Quick Review: ‘Salem’s Lot

Part of Prairie’s scheme to familiarize me with Stephen King’s work has included renting some of the many adaptations of his work to film. Quality varies, of course, but when they’re good, they’re good, and when they’re bad, it’s generally fun to look at the differences between the original story and the filmed version and see what went wrong.

This past weekend, we went with a recent TV miniseries version of ‘Salem’s Lot.

It started out rather promising, with a strong cast (Rob Lowe as Ben Mears, Donald Sutherland as Richard Straker, Rutger Hauer as Kurt Barlowe, and James Cromwell as Father Callahan), and the first half of the show was overall fairly well done — while there were definite alterations made, due both to moving the story to the small screen and updating it for a modern setting, most of them weren’t very troubling, and the tone of the film was dead on.

There were two definite “What??” moments in the first half, though. The film opened with a scene (Ben attacking Father Calahan and hospitalizing both of them after a fall out of a second-story window) that was not anywhere in the book, and had Prairie and I both quite confused, as it didn’t seem to make any sense for either of the characters — though we decided to give the film the benefit of the doubt, and see where things led, especially when the next few scenes covering Ben’s arrival in the town were handled quite well. Also, the doctor was combined with another character in the book, which ended up drastically changing his character for the worse. That bothered both of us, as he was one of the nicer characters in the book.

Other changes were more acceptable, though — various characters being combined, slight tweaks here and there — and most of what we noticed were differences in interpretation. For instance, we had each pictured Straker as far more slick and smooth, and very politely menacing, while Sutherland played him a little more wild. Still, the feel of the book was captured quite well, so even with the slight changes, things seemed to be going fairly well.

Then we hit the second half, and things suddenly starting going downhill. Mark, the boy hero of the book who survives in large part due to his childhood innocence and open acceptance of ghoulies, ghosties, and things that go bump in the night, is made far more cynical and something of a troublemaker, robbing his character of many of the qualities that allowed him to survive through the book. The changes made to the doctor’s character continued to eat away at our perception of him, making him far less sympathetic.

But the real crimes were in the sudden and drastic deviations from the plot of the book as the movie drew to a close. Ben’s encounter with Hubie Marsten in the old Marsten house is substantially changed, and ends up being nowhere near as creepy or effective as in the book. Susan’s death, one of the big moments for Ben in his struggle to deal with the situation, doesn’t happen when it should, instead being pushed into an absolutely ludicrously silly final confrontation near the end of the movie. Father Callahan goes from being a very interesting and ultimately tragic figure to being little more than evil and rather dumb. The vampire “dusting” effects are just silly — surely they could have found another way to distinguish their vampire deaths from those of other shows without having the vamps suddenly levitate towards the ceiling and explode into glitter. And Barlowe’s final moments are just laughable.

In the end, it was one of the more disappointing adaptations I’ve seen, simply because it seemed to start so well — to have it take such a drastic turn for the worse was more frustrating than if had simply been bad through and through from the start.

“Kiss, The” by Cure, The from the album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987, 6:14).