Salem's Lot (1979)

Year 13, Day 274 - 10/1/21 - Movie #3,945

BEFORE: I'm right where I wanted to be, I stretched out my September films so there wouldn't be two weeks of downtime right before the horror chain started, and I think it was the right move.  I planned carefully to reach something with Fred Willard, because he's my link to "Salem's Lot", which ran as a miniseries on TV way back in 1979.  I was 11 years old then, and I didn't care for horror movies, not one bit.  They gave me nightmares - some still do - and as a very fragile child I didn't need anything keeping me awake at night.  A few years later I went to see "Poltergeist" in the movie theater, when I was 15 or so, and I didn't sleep well for a week - perhaps this is because I hadn't built up a resistance to horror films, so diving right in to a scary one without easing into it, like you would with a cold swimming pool, was too much of a shock to the system.  

But screw it, it's October now, the calendar page flips over and I'm forcing myself to convert over to a horror-based economy for the next 22 - or maybe 23 - films.  I'm still one over for the year, so I either have to cut the last horror film from my chain (it's a case where the chain will neatly close up around the gap) or else cut a different film from the November line-up.  We'll see, I'm torn on this issue, I may have to block out NEXT year's horror chain to see if that film might play a key linking role, in which case, I should probably save it for 2022.  Either way, I'm determined to finish 2021 with another solid unbroken chain from New Year's Day to Christmas.  

At this point, there are VERY few Stephen King-based movies left unwatched, I'm going to get to one more this October, and then that will, I think, just leave "Graveyard Shift", "Children of the Corn" and the remakes of "Carrie" and "Pet Sematary".  Last year I crossed off "It Chapter Two", "Doctor Sleep" and "The Dark Tower", and the year before that, it was "1922" and "Gerald's Game".  It's been a process.  But I really should get to "Salem's Lot" now, because a remake is due in 2022, according to the IMDB.  But wait, I hear you say, this was a 2-night miniseries in 1979, and I thought you said you avoid TV movies and mini-series from your countdown.  Right, you caught me - I figured I couldn't sneak this one by you.  Mini-series are exempt from the Movie Year, unless I decide to apply for an exemption, and Stephen King warrants an exemption, I believe.  Hey, I made allowances for the original mini-series version of "It" way back in 2010, so I think I can also kind of grandfather "Salem's Lot" in.  Anyway, I'm only counting this as one movie, not two, so it's extra work on my part.  I put in a lot of effort to figure out how to get here - and to somewhere else FROM here, so now there's nothing to it but to do it.  

Wait, I almost forgot my format stats for September, and my links for October:

SEPTEMBER - 

9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Animal Kingdom, Equals, Bloodshot, Brightburn, Puzzle, Nanny McPhee, Nanny McPhee Returns, Time Freak, Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg

3 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Genius, Yesterday, Cats

3 watched on Netflix: Quigley Down Under, The Prom, The Last Blockbuster

1 watched on iTunes: The Space Between Us
1 watched on Amazon Prime: An Hour Behind
1 watched on Hulu: Trolls World Tour

1 watched on HBO Max: The Suicide Squad
1 watched on a random site: My Future Boyfriend
20 TOTAL

And my October links will be: David Soul, Kate Dickie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Mia Goth, Jason Isaacs, Frank Welker, Sarah Michelle Gellar & Freddie Prinze Jr., Muse Watson, Robert Raiford, Amy Irving, Drew Barrymore, David Arquette, Hilary Swank, Emma Roberts, Eiza Gonzalez and maybe Brian Tyree Henry.  There, that should do it, but I've probably also said too much. If you're playing along at home with the IMDB you probably just figured out my whole Shock-Tober chain. 

THE PLOT: A novelist and a young horror fan attempt to save a small New England town which has been invaded by vampires. 

AFTER: I'm kicking things off with vampires, but as I said, I'm easing into the whole horror thing.  I started watching this on "Throwback Thursday", and today's movie is from a simpler time, one that not only evokes 1979 but some of the very early vamp films, like "Nosferatu".  This was back when we liked our vampires to look all disgusting and full of teeth, not like Brad Pitt wearing a couple fake fangs.  Back when problems could be solved with a good ol' stake to the heart, back when if your dead best friend came and knocked on your window on a foggy night, it was best not to let him in - especially if your bedroom was on the third floor.

This is also VERY early Stephen King, I know "Carrie" was the first of his books to be turned into a movie, but this was the second, three years later.  And it's based on a short story, no less, called "Jerusalem's Lot" - so they shortened the title for the TV movie, but it turns out the town of Salem, MA is also a shortened version of "Jerusalem", I just never made the connection before.  They re-made "Salem's Lot" as another mini-series in 2004 - IFC promoted it as "The One With Rob Lowe", they ran it concurrently with this one back in, well, from the commercials I'm going to guess it was October 2016.  So this has been sitting on my list for maybe FIVE Octobers, that's how hard it was to link to it.  That same short story also got turned into "Chapelwaite", a cable series that's running now on Epix, though they moved the story to the 1850's.  

