It’s an ingenious, shapeshifting entity, the vampire movie; a genre that lends itself to layers of symbolism and subtext. From The Twilight Saga’s syrupy themes of adolescent romantic yearning to the bruising loneliness of a bullied child in Let the Right One In and the revisionist political history and absurdity of El Conde – featuring an undead incarnation of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – the vampire film is rarely just about vampires.
Which is why Gary Dauberman’s film adaptation of Salem’s Lot, based on the 1975 Stephen King novel that spawned two TV miniseries and pop cultural references galore, feels almost radical in its total lack of ambition, scope and depth. It’s an old-school tale of an epidemic of the undead in a small town in rural Maine. And that’s it. No underlying meaning, no knotty themes to unpick. For audiences who have come to expect a little more intellectual bite from their vampire flicks, this is pallid, bloodless stuff.
