On 19 February, horror legend Stephen King took to X: 'Between you and me, Twitter, I've seen the new Salem's Lot and it's quite good. Old-fashioned horror filmmaking: slow build, big pay-off. Not sure why WB is holding it back; not like it's embarrassing or anything. Who knows. I just write the fucking things.'
No one, it seems, knew just what was happening with Gary Dauberman's adaptation of King's beloved 1975 novel about vampires taking over a small town in Maine. Announced in April 2019 and commencing principal photography in September 2021, it was set for theatrical release in September 2022, but delayed due to COVID-related hitches in post-production. And then... silence. Sure, there was the pandemic and the 2023 SAGAFTRA strike, but this mystery went deeper, and strangely chimed with the book's genesis.
'In the early 1800s a whole sect of Shakers, a rather strange, religious persuasion at best, disappeared from their village (Jeremiah's Lot) in Vermont. The town remains uninhabited to this day,' wrote King in a 1969 column for his campus newspaper at the University of Maine. It was this Mary Celeste-style enigma that inspired both his epistolary short story Jerusalem's Lot (available in the 1978 Night Shift collection), and the dense, detailed novel of 'Salem's Lot.
In all probability, Dauberman's movie vanished due to the restructuring of the Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate. This was the same company that was behind the Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme movies, both of which were infamously shelved as tax write-offs. Would such a fate befall Salem's Lot? fretted King's legion of fans. But the author's tweet seemed to suddenly get the wheels of industry turning: Dauberman's movie, the first based on a book that has twice been adapted into a miniseries (Tobe Hooper's 1979 iteration and a 2004 effort starring Rob Lowe), was announced to be landing on streaming platform Max in the US, and would receive a cinema release in the UK.
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