The Long, Strange Screen Journey of Stephen King&#8217;s <i>’Salem&#8217;s Lot</i>

Published in October 1975, Stephen King’s second novel, ’Salem’s Lot, remains not just one of his best-known works but one of the iconic horror tomes of its era. King’s idea of taking an ancient creature out of folklore like the vampire—which seemed quaint and hoary at a time in which horror was dominated by The Exorcist and its many Satanic knockoffs—and dropping it right into the middle of the workaday, intertwined lives of a small, isolated Maine community in the present day was both bracing and terrifying (and still a gripping read even now).

Naturally, ’Salem’s Lot was an instant object of interest for Hollywood, with Warner Bros. eventually snatching up the adaptation rights. But in the 50 years since the book was published, ’Salem’s Lot has had a long, difficult, and turbulent journey to the screen. What’s stranger is that it’s gotten there three times—twice as a miniseries and once as a feature film—yet none of those adaptations have been completely successful, although one arguably came close. And, it turns out, there was even an attempt to turn it into a TV series, which never got off the ground.

Why has the road to adapting ’Salem’s Lot often been as bumpy as some of the unpaved lanes in the title town itself? While the book is more than 400 pages, it’s not necessarily the length that has defeated many a screenwriter and filmmaker, but the density of the material itself. King masterfully introduces the reader to numerous residents of Jerusalem’s Lot over the course of the book’s first 150 pages or so, creating a fully-rounded, well-realized portrait of the kind of provincial small town he himself grew up in.

While not all the townspeople or even all the major characters are likable, their personalities and foibles are familiar to anyone who’s lived in a close-knit community. When the horror kicks into high gear—a little more than a third of the way through the book—and we watch all these townspeople and characters we’ve grown fond of not just get killed but turned into soulless creatures of the night themselves, that’s when ’Salem’s Lot turns terrifying and even tragic.

But that’s also what has vexed anyone who’s tried to adapt the book, starting with screenwriters Stirling Silliphant (In the Heat of the Night), Robert Getchell (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) and Larry Cohen (It’s Alive). Each of them took a whack at the material in the mid-1970s, but were unable to draft scripts that satisfied the studio while keeping the story intact (Cohen later wrote and directed his own movie, A Return to Salem’s Lot, which had nothing to do with the book or eventual miniseries save for the setting).

According to the newly published second edition of Salem’s Lot: Studies in the Horror Film (edited by Tony Earnshaw), Silliphant’s first draft was 157 pages long, equaling a film more than two and a half hours long—not the kind of time (and budget) a studio wanted to devote to a horror movie at that point. Silliphant got it down to 135 pages, still quite lengthy even as he began cutting sequences and characters. Cohen’s attempt was even weightier at 162 pages—quite faithful to the book but at a size only reserved at the time for films like The Godfather.

With several writers unable to produce a suitable feature script (a problem that would come back to haunt the property 40 years later), and a number of directors either passing or unavailable, the decision was finally made to turn the project over to Warner Bros.’ television division and transform it into a miniseries—or more accurately, a two-part TV movie that would air for four hours over two nights, containing just over three hours of material after commercials. Producer Richard Kobritz assigned writer Paul Monash to pen the screenplay, while The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper came on board to helm it.

The results aired over two consecutive Mondays in November 1979, with David Soul as brooding writer Ben Mears, James Mason as Richard Straker (human familiar to the vampire), Reggie Nalder as the king vampire himself, Kurt Barlow, Bonnie Bedelia as local Susan Norton, and Lance Kerwin as young horror fan Mark Petrie. Despite the limitations of TV in terms of both budget and what could and could not be shown in prime time, this first version of ’Salem’s Lot remains the best, even considered by some to be a landmark for horror on television.

