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Dir. Tobe Hooper
USA
[Selected by the Gentlemen’s Guide To Midnight Cinema forum. Check out
the main website here - http://ggtmc.com/]
I was somewhat hesitant to view Salem’s Lot because it was a TV film.
While television can be a great sequential art, the stereotype of typical
television, especially the ‘TV movie’, can be such an uninteresting creation
with its limited palette copied over countless creations and grinded out. Salem’s Lot in comparison to Tobe Hooper’s theatrical films is clearly a television work, but far from
grinded out material it proved to be something a lot more hopeful immediately
as it started. Adapted from a Stephen
King novel, it follows a writer (David
Soul) who goes to his hometown of Salem’s Lot for his vocation. Something is
amiss with the Lot as disappearances and deaths by unknown circumstances become
more apparent, while a man named Richard K. Straker (James Mason) now occupies the main house of the town, the Marsten
House, which has a bloody history and for the writer is a construct of pure
evil. Paradoxically a single three hour film and two feature length parts that
create one single work, Salem’s Lot
has to operate within the structure of television, such as the many
fades-to-black that would be where the ad breaks would be, but unlike something
like The Stand (1994) adaptation,
which after its brilliant opening credits is all the worst aspects of a ‘TV
movie’ for five hours, Salem’s Lot
feels more carefully made and with a richly simplistic story. Length is not necessarily
a good thing, but three hours allows the characters to be fleshed out and the sense
of overwhelming tension grows as the threat to the town starts to take over. In
terms of actors the general level of the cast is excellent and helps the
material perfectly, not taking into account the prescience of James Mason and his distinctly gentle
yet sinister vocal intonations. There’s even a small role from Elisha Cook Jr.,
who is synonymous with pulpy black-and-white cinema for me.
Despite its structure, and being part
of Stephen King’s created world, the work
still exhibits a great deal that is distinct to Tobe Hooper as well. Not only is he a criminally underrated film
director, usually dismissed for only contributing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to genre cinema, but the most intrinsic
aspect of his films is a heightened intensity that is entirely his. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is
legendary for this virtue but it continues on in other films in Hooper’s filmography, from the
artificial sets and bleeding colours of Eaten
Alive (1977) to the terrorisation of a peaceful family within Poltergeist (1982). When it builds up, Salem’s Lot shows the same intensity,
not straying too far from the conventions of its main concept, but playing it
up for maximum creepy effect and throwing some effective jump scenes at me
without reducing itself to just repeating them. The length, put together so
every scene provides something to the story and mood, allows it to grow in its
horror content far more greatly than most ninety minute films, while also
having a fantastical edge that is refreshing when this sort of television work,
especially now, can be creatively rudimentary. It doesn’t feel like a typical ‘TV
movie’ either, made with elegance in terms of look and slowed pace, richness to
the look of the film even before the supernatural aspects intervene into the
narrative. I was absolutely happy when Salem’s
Lot was not only good but exceeded my expectations further. The hesitance
with television work for me feels justified as, with the exception of televised
animation from Japan, the medium is usually an excuse for copying the same
lifeless creation and look ad nauseum. A work like Salem’s Lot, even if it had to still concern itself with its origins
despite the advertisements that cut between it no longer existing, proves
otherwise to this. Stephen King only
really succeeds if the director or a key creative voice in the adaptation
brings their distinct mindset to the material too. Someone like Mick Garris, who directed that
adaptation of The Stand and a few others
is the wrong sort of person even if he is more faithful to the source books; Brian De Palma and Stanley Kubrick are the people needed and Tobe Hooper succeeds with his adaptation too.
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