There’s nothing about the new feature-film adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot that feels particularly fresh or novel — unless you count the fact that it has no interest in being anything other than an earnest, old-fashioned spookfest. That’s going to be music to some horror fan’s ears, but it might also explain why Warner Bros. chose to sit on this film for two full years, finally deciding to release it directly to Max (following a premiere at Beyond Fest). Sturdy and workmanlike without ever being exceptional, Salem’s Lot doesn’t feel like it would have been a surefire bet for movie theaters and suggests the possibility that maybe it’s actually fine for some movies to head straight to streaming.

After all, television does seem to be where adaptations of King’s bulky second novel thrive anyway. Salem’s Lot — and I’m eschewing the apostrophe that sometimes proceeds that first letter — was first adapted as a much-beloved 1979 TV miniseries directed by Tobe Hooper that was edited down to movie length for foreign markets. That was followed by a 1987 theatrical sequel that didn’t have the same staying power and veered off-book from King’s story. Then the original book got another miniseries adaptation that starred Rob Lowe and aired on TNT in 2004. That means the 2024 Salem’s Lot, which was written and directed by It: Chapter One and Two scribe Gary Dauberman, is technically the first feature-film adaptation of King’s novel, even if not many are going to get the chance to watch it at a theater. As a result of its shorter length, Dauberman has pared the story down to its barest bones, hitting the book’s primary beats while simplifying most of the characters’ arcs. It also concocts a new ending that works well with the tale, and I’d guess King himself is just fine with it.

What Is ‘Salem’s Lot’ About?

In Salem’s Lot, novelist Ben Mears (Top Gun: Maverick’s Lewis Pullman) — one of a long line of King characters who are also writers — returns to Jerusalem’s Lot, the small Maine town he lived in as a boy. His exact motivations for coming home are a bit vague, but it’s clear he’s trying to resolve some childhood trauma, as both of his parents died in a car wreck when he was 9. He hooks up with Susan (Makenzie Leigh), an aspiring real estate agent, and befriends an aging teacher named Matthew, played by one of the best character actors working today, Bill Camp, who previously starred in HBO’s adaptation of King’s The Outsider. He also takes an interest in the Marten House, a creepy mansion in town that’s home to two new occupants — the mysterious, never-seen Barlow (Alexander Ward) and the menacing Straker (Game of Thrones’ Pilou Asbæk), who have opened an antique store in town.

Separately, an 11-year-old named Mark (Jordan Preston Carter), a newish kid in town who builds model monsters at home, loses two friends to a mysterious blood sickness that seems to be spreading throughout the Lot. Before long, it becomes clear that it’s less a sickness than it is a curse — vampirism, to be exact — and Mark teams up with Ben, Susan, Matthew, a nearby doctor (Alfre Woodard), and a local priest (John Benjamin Hickey as future Dark Tower ka-tet member Father Callahan) to try to save their town from a vampire coven led by the pale and horrifying Barlow.

So, there are a lot of moving pieces here, which you’d expect from a King story where he takes a bird’s-eye view of one of his fictional towns. A TV miniseries would’ve been able to fit most of it in, but a sub-two-hour movie needs to pick its battles. Dauberman decided to keep all the major characters from the book, but the trade-off is that every character ends up feeling like the shallowest possible version of themself, with defining traits only mentioned in passing (if at all). There’s just not enough time to do a deep dive into Ben’s writer’s block, Father Callahan’s crisis of faith, Mark’s horror fandom, or any of the other details in the original novel. As a result, Pullman doesn’t have much to work with, and the audience is left without a strong central character to root for. That said, it’s a talented group of actors, and everyone does their best with what the film manages to give them. The characters are sketches, but they’re well-performed sketches at any rate.

‘Salem’s Lot’ Makes for a Fine Halloween Watch

Dauberman compensates for not being able to dig too far into his characters by mounting a handsome production that feels classic and stylish, even if it’s not overly showy. Keeping the story set in the 1970s was a good choice and allows for a drive-in movie theater — this adaptation’s biggest new addition — to play a major role. Dauberman, who also wrote a bunch of movies in the Conjuring universe and made his directorial debut with Annabelle Comes Home, shows a keen visual eye and sprinkles some really clever scene transitions throughout the film. The look of the film’s vampires is exactly what you want. They’re supremely unsettling as they float around and perch on rooftops with their haunting, glowing eyes. The biggest question going into this was what form Barlow would take, as the ’79 version veered wildly from the novel’s description. Dauberman was right to update that iconic look, rather than reverting to King’s original, more human-like antagonist.

There are a few other small details to push Salem’s Lot over the hump and make it a solid spooky-season watch. I like the way the crosses glow a bright white whenever they’re utilized as a weapon, blasting the vampires backward like they’d just been hit with a shotgun blast. Salem’s Lot has always been about the death of the small, American town, and enough of that metaphor makes it into this version. It’s going to be tough for anyone to argue that this is the best version of this particular story, and the vampire tropes the movie so seriously deploys — crosses, holy water, etc. — are so long in the tooth (see what I did there?) that it definitely runs the risk of coming across as corny. (Vampire myths have been deconstructed, reconstructed, turned YA, and everything in between since King’s book was published.) Yet Dauberman’s film is competent enough that I think it will manage to find an audience who’s into an overly traditional take on vampire lore, as well as win over King fans who have been onboard with this tale, in all its incarnations, since day one.

Salem’s Lot starts streaming on Max on Oct. 3.

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