Hooper’s strong direction, above-average cinematography, some sterling performances (especially by Mason, whose role is expanded from the book), and a string of genuinely scary scenes give the film considerable heft, although it’s worth noting that even three hours of screen time doesn’t quite do justice to the book. Monash successfully follows the basic beats of the story and includes a number of key plot points, but combines, downsizes, or omits quite a few of the characters—to the point that the streets of Jerusalem’s Lot (which is played by the northern California town of Ferndale) seem vacant even before the vampirism kicks in.

Still, Monash, Hooper, and the cast earned justified acclaim (and ratings) for a respectful rendering of ’Salem’s Lot that has left a lasting impact on a generation of viewers—certainly more so than the two attempts that later followed. But before the remakes came along, the success of the 1979 two-parter led to a little-known chapter in the history of the property onscreen: the development, ultimately abandoned, of a ’Salem’s Lot TV series.

Although ’Salem’s Lot aired on CBS, it was NBC that expressed interest in developing the property as a weekly series. Producer Richard Kobritz was again in charge, with a pilot script penned by Robert Bloch, the legendary writer of Psycho, numerous classic stories like “That Hell-Bound Train” and “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” multiple episodes of Thriller and Star Trek, and films like The House That Dripped Blood. Titled “The Homecoming,” Bloch’s pilot script was followed by treatments for four other potential episodes and a second full script for another.

What exactly would a ’Salem’s Lot TV show have looked like? The concept was that Ben and Mark, the two survivors of the original story, flee to Guatemala after escaping the town but eventually return to America, traveling around the country and staying a few steps ahead of Barlow, who’s also somehow back and out for vengeance despite being destroyed by Ben. While Barlow would have been a recurring “big bad,” the show would follow Ben and Mark as they encounter other supernatural menaces in small towns and defeat them before moving on.

It reads like an occult The Fugitive, crossed with The Night Stalker or even a less conspiratorial The X-Files. Perusing the treatments contained in Salem’s Lot: Studies in the Horror Film—including one apparently co-written by Stephen King himself titled “Call of the Undead”—quickly demonstrates how the idea could congeal into formula. Got a werewolf in your town? Don’t worry, Ben and Mark just happen to be rambling through and know how to handle it. The proposed series also had a meta-aspect, with Ben turning their experiences in ’Salem’s Lot into a best-selling book and film called… Salem’s Lot. This aspect of the show—having the protagonists’ exploits turned into books in-universe—as well as keeping the heroes on the road, was later successfully deployed on Supernatural, which premiered in 2005 and ran for 15 years. 

It wasn’t clear whether David Soul and Lance Kerwin were approached to reprise their roles, but either way, the show did not get past the development stage. “It was just never taken seriously,” Kobritz says in ’Salem’s Lot: Studies in the Horror Film. “We were obliging the network—somebody had either sold them on the idea [of the series] or they had sold themselves… but we had no faith in that one.”

And so ’Salem’s Lot went dormant (except for Larry Cohen’s 1987 in-name-only sequel) as a screen property for the next 20 years or so, while other King books and stories were brought to the screen. But with the original novel still one of King’s best-known and most popular works, it was inevitable that Hollywood circled back to it—and did so in 2004, when a new miniseries, also a four-hour two-parter, was produced and aired on TNT in June 2004.

While the original book and miniseries were both set in the 1970s, the new version—starring Rob Lowe as Ben Mears, Rutger Hauer as Barlow, Donald Sutherland as Straker, Samantha Mathis as Susan, and James Cromwell as Father Callahan—was moved forward to the 2000s, with Lowe’s Mears not just a novelist but a PTSD-stricken war journalist. Cromwell’s Father Callahan—almost a non-entity in the 1979 version—became a more central figure, while local high school teacher/Van Helsing surrogate Matt Burke (Andre Braugher) was firmly identified as gay—an idea mooted for the character going back to Larry Cohen’s early feature film script.

