Salem’s Lot (1979)

              Mini-series are not typically designed to be remembered.  For every ‘The Thorn Birds’ or ‘Roots’ there are a bunch more like ‘Lace’ or ‘Windmills of the Gods,’ events that were heavily promoted at the time and received ratings that would be the envy of any executive today but have since been lost to collective memory.  Mini-series still exist but now they’re called ‘limited series’ or other such euphemistic terms.  For decades they were a favored means of adapting bestselling books that contained too much plot or too many characters to be easily adapted into a movie but which worked just fine over the course of four to eight hours.

              So of course Stephen King had a whole bunch of his books adapted into miniseries, and while ‘It’ is probably more firmly lodged into people’s memory the one that’s aged the best is ‘Salem’s Lot.’  It was the first and I’m going to argue it still holds up just fine.  While still a bestselling novelist Stephen King wasn’t quite Stephen King yet so I get the impression that the series was allowed to pick and choose what parts of the book to adapt without too much preciousness by the original author.  I’ve seen both ‘Maximum Overdrive’ and his approved version of ‘The Shining,’ the man is not to be trusted with moving pictures.

              I read the book decades ago but enough of the plot and characters stuck with me that I recognized a lot of set pieces when they happened in the movie, and reading up on plot summaries of the novel after watching it I can see they consolidated a number of characters, skipped subplots that weren’t necessary, and ripped out most of Father Callahan’s characterization and story, but enough of the bones remain and the story has enough time to breathe over the three hour runtime that it does feel like a solid adaption of the novel.  The first episode is setup and the second is payoff and in my opinion it works really well.

              In many ways this is the first vampire movie (we’re just going with that term to be consistent) where it’s clear that the author really sat down and thought through the implications of vampires.  If they really existed and they really had the set of powers that they do here, especially with the ability to spread at a geometric rate with fresh vampires creating new vampires and so on, then it would happen about like it’s portrayed here: a seemingly slow buildup before suddenly exploding and taking over the entire town.  In a lot of ways how it affects the town here has a lot of common with what Dracula does to Wismar in ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre.’  The wraparound opening and closing of the miniseries, set two years after its climax, is quasi-apocalyptic in nature, with the two survivors from the town on the run in Guatemala, always looking out for the vampires that are chasing them.

              It also does something clever that’s going to keep coming up in future movies and turn from interesting and smart to annoying and overused: it gets a bit meta.  This is set in a world where there are legends and even movies about vampires, so at around the halfway point some of the characters we’ve been following start figuring out what’s going on and begin working out how to fight back.  It’s very obviously a King story because one of the heroes is a novelist and another’s a horror movie buff.  It’s interesting here because it’s done with some amount of subtlety: instead of commenting to each other about how weird it is that they’re fighting vampires and how the old Dracula movies are so lame and shit like that the characters briefly wrestle with how unbelievable it all sounds but as the evidence piles up they start acting like we always wish the protagonists in these movies would act and start taking some basic precautions.  It’s also helpful in that it saves us from a bunch of pointless exposition scenes where characters have to explain things to each other in order to explain it to the audience.  They know the rules, we know the rules, let’s go.

              More modern reviews of the series often complain about the slow pace and here I must respectfully but firmly disagree.  The first episode is almost entirely vampire free, by the end of it I think only two vampires have been seen on screen with a total of four victims.  What the length of a mini-series allows the story to do is slowly set up the entire town and a broader array of characters.  We meet the main character of Ben Mears, find out what his deal is, see the beginning of his relationship with local Susan (played by Bonnie Bedelia), his reconnection with his old high school teacher, his growing friendship with the local doctor, his interactions with the sheriff, the lady who runs his boardinghouse, all of these characters that we meet and see interact with each other, establishing how they live their lives, and they’re interesting and flawed and as the series goes along and more and more of them get attacked and turned it eventually dawns on us that all of them are going to die, and it’s pretty horrifying.

              We get an interesting mix of vampires here.  The head vampire is very Nosferatu, bald and sharp-teethed and in a change from the novel non-verbal, although clearly intelligent.  Like Dracula’s Renfield he also has a familiar, here named Richard Straker and played by James Mason clearly having a blast, although unlike the various Renfields we’ve seen before here he’s smooth and articulate.  The other, newly turned vampires have the full set of powers but retain most of their human appearance with the addition of glowing eyes, long nails, and fangs.  They can turn into mist, have the standard vampire whammy, and even display some ability to either shapeshift to a more human form or cast illusions.  They’re repelled by crosses, daylight, and holy water and die just fine by a stake through the heart.  The series doesn’t bring up garlic, for whatever reason.  Also, once you’re a vampire that’s it, there’s no getting magically turned back to human by killing the head vampire (looking at you, ‘Lost Boys’).  In some ways this is kind of a companion piece to ‘The Stand’ as they’re both about spreading contagions.

              As I’ve already said the series does not end well for anyone involved.  The only character that isn’t one of the two leads who almost certainly survives is the sheriff of the town.  He’s all over the first half and is shown as pretty smart and on the ball, which makes it completely understandable, in a black-comedy way, when in the second episode as Ben Mears is running around trying to find allies to take on the head vampire he finds the sheriff hurriedly shoving his family and belongings into a car and fleeing town.  Everyone else is fed upon and turned, so he clearly had the right idea.

              I do have some criticisms of the mini-series, although overall I think they did a pretty excellent job.  One of the more interesting ideas introduced in the book and which increasingly crops up in subsequent vampire stories is that there’s nothing inherent in a cross that drives away a vampire, instead it’s simply an expression of the faith of the person holding it.  This obviously isn’t how it was originally intended in the folklore, there it was just that vampires were evil and since the cross is a holy symbol it drives them away.  But the entire point of the Father Callahan character in the original book is that, despite being a priest, his faith isn’t very strong, so when he makes a deal to put down the cross to save another character and then goes back on his word the cross suddenly becomes powerless against vampires.  This is such an interesting idea and the series kind of introduces it in one scene but then never does anything with it subsequently.  I’d rather they have cut the concept entirely from the series if they weren’t going to do anything with it. 

              I also have a problem with the ending.  The book ends ambiguously with the surviving characters setting the town on fire during the day, hoping it will kill of the rest of the vampires but knowing they’ll never know for sure.  The series ends with the characters on the run from the vampires of Salem’s Lot but it’s left unclear exactly how many vampires we’re talking here.  If the surviving vampires had continued to spread at the rate they had been during the mini-series this is clearly an apocalypse we’re talking about here as most of the planet would be vampires.  If they stopped then why did they stop?  Why are the vampires bothering to come after them?  They don’t seem particularly interested in revenge and it’s unclear from how they're portrayed how much thought they really put into their actions beyond finding humans and feeding on them.  For all of the extensive characterization we get for people in the movie we don’t really get any for the vampires.  They’re basically just monsters, which doesn’t square with their actions in the wraparound sections.

              It’s hard to complain too awful much when the problems you have with a movie (or series) is that they introduce more ideas than they have time to really dig into.  The characters are likeable, the performances are good, the story makes sense, the sequences of the vampire children appearing at character’s windows and scraping their fingernails on the glass are still famous, and rightfully so.  This was very well directed by Tobe Hooper and watching this should shut up the people who still claim he didn’t direct ‘Poltergeist.’  It seems that 1979 was a very good year for vampire movies, which is interesting considering we’re about to enter a decade that had way fewer mainstream vampire movies get made, although the ones we did get were pretty big ones.