It’s not been a good couple of weeks for Warner Bros both financially and critically as at the time of writing Joker: Folie à Deux has tanked at the box office and has been panned by both the public and critics. Now hot on the heels of Joker’s poor performance the company has released Salem's Lot, a horror film that’s been sitting on a shelf for 3 years.
Made in 2021 Salem's Lot is a film that the company has so little faith in that the UK is one if not the only country in the world where it’s getting a theatrical release. It’s on HBO Max in the US.
Based on a Stephen King novel, there’s already been a few telling’s of the story, the 1979 TV mini-series starring David Soul being the most memorable, Salem's Lot sees author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) returning to his childhood home of Jerusalem’s Lot in order to write a book about the Marsten House, an old, ominous property on a hilltop which has a reputation for being haunted. Attempting to rent it, Mears finds that it has already been purchased by another new arrival in town, the mysterious Richard Straker (Pilou Asbæk), who is in the process of opening an antique shop with his oft-mentioned but never present business partner, Kurt Barlow (William Sadler).
As people start to disappear, most notably the children, Mears and the townspeople start to suspect that there might be a vampire in their midst.
How director Gary Dauberman managed to make such a mess of a classic story is a bigger mystery than the plot of Salem’s Lot. Normally reliable actors, Bill Camp and Alfred Woodard to name but two, give performances that would struggle to pass muster in an amateur dramatics class whilst scenes that are meant to be scary are anything but.
2024 has been far from a vintage year for films and Salem’s Lot, in terms of quality and enjoyability, sits somewhere at the bottom of the pile.