As with most Stephen King stories, this one's set in Maine, and like several other notable ones, the lead character is a writer.  I sort of cracked the code on King last year with "It: Chapter Two", after learning that Louisa May Alcott based one of the characters in "Little Women" on herself, I realized that King's basically done the same, with so many stories with authors as the central character.  Bill Denbrough in "It" was the obvious stand-in for Stephen, but writers also take center stage in "Misery", "The Dark Half", "Secret Window" and quite notably "The Shining".  There are others, but those are the ones I've seen - one theory online is that these author characters are the ones who end up changing or shaping reality by battling demons (literal and figurative) but I think it's much more simple than that.  "Write what you know," they often say, and King knows a lot about being an author.  (He also got hit by a van back in 1999, and used that incident as a plot point in the last novel from the "Dark Tower" series.)

But as you might imagine, a short story doesn't really seem like it needs to be turned in to a two-night TV miniseries, with a total running time of 3 hours and 20 minutes.  SHORT story, that means it's SHORT, so how did they come up with enough material to fill a 2-episode series?  The quick answer is, they didn't - this films drags like...well, a big thing that drags along very slowly.  Some characters have to say things two or three times, just to fill up some space.  This should have been over in an hour - man comes to town, gets a room at the boarding house, contacts his old high-school teacher, starts dating a woman he saw reading one of his books, figure out there are vampires in town and people are dying, track them back to the most suspicious house in town, grab a few stakes and have at it.  It should have been that simple and short, but it just wasn't.  

Even though the look hearkens back to Nosferatu, and there's a very Renfield-like character who's working for "the Master", the modern sensibility here comes from stretching out that story over two two-hour blocks, no doubt on consecutive nights, thus maximizing the ad revenue and cashing in on that money, honey.  Why should we wrap this up in one hour when we've got enough sponsors to run ads for four?  

Oddly, Part 1 begins with the ending, two characters chasing down vampires in Guatemala, of all places.  (This made me think of "Bat-Manuel" from "The Tick")  It's an obvious use of the "splash-page" effect, then snapping back to depict the story that would get us there, but it also had the negative result of removing a great deal of suspense from the story.  We know from the start that those two characters are going to survive whatever comes their way in Salem's Lot, because they end up in Central America together after.  For work, not a romantic vacation, it's not that kind of film.  

This film is so old that it predates all the really psycho-scary films, like "Nightmare on Elm Street", also all the gory slasher-type films like "Friday the 13th" or "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", it's more like the old Dracula films where you barely even saw blood.  There are only like two jump-scares in the whole three-hour miniseries, how did everybody stay awake when this aired in 1979?  I'm guessing network standards were very strict at the time, like you couldn't even show a vampire biting somebody in the neck?  This film always seems to cut away just before that happens, or else it happens JUST off-screen.  Lame.  

It also takes WAY too long for Mears & Co. to figure out what's going wrong in town.  Mears wants to write a book about the old Marsten house, where it's rumored that several people have disappeared over the years, and Mears claims to have seen a ghostly figure inside the house once.  Umm, hello, people in town keep dying from "pernicious anemia", will you people please put two and two together here?  And writing a book about the house really isn't going to solve the problem in a timely manner.

I approve re-making this into a feature film, preferably only 105 to 110 minutes in length, because the story development needs to happen a lot quicker than in this 1979 version.  Come on, pick up the pace, teens today don't have very long attention spans?  But you know that if Netflix or Amazon had their way, they'd license this story and turn it into a 12-part miniseries instead, then end it on a cliffhanger and announce that Season 2 is in development...

Also starring David Soul (last seen in "Starsky & Hutch"), James Mason (last seen in "The Boys from Brazil"), Lance Kerwin (last seen in "Outbreak"), Bonnie Bedelia (last seen in "The Big Fix"), Lew Ayres (last seen in "Holiday"), Ed Flanders (last seen in "The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper"), Julie Cobb, Elisha Cook Jr. (last seen in "Sergeant York"), George Dzundza (last heard in "Superman: Brainiac Attacks"), Clarissa Kaye-Mason, Geoffrey Lewis (last seen in "The New Guy"), Barney McFadden, Kenneth McMillan (last seen in "Eyewitness"), Marie Windsor (last seen in "Song of the Thin Man"), Barbara Babcock (last seen in "Far and Away"), Bonnie Bartlett (last seen in "Frances"), Joshua Bryant, James Gallery, Robert Lussier, Brad Savage, Ronnie Scribner, Ned Wilson (last seen in "Being There"), Reggie Nalder, Ernest Phillips.

RATING: 4 out of 10 spooky deer heads