Salem's Lot

     Salem's Lot is a miniseries made from Stephen King's second book. In my opinion, the miniseries was just as scary as the book, it did have some changes but the changes made were actually a lot scarier when seen on film. Salem's Lot was made in the 1970s for people who were too lazy to just read the damn book. Fortunately, it turned out very well and personally scared the hell out of me. 

      Stephen King often wondered what would happen if you took Dracula and dropped him in the middle of modern-day suburbia, and the book Salem's Lot was the result. Since this is a blog about movies I won't go into all the differences between the movie and the book and just concentrate on the masterpiece that resulted when this miniseries was created. 

      David Soul was a huge star at the time so he landed the main character role of Ben Mears, a tormented writer who left the sleepy town of Jerusalem's Lot, shortened by its residents to "Salem's Lot", to achieve his dream of being a famous author who never really became that famous. It was directed by Tobe Hooper who had recently made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and was itching to take on a Stephen King novel and make a great miniseries out of it. He succeeded and it was a huge success. It's been remade a few times, one version with Rob Lowe that adhered a lot closer to the novel, but this version from 1979 has gained a huge cult following and is by far the scariest version out there. 

      Ben Mears has returned to write a story about the Marsten House, the old and supposedly haunted house on the hill at the edge of town. Upon arriving in town and attempting to rent the Marsten House to write a book about it, he soon learns that two mysterious antique dealers have just recently rented the house themselves and plan to open an antique shop in town. Sounds very gay, which is where I was hoping the story was going but alas, it did not. Mr. Straker is an English gentleman who definitely stands out in a town full of rather ordinary and mundane people. His partner Mr. Barlow is never seen but only heard about, and is told will soon arrive from a buying trip overseas. 

      Soon a young boy goes missing and a mysterious blood-related illness begins to affect some of the residents of the Lot. Friends and family of the missing and deceased begin having dreams of their loved ones and become unusually tired and develop mysterious marks on their necks. 

      What I like most about this story is that the vampire is rarely seen and the main story deals with the relationships of the people in the town. Ben meets up with Susan Norton, the local librarian and they begin a relationship, much to the dismay of her ex-boyfriend who is constantly dead set on beating the hell out of Ben, as you do in small towns. Mark Petrie is a high school student obsessed with horror and magic who sees his missing best friend floating outside his window one night begging to be let in. Having some knowledge of vampires and already being pretty sure his friend is dead since he attended his funeral a few days prior, refuses and busts out with a plastic cross from a graveyard model, sending his friend hissing into the night. Ben and Mark team up with a few other random characters to solve the mystery of what's going on in the Lot and soon find out that Mr. Straker has been kidnapping kids and feeding them to Mr. Barlow who is a pretty terrifying bald blue vampire with eerie glowing eyes, very much in the vein of Nosferatu, which is probably the biggest change from the book, but a change that scared me half to death the first time I saw him. 

      There's a back story about the Marsten House and an experience Ben had there as a child. Ben assumes that since the house is inherently evil and therefore attracts evil, why then did it attract him? We eventually learn that all the missing or dead people from the town are now bluish-colored vampires who now reside in the house's basement. Ben and Mark finally destroy Straker and Barlow and burn down the Marsten House, starting a fire that eventually sweeps through the entire town. 

      We learn from a few book references by Stephen King that vampires still reside in the Lot after the fire and it becomes known as a place you really don't wanna be caught in after dark. A truly creepy movie with some terrifying scenes and some pretty decent acting by some and some really bad acting by others. After it aired on television it became really hard to find until the miracle of DVD brought it back to life for fans who'd been completely scarred by it when it originally came out.