It’s an ingenious, shapeshifting entity, the vampire movie; a genre that lends itself to layers of symbolism and subtext. From The Twilight Saga’s syrupy themes of adolescent romantic yearning to the bruising loneliness of a bullied child in Let the Right One In and the revisionist political history and absurdity of El Conde – featuring an undead incarnation of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – the vampire film is rarely just about vampires.
Which is why Gary Dauberman’s film adaptation of Salem’s Lot, based on the 1975 Stephen King novel that spawned two TV miniseries and pop cultural references galore, feels almost radical in its total lack of ambition, scope and depth. It’s an old-school tale of an epidemic of the undead in a small town in rural Maine. And that’s it. No underlying meaning, no knotty themes to unpick. For audiences who have come to expect a little more intellectual bite from their vampire flicks, this is pallid, bloodless stuff.
Two new arrivals set the sleepy town of Salem’s Lot astir. Author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), linked to the community by a childhood tragedy, has returned to research his next project. And antique shop proprietor RT Straker (Pilou Asbaek) is a recent immigrant to the US (from a previous century, judging by his cravats and florid acting style). Straker has a smile that could strip furniture polish and an accent that sounds as though it was disinterred from a mitteleuropean plague pit. But when kids start vanishing, it’s Mears who bears the brunt of local hostility – his relationship with town sweetheart Susan (Makenzie Leigh) might be a factor.
The 70s backdrop is a little too neat and antiseptic to be fully convincing, but the main issue is a clumsy screenplay that laboriously overexplains while also playing out as if vital plot points have been lost along the way. The vampire genre is, like its toothy protagonists, notoriously difficult to kill outright, but this flat and uninspired film could be a nail in its coffin.
In UK and Irish cinemas
