Stephen King Month: Salem's Lot (1979)

3.5 Stars - Entertaining, but flawed

For the second part of Stephen King Month I decided to look at another of King's earlier works and adaptations, the 1979 T.V. Miniseries Salem's Lot.

Salem's Lot tells the story of a small town that gets taken over by vampires. That's pretty much it, there are several characters and it was probably the first example of Stephen King writing a whole town of characters, which is something he is particularly talented at. The horror comes from seeing all these people we get to know and in some cases even care about being picked off one by one.

The miniseries is entertaining, managing to capture some of the mood of the book and create a decent amount of tension when it needed to. However it isn't all that scary, and the main vampire Kurt Barlow has been completely screwed up, in the book he's an intelligent, soft spoken, intimidating presence with a real menace and ferocity lurking beneath, whereas here he's just a growling snarling monster who looks like Count Orlock out of Nosferatu. This not only undermines his memorable villain status, but also raises a huge logical question of if he can't speak and can only roar like an animal why can all the other vampires talk?

That said James Mason is very good as Straker, Barlow's human slave, and is in fact a far more memorable villain in that he gets to deliver any dialogue Barlow would have had...

Another issue I have as a fan of the book is the reduction of Father Callahan's role, he was a very strongly developed character in the book and was in the most interesting scene, where Barlow comands him to throw aside his cross and prove his faith, he doesn't and his cross stops having any power over Barlow. I find this very interesting because it says that it isn't the cross that is the protection against vampires, but the faith in the power behind the cross. This scene is in this film, but since Straker challenges Callahan to throw down his cross against Barlow and Callahan has only been in two scenes up to that point over two hours in the scene has no impact.

A Town Possessed By Unspeakable Evil

In short, whilst entertaining this is guaranteed to annoy nitpicking fans of Stephen King and at three hous long it might just annoy a casual viewer as well. Though I'd still sort of recommend it.