Salem's Lot
SPOILERS
This is the best contemporary vampire story ever written. There's just no other way to put it. In ways its even better than Dracula, although Dracula is the best vampire ever. But Bram Stoker's book, although an excellent read I would recommend to anyone, is just not as relatable as this story, most likely because we are not living in the time of the book.
Anyone who likes vampires needs to read this book or, even better, listen to the audiobook read by Ron McLarty, as the voice and the sound effects brings this story to even better life than just reading it on the pages. I have done both. This remains my favorite story by Stephen King and I could read or listen to it over and over again. The characters are excellent, the story is thrilling, and even King's trademark ponderings add intense terror to the story. If anyone ever made the vampire scary again since Dracula, it was Stephen King. In fact, I suppose you could say this is the modern equivalent to Dracula, as I'm sure King probably meant it to be. It's like Dracula only 10 times better. The main vampire was creepy and very intelligent, and the slowly unfolding disaster keeps you turning the page! This is one of those books that will keep you up reading it all night!
The book centers around Ben Mears, a writer who returns to his hometown hoping to tap into his child-hood terror to write a book that will make him money and help boost his career. This is unlike the mini-series where it is portrayed as Ben returning to write a book to dispel his inner demons by revealing the evils in small-town America. As well, in the book, Hubie Marsten had killed his wife and himself WELL before the events in the book. Although it is later revealed that Hubie, a devil-worshiper who sacrificed children to his demon masters, had been the one who originally invited Barlow to the town. Another thing in the book that is not mentioned in the movie or mini-series is the fire that burned half the town. This fire is an integral part of the emotional atmosphere of small-town lies in this book.
The book is basically using vampires as a way to explore the evils and lies of a seemingly innocent small town. Which, I suppose, is why the mini-series had Ben writing a book on domestic evil, since that couldn't be portrayed so easily on screen. In the book, a mysterious and charming, but somewhat disturbing man comes to town right before Mears, and begins to set up, with his partner who he claims is in Europe, an antique store. He buys the Marsten House, and unbeknownst to the town, begins to set up the area for the arrival of his master.
He sacrifices Charlie Rhode's dog on the fence of the churchyard to make it unhallowed ground and he kidnaps and kills Ralphie Glick as a sacrifice to the infernal powers so that the town will be ripe for an invasion of the dark forces. So, in the book, unlike in the mini-series you never see Ralphie again.
As the horror slowly unfolds, person and person, and people start to disappear, Matt Burke is visited by Mike Ryerson, who died in his house the night before, sending Matt into a heart-attack after he manages to ward the newly turned Ryerson away. This scene was much scarier in the book than in either the movie or the mini-series, although both did a great job in portraying it. And, needless to say, Matt was not gay for Mike in the book. But the scene in the original movie was much scarier than the mini-series as well. And, after finishing with Mike, Danny moves on to Mark Petrie. Now, this was a scene that was also scarier in the book and the original movie, but was well done in all three. These two scenes are the best, most enduring images of Salem's Lot, no matter which version you are talking about.
As Matt attempts to convince the others from his hospital bed, Mark, who survived his encounter with Danny because of his monster collection, ventures up to the Marsten house to kill the vampire, where he runs into a disbelieving Susan, who has decided she will go up to the Marsten house herself to clear up all this non-sense once and for all. They are captured by Straker, who is much more menacing in the book than either of the film versions, and Susan is made into a vampire while Mark Houdini's his way out of a hog tie trap Straker put him in, and defeats Straker but bashing his head in from behind and breaking his fingers. Attempting to save Susan, he tries to go downstairs, but when Barlow talks to him, he realizes that he'll end up staying and be caught, so he flees and tells Ben and Cody, who are now convinced of the existence of vampires after the encounter with Marjorie Glick at the funeral home (they didn't kill her in the book), about Susan and thus begins Cody, Ben and Father Callahan's fight with Barlow.
