Tobe Hooper's adaptation of Stephen King's Salem's Lot originally aired in late November of '79 but for me, as soon as October arrives and the leaves start to crunch beneath my feet, I feel the itch to revisit this favorite. It isn't as easy as it used to be for me to clear the time to watch this in one sitting but I feel like it wouldn't be fall if I didn't. There might be a lot of mundane soap opera elements to be found in this mini-series but even if there had just been five minutes of Barlow in the entire four hours that Hooper took to tell this tale, it still would've been a high-ranking horror classic for me.
As anyone who's read the novel knows, in describing Barlow in the book, King never wrote anything along the lines of "looking at this dude made people want to eat their own faces off in fear". But to his credit, Hooper had other ideas. While there's an obvious debt to Max Schreck's appearance in Nosferatu, Nosferatu always struck me as a sad, frail figure. He may have been an immortal vampire but he seemed like someone you could goof on to their face and get away with it - if you were the type of person who would do that sort of thing, that is.
That's not the case with our friend Barlow, however. Studies prove it's hard to goof on someone after you've swallowed your own tongue.
For the first time since our holiday roundtable for The Curse of the Cat People (1944), the Horror Dads have reconvened - and this time we've rented the Marsten House to discuss Tobe Hooper's 1979 TV movie adaptation of Stephen King's second novel, Salem's Lot. A nostalgic touchstone for Gen-X horror fans who watched the two-night miniseries during its original airing on CBS in October of '79, Salem's Lot is often offered up as proof that Hooper's legacy in the horror field isn't just limited to the early triumph of Chainsaw. But how well does it hold up now, after over thirty (!) years?
Click here to join Dennis Cozzalio, Greg Ferrara, Paul Gaita, Nicholas McCarthy, head Horror Dad Richard Harland Smith and yours truly for a return to that quiet Maine town of Salem's Lot...
