While many Stephen King adaptations struggle to work around the author’s winding storytelling style, 2023’s delayed Salem’s Lot reboot may have found an answer to this problem. Stephen King is nothing if not prolific. The author has written dozens of novels over his career, and many of these books run over 400 pages in length. This, however, can sometimes pose a problem for filmmakers hoping to bring King’s work to life on screen, as these lengthy texts are tough to trim and the result is way too substantial to be contained in a single feature-length movie.
One of many disappointing problems with 2019’s IT: Chapter Two was the movie’s failure to capture the complex characters of King’s source novel. This problem came up because there was simply too much story for one movie to adapt, as IT: Chapter Two attempted to compress over 500 pages of the source novel into less than three hours of screen time. The upcoming Salem’s Lot reboot could easily have fallen victim to this issue too but, fortunately, a Fangoria interview with the movie's star, Lewis Pullman, seems to imply that the project has avoided the problem that sank so many Stephen King adaptations.
What Lewis Pullman Said About Salem’s Lot
To avoid IT: Chapter 2’s biggest problem, the director of 2023's Salem’s Lot reboot reportedly decided to cut elements of the book that didn’t work and amalgamate the necessary elements to make the most of the movie’s limited runtime. According to Pullman, “Gary Dauberman, the director, is really keen on doing justice to the book. But also, the previous adaptation was a two-parter, because it’s such a hefty book and there are so many different moving parts and so many characters.” The actor admitted that this meant there “are some parts where Gary had to press and find what was really at the heart of the movie to keep in.”
This approach could ring alarm bells for King completists, and it is always unfortunate to see an adaptation cut content that viewers might have hoped to see realized on the big screen. However, much like IT: Chapter Two changed the novel’s Pennywise to make the villain more effective in the sequel, any feature film adaptation of Salem’s Lot was always going to need some judicious cutting. The novel is one of King’s first attempts to capture an entire town’s overlapping internal monologues on the page and, while this experiment is largely successful, conventional movies don’t have a long enough runtime to keep jumping from one character to another.
Salem’s Lot Faces A Classic Stephen King Issue
Salem’s Lot is a long book. Not long like the 823-page The Stand (last seen as a disastrous 2020 miniseries) or the 1,138-page IT (which became one great movie in 2017 and one terrible sequel in 2019), but Salem’s Lot is still a sizable 439 pages. That’s a lot when compared to Carrie’s lean 200 pages or even Pet Sematary’s 374 pages. In an era when even straightforward slashers like Terrifier 2 (which King praised for its unabashed gross-out simplicity) run over two hours long, it would be very easy for a new version of Salem’s Lot to stretch to almost three hours or more.
The primary problem with Salem’s Lot is that the novel's plot is a rambling story that roams around the titular town hopping from character to character, which can easily sap an adaptation of any urgency or narrative drive. Unlike The Shining (which is a similar length, but takes place almost entirely in Jack Torrance’s mind), the story of Salem’s Lot can’t easily be trimmed down into one character’s plot. It is a sprawling, ambitious work that borrows its polyphonic plotting from the likes of Middlemarch, and it is nigh-on impossible to compress all of these stories into one tense movie.
How Salem’s Lot 1978 Handled King’s Storytelling
While IT fell afoul of several Stephen King problems while adapting the author’s infamously ambitious door stopper, 1978’s Salem’s Lot adaptation managed to earn critical acclaim despite how difficult it is to bring King’s head-hopping novel to life onscreen. However, that is because the Tobe Hooper-directed version of Salem’s Lot was a two-part miniseries, so the show could slowly ramp up the tension and could get away with a storyline that intentionally included red herrings and diversions. This approach would be ponderous in a theatrical movie, as the lengthy, critically disliked IT: Chapter 2 and commercially unsuccessful Doctor Sleep proved.
Viewers will afford a miniseries a lot of leeway when it comes to subplots that prove pointless and stories that take their time getting to the action. However, feature films need to be tighter in terms of narrative since they are designed to be watched in a single sitting. Many viewers might plan to watch Stranger Things season 5 in one long binge when the show arrives on Netflix, but the creators still have the freedom to treat the show as a string of standalone stories that cohere as a longer narrative. Creators who make feature films of King’s work don’t have this luxury, resulting in overstuffed, inconsistent adaptations.
Salem’s Lot 2023 Can Fix This King Adaptation Problem
2023's reboot of Salem’s Lot needs to cut a lot of unnecessary subplots while keeping the main story of the novel and focusing on Ben’s investigation into Kurt Barlow. By keeping Ben Mears front and center, Salem’s Lot can trim the meandering plot of King’s original novel and condense the action into a more fast-paced, focused story. As 2020’s flawed The Stand miniseries proved, giving filmmakers free rein to create a sprawling, ambitious version of King’s fictional world is not always a guaranteed path to success. In some cases, movies can edit King’s work to provide a more focused version of the same story.
Kubrick’s infamously divisive take on The Shining took this approach, cutting a lot of subplots and incidental scenes from the source novel in an attempt to capture the essential atmosphere and themes of the story. The approach resulted in a movie adaptation that is indebted to King’s novel but also functions as a story in its own right, and Salem’s Lot should attempt to do the same with King’s small-town vampire novel. For Salem’s Lot to live up to the expectations of Stephen King readers, the movie may ironically need to kill some of the author’s darlings by cutting down the novel’s plot.