Salem's Lot

Salem's Lot (1979) is from a novel by Stephen King, adapted for television by Paul Monash and directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). I already reviewed it a couple years ago, but after watching it again last night I want to revisit it. It's probably the most memorable adaptation of a Stephen King novel with the exceptions of Carrie and The Shining. However, it's more interesting than The Shining and more restrained than Carrie.  

Salem's Lot, because it was shot for television, is limited by the constraints of cable. There's no gore and really no violence, which makes the job of the writer and director significantly more difficult in terms of amping up the horror. They were forced to build the atmosphere in a way that would give us the creeps. If you look at Hooper's directorial debut, Texas Chain Saw, you'll see an altogether different movie. Chain Saw is frenetic, unrelenting and grueling. In terms of plot, it's an episode of Scooby Doo, except the villain is a maniac with a chainsaw, not a local farmer trying to cover up his counterfeiting racket in the basement. Meanwhile, Paul Monash wrote the screenplay for Carrie, a movie that seems stylistically as diametrically opposed to Salem's Lot as you could get. My question is: how did two people whose previous work was so hyperbolic and garish manage to come up with this slow-paced, straight-forward vampires-in-New-England chiller?

You do start to miss the violence, because Salem's Lot might be a banal sitcom about small-town America if not for the vampire element. It's rather tame, but intermittently Hooper and cinematographer Jules Brenner have constructed some of the best vampire movie set-pieces ever. The King vampire, Barlow, is a direct nod to Count Orlock in Murnau's silent-era classic Nosferatu (1922). Barlow was quite different in the novel, but the change lends a sense of unspeakable horror and dread to the adaptation. Salem's Lot's banality is only ever at the surface: beneath it, there is the dreadful sense of doom that we felt in Carrie and Texas Chain Saw. The work of Monash and Hooper is very much a part of the subtext. Very little is overt. Hooper seems to be imitating Hitchcock more than ever. He did it a little bit in Chain Saw, when one of the kids unsuspectingly walks into the layer of Leatherface and meets an unexpectedly quick demise. We knew something was going to happen, but we didn't know when because there was no immediate warning.


Salem's Lot is chock full of warnings--musical cues, telegraphed shots that tell us, "someone's about to get it." And yet, there are still shudders. When we finally see Barlow's ghastly purple face with his beady, piercing eyes and yellow fangs, it's truly horrifying: one of the most nightmarish images I can recall in movies. There's no denying the film's power, and I think in the case of Salem's Lot the fun and the excitement lie in the hours of restraint that give way to the minutes, even seconds, of chilling horror that pop up unexpectedly, more and more as the film progresses. Perhaps this is simply the psychological explanation for why we like horror movies in general.


The cast is fairly convincing: David Soul plays Ben Mears, a writer who grew up in Salem's Lot and has returned to write a book about the Marston house, an iconic den of evil now presided over by the vampire and his human guardian; James Mason plays that guardian, and he utters every line with delightfully cryptic arrogance; Lance Kerwin plays Mark, Ben's teenage muse by proxy: he's into writing (as well as monsters and horror make-up). He and Ben develop a predictable but unlikely kinship (unlikely because their characters have almost no interaction until the end); Bonnie Bedelia plays the love interest, Susan, a character from the Old School of Wimpy Horror Movie Heroines, except she poses as a "partially-liberated feminist." In fact, Susan's character is mostly reactionary. She tows the line. Thankfully, Bedelia plays the part with an understated, intelligent grace. She lets the subtlety of her performance do the work, rather than jamming the meaning of her lines and her motivations into the "foreground" of her performance. Indeed, Susan would have been as bad as she was written if played by a lesser actress.


With Lew Ayres, Ed Flanders, Fred Willard, Geoffrey Lewis, Reggie Nalder (as Barlow), and George Dzundza, as a fat, drunk New England truck driver (a combination you would never want in a human being if you can help it).


Followed by the dismal A Return to Salem's Lot and a 2004 remake (also made for TV).

