By Anthony Breznicanv | Vanity Fair.com | August 20, 2024
Director Gary Dauberman, writer of It, explains how he made a ’70s-infused midnight movie out of the small-town saga.
Sometimes it just takes a while to claw your way to the surface. That’s how a lot of creatives feel about their Hollywood projects, and it’s true in multiple ways for the new adaptation of Stephen King’s vampire tale, Salem’s Lot. Not only is it about residents of a small town who get picked off one-by-one before rising up from the grave as night-stalking fiends, but it has been a journey of many years (many more than expected) for writer-director Gary Dauberman, who signed on after proving his King bona fides as the screenwriter of It and It: Chapter 2.
Ever since Warner Bros. moved Salem’s Lot at the last moment from its original September 2022 release date, fans have been wondering when the movie might see the light of day. King himself also wanted to know. The author tweeted his frustration earlier this year, “Between you and me, Twitter, I’ve seen the new Salem’s Lot and it’s quite good. Old-school horror filmmaking: slow build, big payoff. Not sure why WB is holding it back; not like it’s embarrassing, or anything. Who knows. I just write the fucking things.”
Salem’s Lot had found itself caught in the crossfire of restructuring at parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, where some other nearly finished projects—such as Batgirl and the Looney Tunes comedy Coyote vs. Acme—were scrapped completely for the sake of tax write-offs. Fans feared this King adaptation might suffer the same fate, but then rumors circulated that it was poised instead for a debut on Max. “I had the same questions everybody else did,” Dauberman tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive first look at the film. “This movie was made at a time when that transition to the new ownership was happening, which was an interesting experience. At a certain point, it’s out of your control. People were asking me, ‘Where’s the movie? Where’s the movie?’ I wish I had an answer for them other than a shrug and ‘I don’t know.’”
Now he knows for sure—Salem’s Lot has successfully survived the crucible of corporate mergers and schedule jousting. It will debut on Max this October, smack in the midst of spooky season. “I’m excited it’s finally getting out there and people can see it,” says Dauberman.
With the release mystery finally resolved, the primary question about the film now is how it handles this well-known story, which holds a special place in the hearts of many King fans.
The 1975 novel was only his second book, after Carrie, combining the gothic sensibilities of Bram Stoker’s Dracula with the idyllic Americana of Norman Rockwell. It has been adapted for TV twice before, first as a two-part miniseries on CBS in 1979, directed by future Poltergeist filmmaker Tobe Hooper. That version starred Starsky & Hutch actor David Soul in the lead role of a writer who goes home again, only to find his quaint Maine town infected by an unthinkable evil. Rob Lowe played that part in the miniseries remake that aired on TNT in 2004.
After the mega-blockbuster success of It launched a King renaissance in 2016, Hollywood began blowing the dust off of the rights to other classic titles. Dauberman, fresh off his directorial debut with 2019’s Annabelle Comes Home, began lobbying New Line Cinema to give him a shot at Salem’s Lot. “I feel like it’s a crown jewel in King’s library, and I always thought it would make a great movie,” he says. Dauberman’s proposal was to actually not modernize Salem’s Lot. Instead, he proposed keeping it retro and setting it in the hazy groove of a half-century ago, when King first imagined it.
The It and Annabelle movies are steeped in nostalgic eras, so it felt natural. “Most of my stuff is set in the ’70s. I love the music. I do love the costumes. I just love the vibe of it,” Dauberman says.
King’s work covers a vast tonal spectrum, from the heart-wrenching realism of The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, to the schlocky camp of Creepshow and Graveyard Shift. Most of the author’s stories land somewhere in between, and Dauberman tipped his version of Salem’s Lot toward the more sensational side. It has Our Town overtones, but mirrors the lurid humor and macabre extremism of late-night grindhouse thrillers of its ’70s era—when disco ruled, collars were wide, and midnight movies knew how to walk on the wild side.
“You could do a very dry version of this movie, but that’s just not my personality,” Dauberman says. “It’s trying to ride that wave’s ups and downs. You’re having fun with it, and then you can have a scare, and then you’re having fun again. Hopefully it feels like a complete ride at the end.”
Lewis Pullman (Top Gun: Maverick and Lessons in Chemistry) leads the Salem’s Lot ensemble as author Ben Mears, a best-selling writer who has become persona non grata after publishing a book that was a little too true-to-life for the residents of his old stomping grounds. “He’s like the perfect everyman,” Dauberman says. “I wanted someone who could be the straight man to all the stuff that’s going on around him, bringing some sort of groundedness to what’s going on.”
During a visit back to Jerusalem’s Lot to reconnect with his roots, Ben catches the eye of a local young woman named Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh), a book-lover who believes there must be more than this provincial life. “She’s a small town girl. She’s tried to get out of it,” Dauberman says. “She sees this stranger comes into town and it’s, ‘Please tell me what news you bring from afar?’”
