“Could have turned out a lot worse”: the 1979 adaptation Stephen King was never truly satisfied with
Stephen King has never held back in criticising versions of his work.
There’s never been another author like him in terms of his relationship with adaptations of his writing. King was already famous by the time Brian De Palma created a modern horror masterpiece with Carrie, but the film became so successful that it invited Hollywood to keep using his writing as a source of inspiration. Since he has continued to write at a constant rate for the past 50 years, there’s nearly an unlimited amount of material to draw from for those who grew up reading his work.
King has been surprisingly honest when assessing how successful he feels certain adaptations are. He was incredibly praiseworthy towards the late Rob Reiner, who had made two of the greatest adaptations of his work with the coming-of-age drama Stand by Me and the psychological horror film Misery.
However, King was notoriously infuriated by what Kubrick did with his 1980 adaptation of The Shining, as he felt that it completely misinterpreted the themes of the book. While King had wanted Jack Torrance to be a tragic character dealing with his dark side, Kubrick turned him into a psychopathic source of evil.
Today, the writer’s adaptations are all treated as real events, but the older ones weren’t all turned into big-budget films like last year’s The Running Man and The Monkey, with Salem’s Lot remaining one of his most beloved novels, whose 1979 television adaptation mildly disappointed him.
“Considering the limitations of TV, Salem’s Lot could have turned out a lot worse than it did,” King said, “The two-part TV special was directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame, and outside of a few boners, such as making my vampire Barlow look exactly like the cadaverously inhuman night stalker in the famous German silent film Nosferatu, he did a pretty good job. I breathed a hearty sigh of relief, however, when some plans to turn it into a network series fell apart, because today’s television is just too institutionally fainthearted and unimaginative to handle real horror.”
King obviously knows his stuff when it comes to the geniuses of horror, and Hooper is one of the best to ever do it, because in addition to the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which King already cited, Hooper was responsible for other horror masterpieces like Poltergeist and Invaders From Mars. The issue with Salem’s Lot had to do with the constraints of television; unlike today, where television and film are basically considered to be equal mediums, a made-for-television adaptation wasn’t considered to be a work of prestige.
Although there have been several King works that have been adapted multiple times, Salem’s Lot is one that has never quite been nailed. The most recent version of the story was a 2024 film that starred Lewis Pullman and was made by Warner Bros, and although it had initially been planned to be released theatrically, the release strategy was altered so that it debuted directly on the HBO Max streaming service, which at the time was only referred to as Max.
Salem’s Lot was considered to be a foundational work of vampire fiction, but its greatest legacy might be what it ended up inspiring. Even if there might not ever be a truly great adaptation, there have been other great vampire films that have been inspired by it, such as Sinners, Fright Night, 30 Days of Night, and From Dusk Till Dawn.
