When the new Salem's Lot movie debuts on Max this Thursday, October 3, it will mark the end of a long road for the Stephen King adaptation, which was originally intended for theaters and has gone through a couple of release dates. Actor Spencer Treat Clark, for one, believes the film is landing at the right time.
“It's taken a second, but I'm glad that Max has held onto it as long as they have, because I really feel like it is a fall movie,” says Clark, who plays ill-fated cemetery worker Mike Ryerson. “It needs to be around Halloween. I'm glad they didn't just drop it in March or something. This feels like the right time, and I'm excited for everybody to see it. We're really glad that it has Stephen King's blessing. He said very nice things about the film, and that means a lot to all of us.”
As all Constant Readers know, this is the third time King's 1975 novel about vampiric infestation of the Maine town of Jerusalem's Lot has been brought to the screen, following Tobe Hooper's two-part TV movie in 1979 and another in 2004. Written and directed by Gary Dauberman, whose credits include scripting the hugely successful features based on King's It, the new Salem's Lot takes a few liberties with the source, including a gender switch on the book's Dr. Jimmy Cody. The physician who helps combat the bloodsucker plague is now played by Alfre Woodard, who was previously involved with televampires in True Blood, and didn't look to King's prose for inspiration after she was cast.
“As an actor, I might revisit the book, the source material, after I'm done with a project, but I never do it before if I don't already know it,” she says. “And if I know it, I don't bring it fresh to mind. I wouldn't go back and pick up a book I read 20 years ago if I'm going to do something [based on it] because in the world that the filmmaker is building, the only information that I as an actor should be concerned with is what I'm given in that script, or what my director says to me about it so that I am staying true within that world. [In this case] the 1975 cinematic world we were creating.”
On the other hand, Lewis Pullman and Makenzie Leigh, who star as Ben Mears and Susan Norton, had no such concerns. Both are King fans (when that subject is brought up, Leigh laughs, “That question's like, are you even American!”), and Pullman says, “I hadn't read the book since high school, so it was one of those perfect-timing things where I was like, ‘It's been just enough time that I've forgotten a lot of this, and it feels new to me.' It was extra-exciting to reread it with a new mindset, knowing I was going to be Part of this world, so what did I have to offer?”
“Obviously, I had to brush up on Salem's Lot before we started,” adds Clark, who notes that condensing the novel's sprawling ensemble to fit a two-hour movie put a little more responsibility on him. “In the book, you meet, like, 200 townspeople who all become vampires, [but in the film I'm] one of the characters who gets to show that story. You get to see Mike Ryerson's transformation, so it was more pressure to show especially the in-between parts of when he goes from human to vampire. That's sort of the point of my character in the movie, to show that transition period between the two.”
The challenge, he continues, was “the in-between—when he first gets attacked but isn't really a vampire yet, hasn't died and come back, when he has the forces pulling from his old identity and this new identity. But when I got into the true vampire stuff, when I become more of a monster, that's where I got to have fun and play and throw things at the wall. It took a lot of trust for us [playing vampires], because you can't necessarily practice this stuff. Something that might feel really good, you might be really into it, on-screen, might look a little silly once you have fangs and the makeup and the contacts. There was a lot of crafting and talking about it. Gary was a great leader for all of us, because everyone who had to be a vampire in the movie would be like, ‘OK, what are you doing? What are you figuring out?' And Gary made us all feel very secure once we got on set.”
Adds Pullman, “Part of what made it such a real-feeling experience was that we had such a great effects and makeup team [Justin Raleigh and Ozzy Alvarez's Fractured FX, Inc.]. It was a pretty short bridge to cross from ‘I'm not scared' to ‘I'm scared,' especially when you have someone like Alex Ward, who plays Barlow, inhabiting the role so fully. He's been training his whole life for this; he's a chameleon.”
“For me, the kid vampires were terrifying,” Leigh says. “Any child whose voice has not yet dropped, and then you've got the contacts going and the practical makeup on—it all felt a little too real. The children were having fun and laughing on set, because they were just being kids and playing, but it was kind of terrifying to watch.”
Clark agrees, citing one little actor in particular: “One of the people who absolutely crushes it as a vampire is Nicholas Crovetti [the Goodnight Mommy remake], playing the little Glick boy who first attacks Mike. I think he does the best job of all of us at being a vampire. Something about a little child vampire is so creepy and wonderful, so it was one of my favorite parts of the movie, his performance.”
