Hacker Cinema
Salem's Lot
1979 · TV series · 92 min episodes · 1 season
Ben Mears has returned to his hometown to write a book about the supposedly haunted Marsten House. When people around the Marsten House start dying mysteriously, Mears discovers that the owner of the mansion is actually a vampire who is turning them into an army of undead slaves.
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1 comment on Hacker News
Eh. Unlike the previous commenter, I didn't like the miniseries "way more," but in certain respects it's an unfair comparison--a workmanlike director rather than Stanley Fucking Kubrick, an overlong script treated as more or less untouchable, and what was, when push comes to shove, a TV movie budget for special effects. This affected nearly all of King's TV adaptations, with the possible exception of "Salem's Lot," which had the good fortune to be directed by Tobe Hoober. (For all the fondness the original "It" is remembered with, it's...more unintentionally comical than I think people remember, too.) Even so, I would argue that the miniseries does a better job of capturing the novel's themes about alcoholism and mental illness than the movie does. If they'd had a slightly more inventive director--and both the willingness and contractual freedom to make it a two-part miniseries instead of a three-part one--it would have been pretty great. Not Kubrick great, no, but great.
(Also: Steven Weber is a better Jack Torrance than Jack Nicholson is. Fight me.)