How Will the ‘Salem’s Lot’ Remake Compare to the Original?
After two years of waiting, horror fans will finally get to take a bite out of the new Salem’s Lot remake, which will stream on Max on Oct. 3. Adapted from the 1975 Stephen King novel, the film tells the story of Ben Mears (played by Lewis Pullman), a writer who returns to his small Maine hometown of Jerusalem’s Lot for creative inspiration — only to find that it has been taken over by the terrifying vampire Kurt Barlow. With the help of the town priest and some brave villagers (including Alfre Woodard), Mears tries to fight back against the bloodsucking invasion.
In this clip from the new film, Ben and the other enter the eerie, abandoned mansion where Kurt Barlow lives, seeking to stake the sleeping vampire’s corpse during the daytime:
One of King’s most popular books, Salem’s Lot was adapted into a beloved 1979 CBS TV miniseries directed by Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s Tobe Hooper and starring Starsky and Hutch‘s David Soul, Bonnie Bedelia and James Mason. It was also adapted into a slightly less known TNT miniseries in 2004, starring Robe Lowe, Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer. (In 2021, a prequel series called Chapelwaite starring Adrian Brody also ran for one season.)
The remake, which was originally scheduled to be released in theaters in 2022, has Stephen King’s seal of approval — in fact, he publicly and privately fought for the movie’s release. In early 2024, King tweeted, “Between you and me, Twitter, I’ve seen the new SALEM’S LOT, and it’s quite good. Old-school horror filmmaking: slow build, big payoff. Not sure why WB is holding it back; not like it’s embarrassing, or anything. Who knows. I just write the f—— things.”
But King endorsement aside, the 1979 version is a cult classic and continues to gain new fans nearly 50 years after its initial release. How will the new version stack up against it, or the 2004 version?
Remind Who Will Direct the New Version?
The 1979 version was directed by Tobe Hooper in his his first major project after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974. Though at the time, King gave it something of a backhanded compliment — “Considering the medium, they did a real good job. TV is death to horror” — in the intervening years, it has come to be considered possibly the best TV adaptation of King’s work.
The 2024 version is directed by Gary Dauberman, who does not have the same name recognition as Hooper, but has written or directed a number of major horror films over the past decade. Dauberman wrote the screenplays for the two-film remake of Stephen King’s It — 2017’s It and 2019’s It: Chapter Two. He also wrote the screenplays for multiple spinoffs of The Conjuring: 2014’s Annabelle, 2018’s The Nun and 2019’s Annabelle Comes Home, which was also his directing debut. The film is also produced by James Wan, the horror super-director and producer behind The Conjuring films.
In 2019, Dauberman told the Hollywood Reporter that he was excited for the challenge: “I like to be as true to the story as I possibly can until it gets a little too unwieldy for a movie. … It’s so fun to play around with vampires and make something truly scary.”
SALEM’S LOT, David Soul, Reggie Nalder, 1979.
When Is the Story Set?
The 1979 and 2004 adaptations have set the story in the present day, as did King’s book, which was inspired by a moment in the ’70s when King “wondered aloud what would happen if Dracula came back in the 20th century, to America.” The new version, however, sets the story in 1975, the year the book was published.
Dauberman has a long track record with films set in the past: It was set in the late 1980s, and both Annabelle films were set in the ’70s. Whether this retro setting was selected as an homage to the book, or just a way to keep everyone from using Facebook to warn each other about the vampires, remains to be seen.
How Long Will the New Film Be?
The new adaptation will clock in at slightly under two hours, while the original ran for two nights in the primetime slot, which added up to roughly three hours of film. The paperback version of the book comes in at a short (for Stephen King) 427 pages, which suggests that not too much will be left on the cutting room floor due to run time.
Will the Vampire Be as Scary as the One in the First Film?
If you’ve watched the original Salem’s Lot (especially if you watched it when you were way too young), one image that probably stuck with you is the gruesome face of head vampire Kurt Barlow. Though in the book he is a suave, anachronistic gentleman in the Bela Lugosi vein, in the TV movie, he’s a deformed, Nosferatu-style white-faced ghoul. King denounced the character’s design in 1979 as showing a “bankruptcy of imagination,” but the character is a fan favorite.
The 2004 version hewed closer to the novel, with a goateed Rutger Hauer as the chief bloodsucker. Though he sprouts fangs before he attacks, he always remains visually human.
The 2024 version will likely evoke the beastly 1979 vampire — in an interview with Total Film, Dauberman revealed that he’d be going with a more monstrous character design, saying, “It’s always cool to see different interpretations of vampires. That said, I hadn’t seen a more traditional vampire movie in a long while so I thought maybe one was due.” The new film’s promo poster also seems to point to the same vampire character design as the original film.
SALEM’S LOT, Reggie Nalder, 1979. © Warner Bros. / Courtesy: Everett Collection
Will It Repeat the Original Film’s Classic Moments?
If your childhood wasn’t ruined by the reveal of Kurt Barlow, it was definitely ruined by the film’s infamous scenes of undead children tapping at each other’s windows — first, vampire boy Ralphie Glick attacking and then killing his brother Danny, and finally, a vampirized Danny attempting to attack his still-living friend Mark.
These scenes gained some of their creepiness through practical effects — Hooper shot one of them backwards, to give it an ethereal feel, and the boys dangled from cranes to approximate floating. They also gained some realism through the actual pain the actors were experiencing — the contact lenses used by Ron Scribner, who played Ralphie, rolled so far back into his eye a set doctor had to massage them out. “It was incredibly uncomfortable to wear that. It caused a lot of pain and I couldn’t see worth a darn for hours,” he told Vanity Fair in 2022. The scene also popped up in the 2004 version, though the creepiness factor was a bit more restrained.
Though we don’t know if the remake will include this scene, the odds are good; both of Dauberman’s It films include almost all the classic scenes from the book.
If you can’t wait until October to find out, relive the classic moment and re-traumatize yourself with the 1979 video below:
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