As their relationship grows, Ben discovers that the back-biting he remembers from the residents of his hometown has been replaced with actual neck-biting. This is thanks to a new resident, a flamboyant European bon vivant named Richard Straker, who opens an antique store on Main Street and moves into the dilapidated castle-like mansion that looms over the town. Straker (played by Danish actor Pilou Asbæk) has a silent partner named Kurt Barlow, who only comes out at night, and is a literal maneater.
“Pilou is just fucking crazy charismatic,” Dauberman says. “I wanted him to really have fun with it, and let him run with that character. And we had a lot of fun going, ‘Okay, do one more grounded take. Do one a little bit more heightened. Do one way over the top.’”
Fashioning this Renfield henchman with extra savoir faire is an example of how Dauberman amped up the audaciousness of Salem’s Lot, pimping him out in a purple cloak, feathered Homburg hat, and push broom mustache. This is a character who is not trying to lie low, and the townsfolk see him as exotic rather than an outcast.
“I was kind of wrestling with what this Straker was going to be? Is he going to be more like the book? Is he going to be more James Mason from the [1979] series?” Dauberman says. “He’s an outsider in this town. And I think outsiders can sometimes be looked at as something very interesting, where people start to lean in. ‘Oh, this guy, he’s opening this antique store and he’s got all this cool stuff…’ He’s weaving his web and drawing people in.”
As Straker harvests his master’s initial victims, the first to vanish are two boys, big brother Danny and little Ralphie Glick (Nicholas Crovetti and Cade Woodward, respectively). Their friend, horror fanatic Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter), has seen enough movies to know he should keep his window locked when a sharp-toothed schoolyard pal is floating outside, but few adults are willing to believe his claims, apart from a kindly but weary old teacher Matthew Burke (Bill Camp of The Queen’s Gambit) who serves as this story’s Van Helsing.
Carter, who was only 13 when he filmed it, is the movie’s breakout star. Dauberman said the actor made the most of an already dynamic character. “He’s got one of the best introductions in the book, where he fucking punches the bully,” the filmmaker says. “It’s not the kid who gets beat up and then he goes home. He fights back and he stands up for himself. It pays off as we go through the story of seeing how he won’t back down against the vampires either.”
Jerusalem’s Lot’s population begins to shrink day by day. The Glick boys’ mother succumbs to a wasting illness soon after her sons go missing, but she surprises everybody by resurrecting in the morgue and lashing out with fangs and claws. That’s enough to convince the local medical practitioner Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard) that something truly otherworldly is going on.
Rounding out the group who rise up against this encroaching malevolence is the local priest, Father Callahan (Manhattan’s John Benjamin Hickey) who could be a powerful ally—if only he had more conviction. “In a horror movie, you’re going to go to the priest to help you. And the priest they go to is a reluctant hero,” Dauberman says. “He wears the collar, but he’s just broken. In the book, he’s an alcoholic. He’s a man of faith that doesn’t have any faith.”
The filmmaker’s inspirations are scattered throughout his version of Salem’s Lot as barely-veiled homages.
For instance, in what may be the book’s most famous scene—an undead boy floating outside his best friend’s window—Dauberman has decorated Mark Petrie’s bedroom with a poster for the 1974 blaxploitation classic Sugar Hill, about a woman leading a voodoo-powered gang of the undead in revenge against the mobsters who put a hit on her boyfriend. “My tastes kind of go that way,” the director says. “And Salem’s Lot itself was so heavily influenced by Dracula and other popular culture stuff that Stephen had watched and read.”
Even King’s ’80s-era paperback for the book, featuring a pair of eyes hovering in dusky nighttime hues, became inspiration for the scene in which the Glick boys are stalked in the woods. Dauberman shot it monochromatically, with their silhouettes against a bright blue background. While finalizing the film with colorist Peter Doyle, the pair called up images of that old paperback cover to mimic its gradations of vivid, dripping red.
The midnight movie aesthetic also helped shape another key sequence, when the besieged heroes launch a counterattack against the undead townspeople. Instead of going house to house, as in the book, he set the sequence at an actual drive-in, with the bloodsuckers emerging from the darkness of their car trunks as the sun sets behind the giant white movie screen. “It’s this crazy sugar-high of a scene,” Dauberman says. “I thought, ‘Yeah, this is what this is. This is a drive-in movie.’”
That’s even a line in King’s original book in which one of the characters reflects on where she learned her Nosferatu lore: “She had seen enough Hammer films at the drive-in on double dates to know you had to pound a stake into a vampire’s heart.”
The filmmaker believes that kind of outdoor venue would be the best setting to see his version of Salem’s Lot, but since it will be presented exclusively on Max, he proposes viewers find a way to simulate the communal experience in front of their TVs. “As with most horror movies, I think audiences really elevate the experience,” he says. “So I think getting as many people as you can cram on the couch would be my preferred way to watch this.”