Hallo-Watch: Salem's Lot (2024)

Watched:  10/15/2025

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Gary Dauberman

How does one make a movie that is supposed to be horrifying just weirdly annoying to watch?

Salem's Lot (2024) is here to crack this mystery wide open.  

Poor Steven King.  Probably tired of being mistaken for author Stephen King who wrote the book this movie is based on, which had a TV series or some such of it made back when I was a wee tot and missed the show.  And Stephen King has become a master of horror novels which have only been made into good movies if Stanley Kubrick takes the novel as a suggestion or its Rob Reiner making Stand By Me, which is not horror.    I do like Christine, though.  And Silver Bullet has its moments.  But neither is a patch on the books.*

Writer/ Director Gary Dauberman took a beloved American novel, wrote down "vampires" on a yellow pad, jotted down the character names from the book, and as near as Wikipedia can tell me, paid little attention to anything else.  And, instead, he wrote a nonsense script where everyone is dumb as a bag of rocks to the point where I was wondering if the movie was supposed to be a satire or spoof at times.  

The movie stars Lewis Pullman, who you will know as Bob/ Sentry from Thunderbolts.  And, on and off, Alfre Woodard.  Oh, and Bill Sadler for like five minutes.  Makenzie Leigh plays The Girl (who maybe had a name, but was mostly there to be girl).  Bill Camp plays a complex character who goes completely unexplored.  

Anyway, I *assume* Stephen King wrote a pretty good book, but in this thing, people run around doing all the horror movie shit that drives you nuts.  They split up.  They go alone to check out what they think is the vampire's lair.  They keep going back to dangerous places just as the sun is going down.  They never think "oh, the vampires are in this old-ass Victorian, and no one knows we're here... hey, let's just burn it down, which will take away their hiding place and also expose the vampire to the sun if we start at, say, 8:30 AM".  

Also, if I'm a vampire, why am I going to a small town and turning everyone else into vampires?  It's eliminating the food source and creating competition.  What am I even doing?  

Anyway, after about the half-way point, I just kept asking the characters why they weren't just setting all the vampire places on fire.  It just made no sense to me.  Like, if you can avoid fighting vampires with sticks, you should.  Also, leave town every day before dark and then come back when the sun is up to keep torching vampires.  

I would be an amazing vampire hunter.  Me, a box of matches and a tank of gas.

But this is the kind of movie where you have to race against the actual shadow of the sun setting, which keeps changing pace for how fast that shadow is moving.  

Was this movie satire?  I really don't know.  I know Alfre Woodard was really good despite it all.  But she always is.  And the best part of the movie was the 11 year-old-kid taking out our Renfield.  

What's most mind-boggling is that this comes from solid source material, and the guy who wrote and directed the movie wrote the Conjuring movies, including Annabelle and Nun installments (y'all are really nuts for those movies in a way I don't quite grok).  Which I assume aren't this... dumb.

And, at some point, I realized that the tension I was feeling watching it was not that I was feeling anything fear-adjacent, it was me getting antsy that everything was dragging and I wanted them to just get on with it.  I was, for lack of a better way of describing it, annoyed.  Not one thing that happens in this movie is scary, or even gory.  It is just shit happening on screen.  Telegraphed, you've-seen-this-elsewhere-done-better shit.

Anyway, I kinda checked in with Jamie at some point and verified that, yes, she agreed this movie was bad, and we just sort of talked over the back half of it.  Which is maybe the best way to watch this mess.

*I don't remember if the movie Cujo is good.