This is also a big difference from the book and the adaptations, Mark is much more mature and heroic. He is very smart and crafty, even though is a studious 12-year old. Finally, as the town rapidly begins to die around them, they take action and begin killing the vampires. In the book, Matt dies of a heart attack, not murdered by Father Callahan. Callahan loses his faith in battle with Barlow, who attacks Mark's home after Mark forced him to kill and eat Straker, and even though he saves Mark from the wrath of the master vampire, who had just crushed the skulls of BOTH Mark's parents, he is indeed forced to drink Barlow's blood and become his mortal servant. Defeated, his soul forever tainted by the vampires blood, unable to enter his own church, Callahan flees to New York and is never seen again.
Meanwhile, Cody and Mark go to the boarding house, where Cody is killed and then, finally Ben kills Barlow in revenge for Susan, who he had to put down, and he and Mark flee from the town. Later, after traveling around the country, they return to Salmem's Lot and Burn the house to the ground.
Ok, I know you just read the basic plot and end of the book, but still check it out it's a great read and if you love vampires, you are definitely missing out.
Try the book or the audiobook today!
I did like the original one, although it was kind of campy. But for a '70's film, what do you expect? First of all, what was up with this?
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| What do you get when you cross Nosferatu with a smurf?... |
Was he suffocated or left to die in the cold before he became a vampire? Are they saying that the older the vampires become the more they look like Nosferatu? I don't know, but I just have a hard time believing that this could hypnotize anyone into letting it bite them. Needless to say, he wasn't portrayed like that in the book, And, of course they didn't go with this in the Mini-series, for which I am glad because personally I think this image kind of hurt the original movie to some degree. Part of the appeal of vampire movies is supposed to be that we secretly WANT them to bite us. And, I'm sorry, but I wouldn't want this to come anywhere near me. Looks to much like a rat. I would rather get sawed by the vampires in 30 Days of Night...well, maybe not. But you get the idea. Plus, the costume looks fake. It just kind of ruined it for me. To be honest, the scenes with Mike and Danny where a lot creepier.
To be sure, neither interpretation of Straker did the book's version any justice. In the book, Straker was bald, menacing and calm. But also very classy and charming. Susan described him as sexy in a way, but with an underling of contempt, the kind of guy who would be only as nice as he had to be for show, but who could probably order off an expensive menu and know exactly what kind of wine to order with any meal. Not just the color, but the year and the brand as well. The Straker in the movie was creepy, but he was too much of a grumpy old man.
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| Oh, come on, man! She came on to me! |
I love how each rendition has to have a sex scandal. In the book, it's a character that does not appear in either rendition, Reggie Sawyer, who's beauty queen wife is cheating on him with the telephone company boy. In this version, Larry Crockett, is sleeping with is sleeping with CULLY Sawyer's wife. Cully works with Tibbets on Mr. Crockett's moving service instead of being a well-to-do man working out of town like Reggie Sawyer in the book. Later, this scandal is replaced by Dr. Cody sleeping with Royce McDouggal's wife, Sandy. Interesting to note, in the book Royce and Sandy and little Roy McDouggal DO exist, but it's actually SANDY that's beating the kid, and needless to say, the whole thing about Cody sleeping with her and them blackmailing him doesn't happen.
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| Look at me... |
Now, this was one of the creepiest moments in the movie. It holds very true to the book. It took A LOT of balls for Mr. Burke to stand up to this thing. I would've dropped a brick and ran if I saw this.
Imagine hearing a noise upstairs in the same room someone had just died in the day before. You creep upstairs as slowly as possible, the tension rising to a nearly unbearable level as memories of everything that terrified you as a child flash through your mind and you wonder, what is on the other side of that slightly ajar door where just yesterday someTHING had come and killed your house guest? You slowly push open the door, and there, looking like a demon straight from Hell, is the living corpse of the man who died in this same room saying 'Look at me..'
