By The long-delayed new “Salem’s Lot” film has finally arrived, premiering exclusively on Max on Friday to mixed/poor reviews – just 48% (5.5/10) on Rotten Tomatoes.
Whereas the two previous screen adaptations in 1979 and 2004 were mini-series clocking in at three hours each (181 mins & 183 mins), the new film comes in at just under two hours (115 minutes).
That brevity seems to be the most common complaint about the film, with criticism indicating certain scenes have been brutally cut to the bone and a lot of missing character development overall in order to get to the film’s action beats.
It turns out an early cut of the film was considerably longer – putting the film on par with those mini-series. In a new interview with Den of Geek, writer-director Gary Dauberman confirms his first cut of the film came in about three hours and matched his script which was “180-odd pages”. He explains:
“There’s so much great stuff. It’s like, what do you have to weed out? An audience’s attention span only goes so long. There are a lot of great side stories and B-stories in this book that I love, and it was hard to let those go in order to give more real estate to our core group of heroes.
That was probably the biggest challenge – editing the story, and then figuring out those repercussions and those ripple effects into the main storyline. My first cut was about three hours. There’s a lot left out.
My first draft of the script is 180-odd pages or something because you’re trying to include everything. And a lot of it has to do with a lot of the secondary characters and stuff that I spoke about. So it was sad to see that stuff go, but it’s like a necessary evil.”
One big thing he cut, which was shot, was young Ben sneaking into the Marsten House and seeing the ghost of Hubert Marsten. Dauberman says that “seemed to muddy the waters for audiences; the ghost story within the vampire story”. He goes on:
“To me it’s so important because it’s why Ben believes the vampire stuff, but we’re not telling that story, so that was the hardest thing to cut because I love the sequence.”
The film notably excludes some of the most disturbing scenes from the novel and mostly forgoes fleshing out the town’s collection of, often quite nasty, characters who aren’t nice people long before they are turned into vampires.
He also says he was initially going to portray Barlow more like he was in King’s book and the 2004 mini-series, but it “ate up a lot of real estate” and instead he went for the 1979 mini-series approach of a Nosferatu-esque creature.
There’s currently no indication yet as to whether a director’s cut could surface in the future.
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