Salem's Lot (2024)

Arbitrary said:

Right. They're not scary. They're dreamy.

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Presented as Nosferatu like in the original silent film, John Carpenter's Vampires, 30 Days of Night, etc. they can be monstrous but most of the vampires we've ever gotten have been presented as cool, mysterious, seductive and so on. King purposefully wrote Barlow to be a Nosferatu type but you're automatically starting at a horror deficit with a lot of the audience.

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You brought up a good point. I think the last time I saw vampires that were scary in a film was 30 Days of Night. They were definitely more beastial. That's a pretty damn good movie now that I remember it.

Most of the time though they're not scary.

I took a anthropology about folklore and the supernatural back in college. Had to write a term paper at the end. I did the evolution of the modern vampire myth. Basically it's they were crazy undead creatures, ghoulish, etc, but then once stoker wrote his novel, it all started to shift. That's when you started to see it and literature and film where they were romanticized.

Fuck, wonder if I still have that on a whole hard drive or floppy disk.

Got an A on it, and for the class. Bunch of cute chicks in there too. Was a fun class.

I remember we had to take a pop quiz one day, and that professor said everybody draw a haunted house. We all kind of looked around at each other like what the hell, but we did it.

Whole point of the exercise was to show basically everybody drew something extremely similar. Typically Victorian, two story, probably symmetrical, and there might have been some other stuff in the surrounding lawn like a scraggly tree or even tombstones, and I think everybody had full moon and clouds. I thought it was kind of fascinating just how much lowering urban legends and stuff really shape your imagination of when it comes to those things.

Vuuxo said:

I fucking hated it. They literally catered to the dumbest motherfuckers on Earth and explained the movie in the fucking movie like you would a retarded child. Hollywood thinks their audience are stupid and it's a repeated theme in almost every movie released now.
It's just as boring and unoriginal as the other extremely common trope of the "the movie is aware it's a movie" bullshit they do now in every god damn movie.

Anyway, yeah, this movie was fucking horrible.

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What's funny is I stopped watching this new version, and when and found the Sci-Fi version, and despite that old miniseries being from the early 00s, there's a night and day difference. I went back and finished watching the stupid one on HBO, and they race and gender swapped a lot of characters, and I'm just completely eliminated some, made up of others.

It's really bad. I really feels like they were trying to do a Salem's Lot TV show, but then somewhere along the way everybody realized it was a piece of shit, so somewhere along the way in the editing room or maybe doing some reshoots, they salvaged it by turning into a movie.

I just realized that the Danny glick kid is homelanders son, and if this just came out this meant that this was made a while ago because he still talks like a little girl. He's of the same age as maybe the first season of The Boys.

I think this got shelved for a while because it's such a stinker, but I guess rolling into October it's what do we got to throw out there.

Only watch if you want to punish yourself, but I suggest avoid at all cost, just go read the book, or watch the old 70s mini series, or even the one with Rob Lowe.

Better off just go watch midnight Mass, or read the book

ShakyJake said:

Not sure if it was mentioned, but I rather enjoyed the Salem's Lot miniseries from what? Mid-2000s? Stared Rob Lowe.

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Yeah that's the one that I did every watching. I'm comparing it to this new turd, and like I said it's night and day. I just remember watching it on Syfy but it could have been syndicated over there or something.

It's way more accurate to the book, even though there are some changes. This abomination nothing like either of the two mini series or the novel.

I stand in defense that this was a crappy pilot and they were hoping to do a mini-series about them clearing out the town or the vampires spreading, but it was just so bad they turned it into a feature film.

Even the made-up return to Salem's Lot Goofy movie was better, and that's some Bee movie schlock just trying to capitalize on the success of the original mini series.

Arbitrary said:

Started it, 45 minutes in, it's bad. It's real bad. The opening credits are used as a means to fast forward through a couple hundred pages of story, every spooky scene is lit like a cheap haunted house and there's too many characters given the run time. The book works and the two different miniseries work because you get to hang out in the town and get to know it's inhabitants while tension builds around a spooky thing operating in the shadows.

Five minutes in we've got

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with some shitty stock characters and it looks like absolute garbo. Straker sucks, what's her bitch's mom sucks, the real estate agent sucks, bleh. Kid walks out at night and again we get the bright as fuck lighting for a foggy evening.

edit - oh, wait. I get it. It's a farce.

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Yeah the opening segment made me think it was a TV pilot. It's shot on that exact same way with the graphic effects that you typically see with shows nowadays.


Well I guess that makes a lot of sense if it was going to be some short-sited show. It's horrible, but I know a couple of them people on years said they thought it was good but I don't understand how.

I'm telling you it was a TV show pilot that failed miserably. That's the only explanation unless people are even shittier and making something much more retarded.

Arbitrary said:

If this was originally going to be one thing and then was turned in to a movie that would make more sense than this was intentional from start to finish. You get one episode in, it's trash so you just do a couple action sequences over the course of the second hour and call it a movie. The whole second half is a legitimate horror comedy.

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Burn all Hollywood to the ground, just like Ben Meers and Mark Petrie did...

Arbitrary said:

This, the unnecessary Pet Sematary prequel, the Pet Sematary reboot and IT Chapter 2 were all pretty fucking bad. I didn't watch the Children of the Corn reboot but I don't think I heard anything good about it. No one liked The Dark Tower.

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I never watched the abomination that is the Dark Tower thing for their race swapped Roland who had bombardier blue eyes, and looked like Clint Eastwood according to all of the books.

That Nordic fucker forgot the face of his father for a big paycheck I'm sure. That's what they had to hire a foreigner.

I think the only filmmaker doing Kings work well is Mike Flannigan, but I even get worried he'll be corrupted over time. Guess we'll see.

Caliane said:

Flannigan has already lost me sadly.

Midnight club was awful.
his hatred of Christianity has tainted his stuff for the last few productions, and has only gotten worse. Standard Leftist nonsense. where Christianity is the real evil. Gays, muslims, jews are all loving and caring, and perfectly welcoming. its just Christians that are uniquely hateful, bigoted, cruel, greedy, pedos.

bly manor was ok. bits and pieces of midnight mass was ok. messaging in that was awful though.

Doctor sleep was his best. Absentia 2nd. hill house 3rd.

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Oculus was great, but I haven't watched any of his recent stuff,other than Midnight Mass, Doctor Sleep, and Hill House.

I didn't realize he was that anti Christian, but I guess I'm going back and looking at things like midnight mass, you can see it. I've not ever seen any interviews or read anything about the guy personally, so never made any assumptions. Maybe just figured that was Hollywood studio type crap because of the way things are now with wokeness.

reavor said:

Rewatched the two miniseries just to compare, Id say the best one is the first one, it just has better pacing, and doesnt try to be too fancy using weird filmatography that just looks outdated

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Did you watch the original '70s and the one from the early 00s? I just rewatched both of them over the past week and I like them both in their own way. The Sci-Fi one was pretty good at a lot closer to the book, but the original one has its charm.

The new movie was a piece of shit.