Do you feel it, dear reader? The crisp little nip in the air? That delicious coolness first thing in the morning?
Yes, autumn is close—and the spooky season is near! That refreshing sense of autumnality (my favorite made-up word) conjures up all manner of pumpkin-spiced fantasies for the season ahead.
It also means Halloween is coming!
Naturally, yours portly loves Halloween—I probably won’t shut up about it from now until probably well into November—and Halloween means scary movies, which are even better when it’s dark and chilly.
What’s even better are scary movies that I saw when I was entirely too young, and which have seared themselves into my mind over the intervening decades.
The 1979 miniseries Salem’s Lot, an adaptation of the Stephen King novel “‘Salem’s Lot,” is one such film. It’s streaming now on Shudder, and I’ve been soaking in its vampiric scares off and on for the past week.
The story of Salem’s Lot is straightforward enough: the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot becomes the target of an ancient vampire, Kurt Barlow, also known as “The Master.” As his pernicious influence subtly works through the town, it exponentially becomes overrun with vampirism.
The protagonist is Ben Mears, a writer who has returned to “The Lot” to write a book about the Marsten House, the classic haunted house that seems to exist in every small town. As a child, Ben experienced a ghostly and grisly apparition in the house, and is convinced that it is a fundamentally evil place. He attempts to rent the Marsten House upon arriving in town, only to discover that Barlow has rented it already.
No one in town has seen Barlow, the mysterious new resident, but his agent Richard Straker is ubiquitous, setting up an antique store that is the cover for Barlow’s absence in the town—Straker notes that Barlow is on a buying trip in Europe at one point, although his story changes frequently.
Gradually at first, then quickly, people start to get sick and die mysteriously, with the hospital offering up the diagnosis of “pernicious hemophilia” (or maybe it’s “pernicious anemia”), lacking any better explanation. The crisis reaches such a fever pitch, even the local sheriff clears out for—this always makes me smile—“South—South Carolina!”
Ben is the first to realize the true nature of the threat, and manages to convince his old high school teacher of the threat. His local girlfriend, Susan Norton, also comes to believe it, along with local boy Mark Petrie, a horror movie buff and theatre kid.
I won’t go into much more of the plot—it’s a vampire movie, so you kind of know what is going to happen in the broad strokes. But what makes this movie/miniseries so memorable are the scenes.
I’ll never forget the incredibly creepy scene when Danny Glick, a boy who has been turned into a vampire along with his brother, Ralphie, scratches at Mark’s window, begging to be invited inside Mark’s home. As a kid, that scene was terrifying—the appeal of the familiar, fast friend, now a terrifying creature of the night, eyes aglow with vampiric, hypnotic evil.
The opening scene in a Guatemalan church always struck me, too; it implies that Ben and Mark have been on the run for some time, trying to get far enough away from the wicked vampires that overran their hometown.
Barlow himself is terrifying—the classic, Nosferatu-style vampire. He’s not suave and sophisticated; he’s a monster, an animal, with gnarled fangs and a deathly pallor. The implication is that he has ben around millennia, predating the foundation of Christianity.
The miniseries is a fairly faithful adaptation of the book, which I read some years ago after finding a copy in my school’s small library. Naturally, even a two-part miniseries has to leave out some of King’s detail, but the overall gist is captured well. One major theme that comes out powerfully in the novel, which the miniseries briefly touches on in one scene, is the idea that true faith can repel the vampires, but doubt will allow the vampires—or at least Barlow—to overpower even a Crucifix. The power is not in the object itself, but in the faith of the wielder. There is a heartbreaking scene in the book and film that depicts the local Catholic priest confronting Barlow, who challenges the priest to face off against him, “White against Black,” good against evil, “faith against faith.” The priest falters, and Barlow crushes the Crucifix in the priest’s hands.
There’s also a theme that is common in King’s works about the decline of small towns. Salem’s Lot is an isolated community in New England, and while the miniseries does not touch on this as much, the book definitely portrays the town as being well past its prime. Its young residents are looking to escape, and only the unfortunate are stuck there. There is a graphic scene of domestic violence in the novel that I won’t write about here, but it’s a gripping melodrama about a family living on the skids amid extreme poverty and poor impulse control.
I really, really like this miniseries. I liked the book even more.* Definitely check out this classic* if you haven’t seen it.
*These are Amazon affiliate links. If you make a purchase through those links, I receive a portion of the sales proceeds, at no additional cost to you. —TPP