie plagues that were about to become ubiquitous following the success of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). Barlow may feed on his victims for sustenance but the unforeseen by-product of that (and Barlow couldn’t give two hoots either way) is that he leaves a trail of utter devastation in his wake. By the end of the film, the vampire hunters don’t just have a few scattered victims to mop up – they’re on the run from a growing army of the undead pouring out of the now ravaged town. There’s no searching for lost loves here, or brooding in grand Gothic castles – just a vile pestilence that takes absolutely no prisoners.

Larry Cohen had been one of the many directors attached to the ill-fated feature version and was the chosen director to handle the sequel, A Return to Salem’s Lot, which did make it into cinemas in 1987. It’s a long way from being Cohen’s best work and really has very little to do with the mini-series beyond the name of a town over-run by vampires. The book was adapted again in 2004 as another mini-series (which was also first imagined as a feature), directed by Mikael Salomon and featuring Rob Lowe, Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer in the David Soul, James Mason and Reggie Nalder roles. It’s well made and reasonably engaging but it has nothing that will trouble the memories of viewers decades later as Hooper’s version still does.

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