Chills! In the book, Matt wards off Mike the same way he did in this ("I will see you sleep like the dead, teacher!") and then he has a heart attack (no wonder!) and Susan calls an ambulance. Then, she finds a Cumberland County High School ring bearing the initials MCR-Michael Corey Ryerson. And that is when the lovely Ms. Norton starts to believe. And, of course, not only was Matt white in this movie (NOTHING WRONG WITH HIM BEING BLACK OR GAY IN THE 2004 MINI-SERIES, JUST POINTING OUT THE DIFFERENCES) but he invited him to his house for the same old-teacher fatherly reasons he did in the book. An old student in a small town where everyone knows everyone is either ill or on drugs so the concerned teacher takes care of him only to SEVERELY regret it later. The only thing the other scene had in common with the book was that Mike's autopsy scars showed. Although, that scene was creepy, too, it wasn't near as creepy as this one.
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| Ben meets Matt in the original. |
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| So kiss me... |
Susan was another thing I liked about both the movie and the 2004 mini-series, in this version, she gets to live until the end. She finds Ben instead of the other way around and, like in 2004 version, she is not just a plot device to give Ben a reason to hunt Barlow. Although she does still function in this capacity. I like how she at least gets to talk to him and plead her case. And she looks so good as a vampire! You can feel the emotion in both cases much better when, even as a vampire, she loves Ben so much, as this scene takes place at the beginning of the movie and lets you know that she came all the way to find her lover. Sigh. I'm a sucker for dark romance.
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Ok, let's hope this tongue-depressor cross is as lethal to the vampires as these pants are to my sperm count...
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| "What are you doing, son?" "Oh, nothing, Dad, just fiddling with my figure..." |
Another thing about the movie that was more true to the book, was the relationship between Mark and Ben. In the book, after Barlow kills Mark's parents and they kill Barlow, Ben and Mark leave town and journey south, eventually going to Mexico. There, while taking instruction in the church to get into the priesthood, Mark tells the old priest what happened. The old priest then talks to Ben, who decides that he and Mark must go back and finish what they started or they will never have peace. So, then they return and set fire to the place and that's the end.
I liked this version a lot. In ways, it wasn't as creepy as the original movie, but it stuck pretty true to the book. It did add some updated themes to modernize the story, but in all the flavor was pretty much the same. In this version, Ben, who is a journalist that writes non-fiction, comes to town and tells Susan (who doesn't appear to have a father in this version) that he's writing a book. She assumes it's about the Marsten house because, apparently, everyone in town knows that Ben went in the house and had a traumatic experience. In this version, Hubie Marsten was alive when Ben was a kid. He and his wife had moved to Salem's Lot and lived on the hill rarely going into town. It was rumored that he kidnapped and killed kids for his demon worship, but no one could prove it.
So one day on a dare from a group of kids who had a little club named The Bloody Pirates, Ben goes into the house to get a souvenir to prove that he went inside. Wanting to prove he wasn't a wuss, he decides not to simply grab something and leave, but ventures upstairs so he could grab something that would let them know he really went in. He runs down the hall, grabs Hubie's glasses and is just about to run out when he hears someone coming up the stairs. So, he hides in the closet and can't close the door all the way because it's stuck. So Ben is forced to watch as an evil presence commands Hubie to hang himself.
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| Little Ben encounters a ghost... |
After the man is dead, Ben dashes out of the room, down the hall, and then he sees Hubie's wife, Birdy lying on the floor with a huge hole in her chest. Ben freaks out and spends the night paralyzed on the floor, staring in terror at the corpse that seems to be crying 'Help me!' The next morning, he aunt comes and gets him and that's when she finds the body of little Ronnie Barnes dead in the bathtub. For the rest of his life, Ben blames himself for being too much of a coward to get up and save that kid, so he comes back to town to write a book about the lies of small town America. Which, he says, will also reflect on the lies he told as a boy when he told everyone he never heard Ronnie and allowed them to think he was brave. This, of course, later pisses Susan and Matt off.
Susan Norton and her family were a bit different in this rendition. Her mother is essentially the same character as she was in the book, except that she owns and runs her own cafe. And Susan either doesn't have a dad or he's dead because he isn't shown or mentioned. But Susan herself is much more fiercely independent. She's not the naive little country girl she is in the book, although she does have some learning to do like how to keep her mouth shut (no wonder Ben lied to her about the book, five minutes after he lets her believe it's about the Marsten house she's 'just mentioned' it to the gossipy librarian.) And how NOT to run upstairs when trying to escape a madman who already knows you're in the house. Not many places to hide UPSTAIRS. Well, at least we know she'll never make that mistake again, LOL. But anyway, in this version she made it to New York, she just couldn't pay the rent and her mother doesn't have the say in her life that she did in the book. Her name and her hair is pretty much all she has in common with the book character.