The miniseries keeps many of the incidents from the book intact and preserves more of the characters as well, while changing the prologue and ending considerably. Hauer’s Barlow is also more of a Dracula-like European nobleman (King’s original vision) than the wordless Nosferatu clone of the ’79 adaptation. Director Mikael Salomon manages to create some tangible atmosphere and a few striking images, but the acting is inconsistent (ranging from Lowe’s rather enervated Ben to Sutherland’s devouring-the-scenery but still entertaining Straker) and a number of the characters get short shrift even with the three-hour (minus ads) runtime.

Still, it’s a more credible adaptation than its reputation has suggested over the years, the latter perhaps due to lingering nostalgia for the Hooper version and the fact that this one has been very difficult to see (it’s not even easily accessible via streaming at the moment). By bringing the story into the 2000s, it also sidesteps the issue of just how an entire town—even a small hamlet in rural Maine—could disappear in a short amount of time without the world noticing. 

Writer/director Gary Dauberman sought to avoid that issue in his 2024 feature film adaptation, which he returned to the 1970s to avoid the intrusion of pesky elements like social media and mobile devices. Dauberman, who co-wrote the two-film adaptation of It, was announced as the movie’s writer in April 2019, and subsequently named its director as well. Principal photography stretched from September 2021 into the following spring, and for the first time, a screen version of ’Salem’s Lot was filmed in New England—Massachusetts to be exact, but a lot closer to Maine than either northern California or Australia, where the previous two were shot.

The problems surrounding this interpretation of ’Salem’s Lot are well-documented: Initially pegged for theatrical release in late 2022, the movie was delayed repeatedly, due to both a post-production pipeline still hampered by the ripple effects of COVID and the aftermath of the Warner/Discovery merger, which led to numerous projects at the company either getting the axe completely or being shelved indefinitely.

’Salem’s Lot avoided both of those fates, but did not receive a theatrical release either; instead, it was launched as an “original movie” on the Warner streaming service, Max, where it finally premiered in October 2024. Lewis Pullman starred as Ben Mears, with Makenzie Leigh as Susan Norton, Bill Camp as Matt Burke, Alfre Woodard as Dr. Cody, and Pilou Asbæk as Straker. Running a scant 113 minutes—and feeling like it had been heavily edited to get there—the 2024 ’Salem’s Lot showed why a successful feature film adaptation remains out of reach.

Despite Dauberman’s genuine love for the material and some eerie visuals, plus well-designed vampires (with the exception of his Barlow, which sort of combined the 1979 Nosferatu retread with the bloodsuckers from Blade II), this take on King’s novel is the weakest of the three. Barely any time is made available for character development, too many of the townspeople and their stories are shoved to one side, and the film plays like a rough draft of the material in sore need of more flesh on its bones.

“There are a lot of great side stories and B-stories in this book that I love,” Dauberman told this writer on the occasion of the film’s release. “And it was hard to let those go in order to give more real estate to our core group of heroes.”

It’s a disappointment because the film’s relatively short shelf life surely shuts the door on any future development of the property, at least as long as Warner Bros. owns it. The movie also demonstrates the difficulties inherent in making a single, average-length feature film out of this book. With the two previous miniseries—both superior—also struggling to find the right balance of scares, story, and character, what option is left?

Perhaps the best and only way forward at this point would be a limited series of eight to ten episodes, ironically similar to how Max parent outlet HBO handled King’s The Outsider, or what Mike Flanagan did with his Netflix vampire epic Midnight Mass (the best ’Salem’s Lot adaptation not actually based on ’Salem’s Lot). As we noted earlier, King’s book succeeds in bringing the town of Jerusalem’s Lot to vivid life: The reader feels like they know the back roads, have visited the town dump and graveyard, and are on a first-name basis with the owner of the local boardinghouse (Eva) or the area realtor (Larry).

A proper screen translation of this story would spend the time—certainly more than an hour—giving viewers that same chance to get to know this village and its people before brutally yanking them into the darkest nightmare imaginable. That’s a ’Salem’s Lot we’d like to see. But after three previous tries (not to mention the abandoned TV series spinoff), a definitive version of Stephen King’s classic will likely remain, like Barlow and his spawn, in the shadows for now.