Night of the Comet

As the world is less than two years away from a complete apocalyptic breakdown, I thought it apt to start 2011 off with my favorite end-of-the-world flick. In Night of the Comet (1984), Regina and Samantha Belmont are sisters in the San Fernando Valley who are left behind after a comet passes through the earth's atmosphere and turns most of the population into dust. A few people that were partially exposed to the comet are rapidly degenerating--they've been turned into really pissed off zombies while their bodies disintegrate at a slower rate than people who were directly exposed. Reggie and her sister, we find out, were in the right kind of building structure (steel) to avoid any exposure, so they're hunky dory and can enjoy their newfound freedom roaming the streets of L.A. (provided they carry semi-automatic weapons to ward off unwanted zombie attacks). Reggie utters the incredibly bad line, "the Mac 17 was practically designed for housewives." I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, but it smacks of one of those great bad movie lines that you can't help tossing around in conversation.

Night of the Comet is a 1950s movie set in the 1980s. Or rather, it's a 1980s movie that was made by people who grew up on the cheesy science fiction flicks from the 1950s. Actually, it's one of the purest forms of movie-making I've ever seen. It's completely contrived. The artificiality is what gives it its charm. The movie isn't scary--there aren't even enough zombies in it to pose a serious threat, especially since the ghouls have a rapidly approaching expiration date. The only real threat comes from a sinister cadre of scientists who were partially exposed to the comet and are looking for clean blood to extract a serum. But the valley girls, played by Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney, are so disaffected and deadpan that we're not really all that bothered by the movie's superficial apocalypse.

Writer-director Thom Eberhardt has tongue firmly in cheek. The 1980s seemed to be marked by movies with too much sentiment and movies that were just too smart for it. Night of the Comet might fall into the second category but for its ending, which tries to establish Stewart as the new mother figure, set to repopulate the earth with a brawny Latino, Hector (Robert Beltran), who they meet at a radio station. (They're hoping to find a sign of normalcy but they discover the deejay's voice is only a recording). Hector is pretty much the only eligible bachelor left in L.A. Fortunately for Reggie he's a gentleman.

The movie's soundtrack--populated by lusciously synthesized rock anthems and a wonderfully campy score by David Richard Campbell--is heavenly in its 80sness. The movie is all flaws if you're turned off by the 80sness, but if you're into that, you find so many pleasures in Night of the Comet that it feels like the reckless pursuit of a good time. Stewart is a remarkably plucky actress who carries the film well, and Maroney works as the sidekick, who's less classically beautiful but has more of an attitude. There's a terribly constructed fight scene between Samantha and her step-mom (played by Sharon Farrell) which results in Samantha being decked by her, and it's certainly the worst staging in the movie. On the other hand, there's a wonderfully fluid scene of Reggie riding home on a motorcycle with the downtown skyline filling the background and an orange hue permeating the entire environment. It's residue from the comet, or something like that. It has a terrific effect, and it's the kind of contrivance I'm talking about that makes Night of the Comet either a delight or a dud, depending on your taste.

The movie has light touches of socio-political commentary. So light that they really don't say that much at all. It tries to repeat on George Romero's consumerist satire in Dawn of the Dead. The girls are accosted by zombie stock boys while trying on clothes at the mall, and they destroy the department store in a gunfight that's more like a music video (it's set to another of those anthemic 80s rock songs the movie is so fond of). The scientists are really just relics of society, still floundering, struggling to maintain control over the youth of America, who have been given the keys to the car, the jet, the office, and the mansion, and told, "the adults are dead, so you can party for the rest of your life." I think that's the real appeal of this movie. And the budding romance seems more obligatory than anything. But Stewart and Beltran make it work--you could see them going on a date in normal circumstances if they had actually met under such circumstances. It doesn't matter much for me, because my critical senses always manage to become intoxicated by this silly movie. 

With genre favorites Mary Woronov and Geoffrey Lewis (as the leaders of the group of eggheads bent on their own survival, no matter the cost), as well as Michael Bowen in a small part as Reggie's pre-comet boyfriend.