I haven't read that much Stephen King, and I haven't read him in a while, but I absolutely loved 'Salem's Lot when I read it in 2003 or 2004. I read it at the right time to be primed for the updated NBC miniseries that came out in 2004, starring Robe Lowe as Ben Mears and Donald Sutherland as Straker, but it's also been so long since I watched it that I don't remember anything except the iconic scene where Barlow kills Mark Petrie's parents - instead of clonking their heads together, he spins their bodies around, breaking their necks.
These are the things that stick with you, 20 years after the fact.
I also knew that there was a 1979 version, but I can't recall how much of it I saw - if any. In any case, just before I left for Europe I saw that Max was getting ready to release a new version, so I put it down on my "to-watch" list, and dutifully caught it when I got home. My short review is, just watch the 1979 version instead.
This is exactly what I did, and the differences are pretty stark, even though the new movie is pretty indebted to the 1979 version, moreso, in some ways, than it is to the book.
The 2024 version suffers from two big problems. First, it is a single, two-hour movie, instead of a three-hour TV miniseries (as the previous two versions were). The pleasures of the novel come from the slow unfolding of the horror of what's going on, after we've become acquainted with the characters who live in the town and their relationships to one another. This new movie has pretty much none of that, so that the characters feel like they're on rails - they're just doing their thing as dictated by the plot, without it feeling like any of their actions are organic.
The other big problem for me is that the new movie is set in the 1970s, as the book and the first miniseries were. I love a well-done period piece, but this version suffers from the same issue that a lot of 70s-set movies made in modern times do, which is throwing in 70s signifiers to really hammer home what decade we're in. In the 1979 version, Ben Mears drives a jeep, but in the 2024 version he drives a sort of Impala that is intended to scream 1970s. The 2004 doesn't have this problem, because it sets the story in the present.
There's another issue with Ben Mears, which is his age. David Soul was 36 when he played the character in the 1979 version, while Lewis Pullman is 31 in this year's version. Five years doesn't seem like much, but it does give you a change in perspective, as you start to see middle age on the horizon - and it's particularly important here, because of Ben's backstory as (supposedly) a grieving widower. I say "supposedly", because the 2024 version doesn't give Ben any of that backstory - he's just some guy who lived in the Lot as a kid and came back. This version also takes away his interest in the Marsten House, which is the thing that brings him back to the Lot in the other versions.
I don't particularly begrudge other changes the new version makes. It may have been more true to life that the only Black character in the 1979 version was one of the gravediggers - and he has, at best, one line in a single scene. But the actor that was cast as Mark Petrie is pretty good, and I'm never going to complain about Alfre Woodard in a role (here she replaces Jimmy Cody, Ben's first ill-fated sidekick in the book).
But overall, the better technology for photography and special effects ends up detracting from the story. In the 2024 version, characters get grabbed in jump scares, but in the 1979 version, they didn't have the budget for stuff like that, so they just stand there while the vampires bite them - which is true to the book's depiction of vampiric hypnosis.
The climactic battle in the 2024 version takes place at a drive-in theater, where the vampirized townsfolk are hiding in the trunks of cars. This sequence has some good visuals, but it also relies on a vampire trope that I hate, which is of them being able to survive in shadow (in this case, the shadow of the movie screen). It's emblematic of the movie as a whole: it has some good, evocative visuals, but it lacks substance. The 1979 version is pretty cheesy, but it does the atmosphere and the characters' motivations better, and because it's set in its own concurrent era, it's not so desperate to show you how 1970s it is.
This thought was brought home to me when I watched X, the throwback slasher flick directed by Ti West and starring Mia Goth. X is set in 1979, but it seems a lot less desperate to show that it's set then - the year is more to link it to old-school slasher flicks from that same era, and to comment on the way porn capitalized on new technologies even back then (there's a scene where one of the characters talks about the possibilities that home video holds out for porn). The result is a lot less self-conscious, and a lot more deft in introducing the characters and describing their relationships.
It's kind of an unfair comparison, because 'Salem's Lot has different themes on its mind than X, but as I say, the new version of 'Salem's Lot doesn't do as good a job of exploring those themes. All that leaves you with is a good-looking but ultimately empty movie - on the other hand, Lot director Gary Dauberman originally filmed a three-hour version, and I'd like to have seen that.
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