Matt is almost completely different in this version, and not just because he's black and gay, but even the way he treats Ben. In the book, he invites Ben over to talk to his class and Ben accepts out of friendship with his old teacher. In this story, he gives such and honest and scathing review of Ben's books that Ben comes out of admiration. However, even though this character is almost nothing like the book, it's amazing how they kept him enough like it that it didn't totally change the story. Like in the book, Matt is the first to discover the truth about vampires when he invites Mike Ryerson over to his house to spend the night because, like in the book, he encounters Mike in the bar looking very terrible. And, also like in the book, he ends up having a heart-attack after encountering the newly-turned Mike and spends the rest of the time leading the fight against Barlow from his hospital bed. The only difference is WHY he invited Mike over. Heee heee heee.
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| In his defense, Mike IS kind of hot... |
At the bar, Mike tells him that after Danny's funeral, he felt like someone was watching him drown and then he woke up covered in dirt with no memory of what happened the night before. Then, the next two days he began to sleep all through-out the day not waking up until the nighttime and not able to eat anything. After taking him home, Matt notices a bruise on his chest when Mike takes his shirt off (after he notices Mike's rippling six pack of course.) And comments to Mike about it, who brushes it off. Later that night, Matt hears the window in the guest room come open and laughing that sounds like a demonic child. So he locks the door and calls Ben. When he and Ben examine the body, Matt tells Ben about the bruise on Mike's chest. They pull back the sheets, it's gone. But there is a spot of blood on the sheet and Mike is undeniably dead, so Ben tells Matt to call the police. This is all very close to the book, except in that Matt noticed the puncture wounds on Mike's neck the night before, and they were gone the next morning. That this is missing kind of hurts this scene because without it, Matt doesn't really have reason to expect vampires.
The next night, he's talking to Susan in the kitchen trying to convince her of his theory, when, all the sudden, there's a noise upstairs. It seems to be coming from the guest room. He tells Susan to keep talking, heads up the stairs and pushes open the door to the guest room and LO and BEHOLD:
Lover boy's come back for a visit! Needless to say, Matt freaks out and after he wards Mike off by revealing to him he's a monster and telling him to get out in the name of GOD! He has a heart attack and falls out. This scene wasn't anywhere near as creepy as the original, and Mike was a highly sympathetic vampire. But, it was still a really good scene. I always kind of laugh though, when Mike lifts up his hospital gown and Matt freaks out because of the surgical stitches covering the autopsy scar. I guess it's because Matt obviously has a thing for Mike in this version and what should have been a dream come true is now a terrible nightmare! I'm telling you, watch this and you'll see what I mean. This scene is kind of hilarious. Just to see Matt's reaction!
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| "Open the window, or I'll try another one.." |
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| "I'll kill you, Petrie! And your mother!" |
After he's finished with Mike, Danny goes to his old friend Mark's house, thinking his pal would be mensch, and help a brother out. Unfortunately for him, Mark is somewhat of a horror buff and knows a thing or two about vampires and has incredible will-power. He lets Danny in, which is brave, but incredibly stupid, and burns his face with one of the crosses on his plastic model set. This scene is just as scary as the one in the original, but in a way more so. Doesn't Danny just look eerily beautiful outside Mark's window? I'd be like, why let you in when you look so good out there? So, having warded off the evil month-old vampire from his window, Mark, like in the book decides he is man enough to take on the thousands-of-years old Barlow. Unlike the book, though, he doesn't take a good stake from his father's lathing table. Instead, he takes the fence post that Susan actually took in the book. So, the next day, as Matt lies in the hospital trying to convince Ben and Jimmy he's not crazy, Mark takes off to the scary old Marsten Place where he encounters someone he doesn't expect.