Pullman also sings the praises of another young co-star, Jordan Preston Carter. He portrays Mark Petrie, who joins the small group defending Salem's Lot after his friends, the Glick brothers, are among the first to be attacked and turned. “He had some high-octane stuff to do at such a young age,” Pullman says, “and he was an absolute, consummate professional—more so than me. I was trying to crack jokes, and he was like, ‘No, dude, we are working!' He was serious about it, which was very helpful to me. He's such an imaginative guy. We would play these games between takes, where I would be like, ‘All right, Jordan, you have five seconds to pick out one thing from this room that you're gonna want for a vampire attack. What do you want?' And he'd be like, ‘I would get the whole chair, and disassemble it and sharpen it for stakes.' He constantly had his head in the game.”
Among the appeals of Salem's Lot for its cast was the location shooting in Worcester County, Massachusetts—a good deal of it at night—and the '70s setting, staying true to King's book. “That's one of the best parts of this job,” Pullman says, “getting to do something that's about as close to time travel as we can get. If you're willing and able to lean into it, it's really bizarrely transporting. It's so much fun.”
“Yeah, I'd like to live in the '70s,” seconds Leigh, “and wear every outfit I wore in the film.”
“Well, I would lose the sideburns if I could go back,“ Pullman quips.
Clark seems to disagree on that last note: “I'm so glad that they kept the '70s aesthetic and timeframe; I have big long sideburns [as Mike], which I didn't even know that I could grow, and it all makes a difference. We filmed in the fall, and there were locations we used in early September when everything was green, and by the end of the movie, sort of paralleling the decay of the town, the leaves were falling, and the trees were bare. That makes a difference for you as an actor and also as an audience member. The area itself has this kind of spookiness; it's in New England near Salem, it's old and colonial and there's history to it.“
“When you're on the set,“ Woodard recalls, “and actors you've never met are dressed as vampires, standing on the rooftops, and then they start coming, in these naturally dark and foggy places in New England—you don't have to act that. We were in all these creepy spaces, and in the daytime, they might have been rundown, they might have been full of tchotchkes. But when we got past the golden hour into the blue hour, and it was twilight and dusk, all of that changed. That's why with clubs, if you see them in the daytime, it's like, ‘This is a dump!‘ But when you come in at night, and the lights are on, it's like, ‘We're somewhere fabulous, and we'll pay whatever they're charging for us to dance here!‘ Well, that's how it is with a horror set. When those lights go off, and especially if it's the natural light, it feeds you in a way. I might say to a friend, ‘Come to the bathroom with me,‘ because it's all fun and games until you walk away from your crew, and then your head is swiveling around because you feel like you don't know what you've conjured up. Like, is a vampire following me to the bathroom? Of course, I don't believe that, but that's what your imagination does.”
For all the scariness they encountered and enacted on the shoot, all four actors have happy memories of their time in Salem's Lot. “I love horror, I was having the time of my life. Hopefully, it didn't make the film less scary!“ laughs Leigh, who has written a fright feature called The Offer that's being produced by Killer Films. “The experience of reading a script and then watching the film can be so intense and dark, but the experience of making it is super-joyful and fun.”
“It's such a gift, from an actor's standpoint, to do such physical work, especially in a world that requires a lot of imaginative straining,“ Pullman says. “When you get your heart rate up to that space, there's a part of your brain that really believes it's happening, so strangely, less acting is occurring. It's a lot of fun to be able to do that.”
“I got to do some cool stunts, like being sucked out the door,“ Clark recalls. “I was on a big swing, a very cool rig where they had to pull me out and up so I was not seen by the camera. I actually got swung about 40 feet out through the soundstage. They make you practice all that and feel super-safe, but that's the fun part. Those are the parts where you have to pinch yourself and say, ‘I'm so lucky to be able to do this.'”
And Woodard believes that Salem's Lot, beyond its entertainment value, will give viewers some ideas to, ahem, sink their teeth into. “After a horror film, you should have screamed, you should have laughed, and if it's a pertinent story the way Salem's Lot has always been and you've found somebody to bring that forward, you should be having conversations about the fact that yes, it's going to be All Hallow's Eve, but there's also going to be an election in America. It's scary season, and this story has a lot to tell us about infections that creep into society.”
Salem's Lot is streaming exclusively on Max October 3rd.