So anyway, now Matt's in the hospital. He calls Ben and Susan to his side to tell them his suspicion. They, of course, think the old teacher is going off the deep end. So then, he tells his suspicions to Dr. Jim Cody. And only on T.V. is this guy not immediately remanded to the psych ward. Miraculously, he gets Jimmy to agree to autopsy the Glick boy, Danny, of course, Ralphie comes back as a vampire in this version (unlike the book) but he is never 'found' according to the townsfolk. So Ben and Jimmy go to the Glick house and on the way, Jimmy tells Ben about the death of Floyd Tibbets, who had just attacked Ben.
Before they went to see Matt in the hospital, Ben was attacked by Floyd, Susan's jealous ex, who was dressed up in a bunch of clothes and a hat a gloves like a scarecrow. Now, in the book, Floyd puts Ben in the hospital, and Ben is two floors down from Matt. But, in this version, Ben gets the upper hand when he knocks off Floyd's glasses, exposing his eyes to the sun. They are both sent to the jail. And even though this never happened in the book, I was kind of glad they went this way because this scene kind of helped make up for the loss of creepiness in the Mike scene.
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| I squeezed ans slithered to reach you... |
It's a wonder Ben didn't have a heart attack! Jimmy tells Ben that, after he gets out, Floyd chewed through his wrists, apparently to drink his own blood.
When they get to the Glick house, they find it empty. Apparently, Margie Glick has died. Jimmy and Ben then go to the funeral home to watch her corpse. There, Jimmy tells Ben he is being blackmailed by Royce McDougall because he was caught sleeping with his wife, Sandy. This is like a combination of two story-lines from the book. Reggie Sawyer catches his wife, Bonnie, cheating on him with the phone company boy. And, the abused McDougall kid who Sandy was actually beating. In the book, Randy McDougall gets turned by Danny and turns his parents. So, they just combined these two sub-plots in this version, get rid of Reggie and Bonnie Sawyer, and save the kid. I guess they thought baby vampire would be too upsetting. Just when they are about to leave the funeral home, something happens to prove to them everything the crack-pot old teacher says:
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| Mrs. Glick does a little dance for Ben and Jimmy. |
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| Dr. Cody saves little Roy. |
Meanwhile, Mark trudges through the snowy woods to fight the vampire master, when who should he encounter but Susan Norton on her way to see if Barlow is really what Matt says he is. In the book, she thinks she'll just go up there and prove that they're wrong and put this vampire nonsense to rest. However, in this version she's going up there because when her mother told her about Floyd drinking his own blood, it kind of jivved with what the teacher said. So, she grabs the Cafe's gun and decides to see if it's true.
She make's a feeble attempt to talk Mark out of it. But then they go in, trip an alarm, and suddenly, there's Straker.
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| Add caption |
After taking the gun from Susan, Straker knocks Mark out and then begins to toy with Susan. After an embarrassing chase in which, like every other dumb blonde in cinema history, she apparently thinks it's better to run UPSTAIRS to get away from the bad guy instead of kicking through a window or something, she's captured and taken downstairs to be a wake-up snack for the master.
Mark wakes up upstairs tied to a chair and, after narrowly missing Ben and Jimmy who come looking for the missing Susan, he bites his way out of the rope. He attacks and easily overcomes Staker (disappointing) and proceeds to go to the basement door to rescue the pretty lass. But, alas, time is out, and we get to hear Susan's despairing cries as she become's the master's breakfast. Mark flees to go tell Ben what has happened.
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| A religious old relic... |
Matt had asked Susan to fetch some holy water for him. Unable to make the seemingly ridiculous request to the father's face, Susan asks him to go meet Matt right before she makes her ill-fated quest to the Marsten house. He does, and Father Callahan is introduced to Matt's theory and agrees to help him if the group provides solid evidence of vampires. After Mark tells Ben what happened to Susan, Ben calls Jimmy and Father Callahan agrees to accompany them to the Marsten house to kill Barlow and rescue Susan.
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| As far as vampire hunters go, they've got nothing on the Frog Brothers. |
So, our heroes go up to the Marsten house, where they find and stake Mike Ryerson-the good father believes now!-and the Glick boys. Then, they venture over to the coffin in the other side of the basement, push back the lid, and who should they find in it?
Now, in the book, Ben stakes her after some coaxing from the others. But, in this version, Ben suddenly decides-"Wait, maybe if we kill Barlow, they'll all come back to life." (Ok, so we didn't care about that when we pounded the stake through two preteen boys...) And they decide oh, it's been a long day, we'll come back for her.
So it's back to the hospital for Ben and Jimmy. Meanwhile, Mark and Father Callahan return to Mark's house in an attempt to persuade his mother. In the book, Matt points out that it would have been better for them to have called Mark's parents from the hospital and got them to come over there. And when Ben picks up the phone to call Mark's house, he gets a dead line, and Matt has to talk sense into him and Jimmy to keep them from 'rushing pell-mell' into the night. They should have done this in the show, too, because, of course, what should happen while Mark and Callahan are in the middle of arguing with his mother?
Barlow decides to avenge his partner (business partner, partner-partner, or both?) and kills Mark's mom. Just as he is about to kill Mark, too, Father Callahan holds up his cross and gets him to let Mark go, on the condition Callahan throws down his cross and meets the vampire one-on-one. Mark flees, and Callahan tries to fight Barlow without his cross. He fails, miserably, and ends up being forced to drink Barlow's blood, becoming his human servant.
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| A new partner in crime. |
Mark gets back to the hospital and informs the group about Barlow's attack. The next day, Ben, Jimmy and Mark set out to destroy Barlow. They try to get the help of Sheriff Parkins, but Parkins is chicken-shit and tells them 'Fuck-you I'm going to Florida' or words to that affect. After interrogating Larry Crockett, they realize that Barlow is at the boarding house Ben has been living in.
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| "I swear I didn't know!" |
Meanwhile, back at the hospital, a newly infected Callahan comes in a proceeds to stake Matt to death with a tire iron, calling him 'boy' in the process. This is unlike the book because, as I mentioned he dies of a heart attack in the story and Callahan flees to New York in despair and shame. Callahan's murder of Matt is what initiates the beginning scene of Ben chasing and pushing him out the window.
And, of course, it's why Mark kills him in the end.
Finally, they three stooges track down Barlow to the Boarding house after realizing the chalk on Mark's neck left over from when Barlow grabbed him was drywall. Jimmy proceeds to get killed in a most gruesome way (I'll leave at least that for a surprise) and the Mark and Ben climb down to the basement where at last they encounter the giant leech. Barlow hypnotizes Mark and Ben is forced to knock him out. But, at last, Ben kills the master vampire!
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| "I don't need any help, I only need you to be happy." |
I liked this part a lot, because it allowed Susan to be more of a character in her own right, and not JUST a motive for Ben to fight Barlow. She comes back, to Ben's sorrow, as a vampire and tells him that she had found out that Ronnie Barnes was dead that whole time, Ben could never have saved him, because he had been killed instantly. That what he heard was not a ghost at all but "something else." She tells him he can stop being sorry, now, and that she loves him and wants him to come with her. Ben says he's sorry, but he can't and that he wishes she had never done what she did. Then, Mark comes running up behind her, and Ben is forced to stake the woman he loves to prevent her from killing him. She holds on to Ben's hand as long as she can and then bursts into a cloud of sparkling dust. So sad.
Ben and Mark set fire to the Marsten house and the town and flee, later following Callahan to Chicago where Mark kills him and a dying Ben tells the tale of Salem's Lot to an intern at the hospital instead of a priest like in the book. The intern doesn't believe Ben, but when he finds Callahan dead, he knows it's 'the boy' that did it. Though he doesn't believe, he helps Mark escape, and then comes the end, which is narrated by Ben as the doctors try frantically to revive his body. This is one of the best endings to a series ever.
If I haven't totally ruined it for you, check out Salem's Lot on Amazon today! Would make a great stocking-stuffer for the vampire-lover in your family!
Also, check out some other movies based on the works of Stehpen King
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